The war in Syria will not last forever. This is likely to be the last year of conventional fighting, then the word will pass to showdown, damage count and reconstruction.
Peace talks have been proof that beyond the convictions and objectives of the parties, all those involved for a long time are evaluating the concrete idea of a exit strategy.
The model that will be proposed with the support of the United States will be that of a federal reform of the country, trying to retrace from an institutional point of view what has already been experimented in Iraq in the 2003. There are three concrete objectives: satisfying the parties in the field to the extent sufficient to end the hostilities; save face; get as close as possible to the initial idea of dismantling the Syrian national state.
However, the Syrian framework has a structural difference with Iraq: the outcome of the war. In 2003 Iraq, the American plenipotentiary Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, was invested with absolute power, comparable only to MacArthur in '45 Japan. The rights to reconstruction and to the future institutional ordering of the country were born from the military victory, which at least in the short term was unquestionable.
The emergence of the insurgency and the subsequent political and military defeat suffered in Iraq by the Coalition during the following decade become secondary absurd. What matters is that a country organized according to the monolithic structure of the party Baath and governed by an absolute presidentialism with centralized administration, it was transformed into a set of distinct parts, where Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds ended up dividing up the territory. How this happened and what it entailed we have seen in recent years, talking about it several times on this heading. The birth of the Islamic State was possible from a technical, political and military point of view also for this.
The Syrian crisis is different in substance. In Syria the alleged anti-terrorist coalition was mostly a staging, useful to implement first and then cover the programmed political chaos generated by the anti-Assad revolt, Syrian branch of the so-called Arab Spring.
When Raqqa has fallen and the bulk of the Islamist terrorists will be transhumed to other theaters, the only ones who can say they have won the war will be the Syrians first. The allies in the field will also claim credit with them: the Russians, Hezbollah, the Iranians and Iraqi Shiite volunteers who fought on Assad's side.
On the basis of the outcome of the conflict it will not be possible to impose a new geopolitical order on the region, at least until Assad is protected by Moscow. What will be proposed on US pressure through the instrument of UN mediation will then be a new institutional arrangement that just like in Iraq will take the path of federal reform.
The knot is all here.
Simultaneously with foundations of public law the forms of federal state that we know in the West are not applicable in the Middle East and more generally to the Arab countries. In the belt that goes from the Maghreb to the Persian Gulf, there is not a single federal-based country. The most common type of administrative order is the subdivision into Governorates, where the regent is directly appointed by the central power. This depends on the one hand on a lower democratic and juridical maturity, on the other on the political experience of the last half century. The lack of ethnic, religious and social homogeneity that characterizes almost all Arab countries has in fact imposed rigid institutional models where balances are achieved with delicate power balances or with force. Often with both systems. 
It is one of the reasons why in Arab countries and in the Middle East it is not easy to understand where enlightened (real or presidential) directism ends and where the dictatorship begins. The most obvious difference is almost always the degree of representation that minorities or various ethnic and religious components are able to have and the level of social temperature and consequent repressive measures.
Applying a federal system in a multi-confessional or tribal-based Arab country is the prodrome for its disintegration. Gaddafi's Libya is the best example of this.
By extension it is impossible to apply constitutional and juridical structures that are exogenous to systems that sink their existence on perhaps questionable, but absolutely different principles.
In Syria in all likelihood it will be proposed to leave formal control of the territory in Damascus but to divide the country by ethnic based areas. Essentially the Kurds in the north east, the Sunnis in the central south and the Alawites along the northwest coast.
In fact it would be a soft division, a sort of path halfway between the intentions of those who fomented the anti-Assad revolt, and a full victory for Assad himself.
Turkey could oppose this project by absurdity, until now in the role of the evil ogre. The idea of an autonomous region ruled by the Kurds close to its turbulent southeastern borders never appealed to Ankara to the point of prompting it to intervene directly in the Syrian crisis against the Kurdish YPG militias.
Conversely, the project will appeal to opponents of Assad, heirs of those "moderate rebels" armed by the US and defeated on the field.
Will Assad be strong enough to oppose a compromise plan? Russia and Iran are unlikely to miss a political and economic return after direct involvement. Will they accept significant external interference in a real peace plan?
Based on the answers we will know how great the defeat of Washington's Middle East policy of the last 15 years has been.
(Photo: SAA / web)
