Remember my piece almost a year ago describing smart diplomatic options for Doing Something about Libya?

Here it is, and none the worse for wear:

You draw a noisy stick across the bars of the FCO/State Department cage to rouse the bemused and sulky inmates, and demand ideas for action. What might they serve up?

“Basically”, they’ll primly reply, “You politicians have to accept that there are subtle/difficult trade-offs and hard choices to be made between Breadth v Depth, Fast v Slow, Big Impact v Less Impact, More Certain Impact v Less Certain Impact, Risky v Not-so-Risky, Legal v Not-so-Legal, and so on.”

“Oh, and did we mention Cheap v Expensive?”

And having got that off their clever chests, if they are smart they’ll produce something like the following Options Menu…

I grouped options under different headings:

–  Indirectly Limiting the Regime’s Power

–  Directly Limiting the Regime’s Power

–  Preparing for New Government

Does anything new spring to mind in connection with Syria, based upon our vivid experiences in toppling Gaddafi?

The key thing in diplomacy as in life is to pick the right tool for the job.

Yes, to a glib outsider Libya and Syria look much the same. Both full of Arabs, both led by wicked dictators who have lingered on for far too long, both held back by lunatic national policies. Where’s the differences?

Well, scale for one thing. Syria has some 21.5 million people, just one down from Australia at 53rd place in the list of countries by population. Libya by contrast has just over six million – at 103rd place. So the physical and psychological impact of the Gaddafi regime has been very different. With only six million people everything happening in a country becomes a lot more ‘personal’. Pluralism and politics mean very different things.

But also look at economics. Libya is close to the top 50 countries in the world going by GDP per cap – Syria is below 100th place, a dismal record of Baath Party incompetence. Syria has some oil, but other noting than cheap plastic washing-up basins sold in Serbia I have never seen any product made there.

Perhaps above all, Syria has some friends. And important near neighbours (Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon). For decades Gaddafi actively annoyed almost every capital on Earth in one way or the other. And apart from oil, who really cares about all that North African desert?

Damascus by contrast has run a pretty tight national socialist ship, wooing/thwarting East and West alike as and when necessary due to its proximity to Israel and that knot of Middle East problems. During the Cold War Syria played an important role as a friendly or even close partner for Moscow, the USSR being muscled out of Egypt by the USA’s spending power and moving away from its early positive relationship with Israel.

This is why the Russians are still busy in Syria, including by vetoing UNSC resolutions. It gives them diplomatic market share in that turbulent region. Some say very busy:

According to Le Figaro on Tuesday, Russian military “advisors” are “omnipresent” in Syria. Besides reportedly sending S-300 anti-air missile systems to Damascus and agreeing to deliver a new batch of military aircraft, the Russians this week celebrated the reopening of a Cold War-era intelligence listening post on Mount Qassioun, the summit that dominates Damascus from the northwest.  The Russians appear increasingly dug in.

Russian advisors are also laboring to reorganise the Baath Party and arrange talks with members of the Syrian resistance.  They are making their own contacts with Arab and Islamic organisations, seeking to dilute the solidarity of the West with Arab leaders on the Syrian problem.

To any normal non-Russian person the Russian position is beyond cynical. Every senior Russian diplomat mouthing sentiments which in effect of not in substance give succour to the revolting Assad regime has his/her job (OK, almost 100% his) because the West actively supported democratic transformation in the USSR. Moscow’s lack of elementary human solidarity with the Syrian resistance/opposition is chilling.

Yet Russia is in it for Russia, not for anyone or anything else. Moscow knows that one of the key lessons of the fall of Gaddafi is that however much the ‘West’ supports the Arab Spring opposition, the default popular Arab instinct these days is to want to be as un-Western as possible.

So even if Assad falls and a new government ostentatiously ejects the Russians from their naval base and fancy listening posts, the Russians will soon be comfortable again sidling up to the new management and whispering anti-Western blandishments in their willing ears.

Likewise because Russia is in with the current regime it can have some sort of real role talking to in-country opposition tendencies about a negotiated end to the crisis. This is exactly what the UK did in apartheid South Africa, to very good effect. The very fact that Mrs Thatcher stood firm at the UN against sanctions made us look tough – and therefore more credible – to all sides in the drama.

So where does that leave the West? In a weak but not hopeless position. What tools work here? Many of the ideas listed in the Libya piece linked above look OK (enough) for Syria.

The unhappy Syrian masses surely can go only so far without outside military support. The regime’s firepower and ruthlessness are pronounced, and the Russia/China blocking of the UN Resolution served to leave the active anti-regime elements feeling let down by ‘world opinion’.

Yet plenty can be done secretly to help ‘train and equip’ anti-Assad forces. I’d also be rummaging around to find ways to get secret messages to those hovering on the edge of the Assad circle encouraging them to hold back – in their own interests: Nothing like finding a message from MI6 pushed under the front door during the night to give one cause to reflect.

Sensible governments also should start working on a powerful offshore programme of Preparing for a New Government – drafting new laws and new constitutional changes for a post-Assad government, working with smart Syrians in exile, helping train potential judges and senior policy experts in the areas needed to make Syria develop well under civilised management. Sensible Arab countries’ experts and other international transition experts (eg from Poland which knows a few things about Syria from Cold War days) could join this effort to make it substantively balanced and not explicitly ‘Western’.

That sort of programme has three big advantages. First, it’s needed anyway. Second, it offers an intellectually attractive rival to self-serving and parsimonious Russian offerings in the general ‘reform’ area. And third, it serves to send an encouraging signal to Syrians (and to Assad) that we are preparing hard for a new era.

Finally, make it a key policy goal that a New Syria opens all police and secret police archives, so that the extent of Soviet/Russian (and other foreign) penetration can be exposed once and for all. That is important as a goal in itself: these archives otherwise can end up being a disruptive source of poisonous politics and blackmail. Plus it sends Moscow and signal that inevitable future transparency could well end up embarrassing the Russians too, so they might like to proceed now in a measured way.

This one will get much worse before it gets better. As things stand now, the Russians for a change have some non-trivial diplomatic momentum and a chance to wield effective influence. Will they manage to use this to get some positive results, if only for themselves?

In the short term, perhaps. In the longer run the Assad regime will wobble then crash under the weight of opposition from massed Syrians fighting local tyranny with Western and wider Arab support. And this phase of crafty Russian diplomacy will crash with it.