Strategypage writes that Assad just can't take Aleppo:
In Aleppo the government has brought in over 10,000 additional troops and hundreds of armored vehicles. Artillery, aircraft and helicopter gunships continue daily attacks on actual or suspected rebel targets in the city. Several thousand troops are already in the city, but all they do is chase rebel groups from one area to another. The additional troops are apparently there for an attempt to keep rebels out of all the city neighborhoods. That will be difficult, because the city of 2.5 million is mostly pro-rebel and desertions from the security forces are increasing.
And they can't win the war in general unless they do something radically different that changes the rules:
The Assad government is running out of everything and the inner circle has to decide if they should flee, surrender or fight to the death (possibly using their stock of chemical weapons). Israel fears that the Assads may launch some of their ballistic missiles, armed with chemical weapons, at Israel, to trigger an Israeli invasion and distract the rebels. That's a long shot, but desperate men take desperate measures.
I didn't think Aleppo should be held. Assad might need 50,000 troops to pacify that city. That's nearly half the available loyal troops he has. He should pull out supporters and assets and let the city go. Fighting a losing battle (with less than a third of the troops he'd need to win) there just gives his troops options to desert by disappearing into a large uncontrolled city and make their way to Turkey.
And I agree that Assad has to do something desperate to change the course of the war.
I think retreating to some subset of Syria is an option, too--whether an Alawite homeland clinging to the coast or a truncated Core Syria that runs in an arc from the Turkish border (excluding Aleppo) down to Damascus and then down to the Jordanian and Israeli borders. Either is a desperate measure that could fail--perhaps spectacularly. But so is the current strategy.
Is chemical weapons use against Israel a real option? Not now. The Arab Spring should really have disabused the notion that the Arab people see the Palestinian question as more important than anything else.
But just because use of chemical weapons that prompts an Israeli retaliation won't convert rebels into anti-Jewish supporters of Assad, doesn't mean that Assad doesn't believe it would work. Does Assad still believe anti-Israel views insulate him from revolution? I was unpersuaded then, before that Day of Rage announced the beginning of Assad's end. Nothing has occurred to reverse my view.
But you never know what isolated, desperate men believe.
Heck, maybe the worst part of Kofi Annan's abandonment of diplomacy isn't that it was a stupid waste of time but that the end of talking removes Assad's hope that continuing the same strategy could pay off if the UN saves him.
On the bright side, Annan's departure means we can no longer avoid regime change as our strategy:
With Syrian diplomacy all but dead, the Obama administration is shifting its focus on the civil war away from political transition and toward helping the rebels defeat the Syrian regime on the battlefield.
Assad might think he really has no option but to do something desperate. What that desperate something will be can't be that far off.
