Syria and the Spanish Civil War

The butchery in Syria is unfolding in a world that has failed to stop the horrors, just as it proved impotent in 1930s Spain.

By AMIEL UNGAR
Five-year-old Sheima lost both eyes when hit by a stray bullet in Syria, February 9. (photo credit: REUTERS)
Five-year-old Sheima lost both eyes when hit by a stray bullet in Syria, February 9.
(photo credit: REUTERS)
AS BASHAR Assad’s forces backed by unrelenting Russian airstrikes encircle Aleppo, the internecine fighting in Syria increasingly resembles the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s.
If the hated Assad regime remains standing, it can attribute its survival to its ability to maintain cohesion while its opponents wage a civil war within a civil war. The Syrian insurgency is plagued by ongoing battles between Islamic State (ISIS) and Jabhat Al-Nusra and the other Islamist and non-Islamist groups, just as the Spanish Republicans suffered from fratricide between anarchists, communists, socialists and moderate republicans.
Both civil wars were also proxy wars with each side having powerful external backers. In Spain, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany supported Francisco Franco’s Nationalists and the Soviet Union backed the Republicans. Assad is backed by Iran’s so called “resistance axis” and Russia, while the insurgents enjoy support from the Gulf States and Turkey, and Western sympathy. In both conflicts, each side recruited foreign fighters on a volunteer or paid basis. In Spain, political refugees from Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany fought the German and Italian expeditionary forces helping Franco. In Syria, Chechens are fighting Chechens.
As in Spain, Syria is serving as a proving ground for new weapons systems and new military techniques. In Spain, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union tested out aircraft and armor that were then employed in World War II. The Luftwaffe’s terror bombing of civilian populations, tested in the Basque town of Guernica in April 1937, was repeated in WW II. In Syria, Russia’s modernized army is acquiring valuable combat experience; ISIS volunteers receive military training and indoctrination, which they put to terrifying use in Paris, in November.
A subplot in both Spain and Syria is the fate of a minority with national aspirations and its own agenda. In Syria we have the Kurds; in Spain there were the Basques.
Spain was a disaster for France and Britain, the powers tasked with defending the existing international order. In the hope of confining the conflict to Spain, they set up a farcically named “Non-Intervention Committee,” while everybody else intervened.
At least Britain and France were up front in declaring their neutrality.
The Obama administration, hoping to confine the conflict to Syria (it has leapfrogged to Libya and elsewhere), essentially limited itself to protestations that Assad must go, while pursuing a policy that prevented qualitative arms from reaching the insurgents, or imposing on them the impossible obligation of concentrating on ISIS rather than on Assad.
In the 1930s, France and Britain were paralyzed by the question of who constituted the greater danger, Hitler or Stalin; today American foreign policy is paralyzed over who constitutes the greater danger, Assad and his revisionist Iranian and Russian backers or the Islamists. The indecisiveness displayed by France and Britain in Spain reinforced the image that the democracies were decadent and that the totalitarian countries represented the future. Syria may have the same damaging impact on America’s international reputation The Stalin-backed Spanish Republic was defeated. But for the USSR, it was still a good war. Many anti-Fascists (the disillusioned like George Orwell proved exceptions) were convinced that the Soviet Union at least tried, while the West was delinquent, and that therefore Stalin represented the best bet for stopping Hitler.
In the Arab world, the betrayal of the Syrian insurgency will undoubtedly corroborate the narrative that Western “Crusader” talk of freedom, democracy and human rights is a sham if it allows Assad to remain in power, and that therefore a caliphate under Islamic shari’a rule offers the best chance for redressing wrongs.
The butchery in Syria is unfolding in a world dotted with human rights organizations and an International Criminal Court that have all failed to stop the horrors, just as the League of Nations proved impotent in Spain.
Vladimir Putin has been derided by Barack Obama for his atavistic 19th century power politics. However, the parallels between Spain and Syria demonstrate that liberal America’s unshakable belief in progress rests on shaky assumptions, and that history tends to be cyclical, rather than an unbroken march forward. 
Contributor Amiel Ungar is also a columnist for the Hebrew weekly Besheva.