The Guilt Trip
How to get money from the West

A few weeks after his assignment ended in May 2023, UN Resident Coordinator and Humanitarian Coordinator in Damascus, El-Mostafa Benlamlih, posted a harsh critique of Western donors on his LinkedIn profile: 

(Syrians) need the recovery of the systems essential to life: water, energy, mobility, and a functional local administration so that they can recover and rebuild their lives. These were exactly the systems that the donors refused to support on the pretext that they would benefit and legitimize the “Regime”. It was clear that we, the UN and our humanitarian partners, had to do other things than what we have been doing. We could only do this with the support and adherence of the same partners who had constantly imposed restrictions and red lines on our action.

The quote was picked up by Nikolaos van Dam, the former Dutch Envoy for Syria, who, with Harmoon, a Syrian think tank, published a similar piece. Both reflect a broader narrative about what has happened in Syria over the past decade and what the West should do now. In effect, this narrative attempts to blame the opposition for destroying the country and to emotionally blackmail the West into restoring the pre- 2011 status quo. It is so prevalent and well-rehearsed among senior UN staff, humanitarians, and some diplomats that it deserves a name: the Western Guilt Theory (WGT). It has two parts and goes something like this: 

Part 1: Crime 
Those who opposed Assad picked a fight they could not win. The regime had entrenched itself deeply in its over 50 years in power, and had demonstrated its readiness to use extreme violence to crush its opponents, for example in the 1982 Hama uprising. Despite this obvious truth, the Syrian opposition did not back down even when it became clear that its external backers were not willing to provide the military assistance needed to achieve victory. When Russia intervened in 2015, the war was lost; but the slaughter continued because the opposition stuck to its maximalist demands instead of simply giving up for the greater good of the country. The external backers, meanwhile, are co-responsible for this because they raised false hopes, pursued their vested interests and thereby prolonged the suffering. 

Part 2: Redemption 
The anti-Assad camp is unwilling to accept the reality of the regime’s victory. Assad has won the war and it is time to move on. At any rate, the prospect of Syria being ruled by Islamists was always unpleasant, which means that there were only ever bad options. But instead of helping to rebuild a country it helped to destroy, the West prefers to sit on its moral high horse and maintain devastating sanctions that hurt innocent civilians and prevent Syria from recovering economically. Early Recovery (ER) must therefore be the policy of the hour. If donors are too proud formally to cooperate with the Syrian government on large-scale reconstruction, they should at least fund expanded ER via the UN. Only by spending billions on rebuilding Syria can the West redeem itself. 

Useful narrative, flawed history 
The WGT works for one glaring reason: the West still has a conscience. Other external actors who have had a far more pernicious effect on the course of the conflict, like Iran and Russia, are immune to emotional blackmail and so are left out of the blame game. It also neatly overlooks the many attempts by Western and Arab states to convince Assad to defuse the crisis throughout 2011. It further disregards the decades-long meddling that Syria undertook in the internal affairs of its neighbours Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Israel, and Palestine, which explains why governments of those states sought redress when the opportunity presented itself, as it did in 2011. If Assad’s Syria was a victim, it was the victim of its own machinations. 

More than this, the WGT narrative comprises assumptions that insult millions of Syrians who risked everything to resist a genocidal regime. In light of Ukraine’s much-lauded fight against Russian aggression (that also led to a great deal of humanitarian suffering and the destruction of large parts of the country), condemning Syrians for having entered into a similarly unequal fight is strange. Popular resistance movements don’t arise with guaranteed prospects of success: the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War was doomed when Germany and Italy intervened on Franco’s behalf, but no one seriously suggests that they should have given up. It is anyway inaccurate to describe the Syrian conflict as decided and Assad as its winner; US and Turkish boots on the ground suggest otherwise. Besides, the Syrian revolution is a process, and what it has achieved already is a guarantee that there can be no “back to normal.” 

Holding responsible the weaker side, whose decision-making was highly diffuse, for all the woes that befell Syria in the past decade, while implicitly giving Assad a pass for some of the worst atrocities committed this century, is intellectual cowardice cloaked in cheap humanitarianism. It will not survive examination when the serious history of the Syrian conflict is written. For the time being though, the WGT narrative shapes broader soul searching while justifying budgets and promotions for Damascus-based UN bureaucrats.