The Next War

The next front in the war on terror is developing in Syria. I hope we are preparing to fight there.

On the one hand, I have a certain grim satisfaction that the jihadis that Assad fed into Iraq to kill Iraqis and American and Coalition troops have turned on Assad in the Sunni revolt. I knew Assad was playing with fire but didn't know if he'd be burned.

On the other hand, the al Qaeda jihadis in Syria have room to expand and support their brethren in Iraq, where casualties have surged lately. Our Surge offensive in 2007 and the Anbar Awakening that began in late 2006 nearly destroyed al Qaeda in Iraq. We left Iraqi security forces capable of carrying on the long fight to finish them off.

Unfortunately, political divisions inside Iraq have weakened Iraq's ability to combat the terrorists. And so al Qaeda will expand their foothold in the region.

We will have to react to this. Eventually, Assad will either fall or abandon eastern Syria as beyond his ability to control in order to hold a smaller part of Syria. At that point, eastern Syria will be an ungoverned region that ruthless al Qaeda killers can use to rebuild. If nobody takes over those regions, we'll need to do what we do in Pakistan--set up an intelligence network to identify jihadi leaders and kill them with drone strikes.

I hope our intelligence agencies (and those of our friends) are sending people across the border to make contacts. I assume we are in there because of worries over chemical and biological weapons should Assad's control over them collapse (or should he decide to use them). While there, we should be setting up a more general network.

Luckily, we can probably quietly base forces in Turkey, Iraq's Kurdish region, and Jordan. As Iraq gets stronger, they may help us, too.

Hopefully, Syria's Sunni rebels will want our active help to stamp out the jihadis who are fighting their common Assad enemy right now,

At some point, we'll have to expand our War on Terror into eastern Syria.

I suppose it is some small advantage that jihadis are heading to northern Mali, too, for a sanctuary, thus splitting al Qaeda efforts.