Will people stop saying that the only alternative to the bloody Assad regime that has helped kill thousands of Americans is al Qaeda rule in Syria? It just isn't true and simply accepts the Assad/Putin line that the noble Assad is fighting our common enemy and so deserves our support.
Strategypage notes that the jihadis represent 10-15% of the rebels in action:
The rebels don’t lack for volunteers, with over 80,000 armed men in action. About 10-15 percent of these are Islamic radicals and they get a disproportionate amount of publicity. This is intentional, as Russia, China and Iran have their foreign language news organizations pumping out stories (some true, most not) about Islamic radicals fighting for the rebels. The reality is that most of the rebel fighters are not interested in seeing post-Assad Syria dominated by Islamic radicals. Syrians know what problems that has created (and continues to create) in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen. Syrians are resigned to another civil war after the Assads are gone, to deal with the Islamic terrorists. Right now it’s a brutal war of attrition and a psychological endurance contest.
The proper response to not wanting al Qaeda to take over Syria is not to preserve the Assad regime. The proper response is to overthrow the Assad regime while strengthening the non-jihadi majority for the post-Assad fight and preparing our forces to engage the jihadis and kill them when that stage of the fight begins.
Strategypage doesn't mention how many of the jihadis are foreign born rather than local. This matters because armed men in action generally represent 10% of the rebel manpower. The remainder are logistical assets, intelligence assets, and part of a recruiting pool in addition to being those who will fight part time. Locals will represent the tip of the iceberg while foreigners will not have that logistical "tail" behind them to the same degree within Syria.
I'd also like to note that in Afghanistan we aren't facing more than a quarter of that number in Taliban and jihadi fighters. In Iraq, we never faced more than 25,000 full time insurgents and terrorists.
Again, the casualty figures make this clear since 44,000 Syrian military and militia personnel have been killed in the fighting so far. That's a huge toll. This reflects the poorer quality of the Syrian forces compared to our troops and the numbers of insurgents in the fight.
Defeating Assad is a good enough objective to risk some arms getting to the jihadis, especially when you consider that they have had no problem getting arms so far. The problem is that non-jihadi insurgents aren't getting enough arms and don't have the training to allow them to become as effective as the fanatical jihadis whose willingness to die makes them the most effective fighters (as long as equally fanatical replacements keep coming, of course). So arm those more acceptable rebels.
And map who and where the jihadis are so that when Assad flees the presidential palace we can pivot to the next stage of the war and win that one, too, rather than seeking some type of coalition government that puts jihadis in the palace, too, perhaps sitting right next to pro-Russian Baathists as long as they aren't named Assad.
Did we refuse to send weapons to Stalin in World War II because we didn't want to taint our war against Nazi Germany? Get over squeamishness and arm Syria's rebels. Defeating Assad is an objective worth this course of action.
