Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum

Author:Anne Applebaum [Applebaum, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2024-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

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In September 2018, the United Nations stepped in to de-escalate the situation in Idlib, the northwest region of Syria. “De-escalation” is a euphemism: it’s what happens when diplomats can’t stop a war but are trying to save people’s lives anyway. Syria was an active war zone, convulsed by violence since 2011. In that year the Syrian dictator had turned against peaceful demonstrators who were hoping to end his brutal regime. Assad might well have lost the civil war that followed, had the Iranian government not sent fighters, advisers, intelligence, and weapons and had the Russian military, in 2015, not entered the conflict on the side of the Syrian regime. If the dictators of Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Belarus have been propped up by propaganda, surveillance technology, and economic aid from the autocratic world, Assad was saved in a less subtle manner, by Russian and Iranian bullets.

The two armies had different motives. Iran needed access to Syrian territory because Iran sends weapons and fighters to Iranian proxies nearby, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and other small groups in Palestine, Iraq, and Syria itself. Syria’s hostility to Israel suited the Iranians too. Even if he wasn’t completely aligned with the Islamic Republic’s religious war, Assad was an extra lever, an extra threat, and an extra ally in the region.

Putin’s logic was surely broader. He probably intervened because the Arab Spring that preceded the Syrian uprising scared him, because it looked too much like the “color revolution” he fears in Russia, and because he wanted to show Russians that political mobilization and political protest will end in bloody tragedy. He also wanted to preserve Russia’s long-standing ties to Syria and prove that he could compete as an equal with the United States in the Middle East. Two years earlier, President Barack Obama had refused to intervene after the Syrian government used chemical weapons—weapons built with Iranian assistance—even after promising to do so. Putin spotted the opportunity to outflank Obama and to demonstrate what he really meant by multipolarity and a new world order. Over the course of the next several years, Russian, Syrian, and Iranian troops jointly went out of their way to break every possible norm, every element of international law that they possibly could.

One of those tests took place in Idlib. At that time, the province was one of the few remaining territories controlled by the Syrian opposition. As a part of the “de-escalation,” the UN asked all participants in the conflict to avoid hitting hospitals and medical facilities. The UN even provided the Russian government the exact coordinates of hospitals and medical facilities in Idlib, in order to protect those buildings. But instead of protecting them, the Russians and Syrian pilots used the UN coordinates to guide missiles to the hospitals. After a series of direct hits, medical teams on the ground stopped sharing information with the UN.

That jaw-dropping fact should have alarmed the world. “Today in Syria, the abnormal is now normal. The unacceptable is accepted,” said Joanne Liu, the president of Doctors Without Borders, the medical charity.

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