Turkey early on said Assad has to go. They had an opportunity to help rebels acceptable to the West make gains across their border with Syria. What have we gotten?
Al Qaeda has swept to power with the aim of imposing a strict Islamist ideology on Syrians across large swathes of Syria's rebel-held north, according to a CNN survey of towns, activists and analysts that reveals an alarming increase in al Qaeda-linked control in just the past month.
Al Qaeda-backed militants known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are the predominant military force in northern Syria, according to activists and seasoned observers, and have a powerful influence over the majority of population centers in the rebel-held north.
Now if Turkey wants to intervene, they'd have to fight a two-front war. Nice job!
The Kurds are actually a bright spot in stripping territory from Assad without allowing jihadis to gain control:
Syrian Kurds are reported consolidating their hold on northeastern Syria along the border with Iraq after defeating jihadist groups in a three-day battle, the latest in a series of clashes since July in which the Kurds have come out on top.
This could move them a step closer to setting up their own embryo mini-state, possibly linked to the Iraqi Kurds' semiautonomous enclave across the frontier and the core of an ethnic state combining for the first time the Kurds of Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey.
Unfortunately, this is more likely to prompt Turkey to intervene against the Kurds even though they've weakened Assad by their actions.
In the Iraq War counter-insurgency phase, Iraqi Kurds were among the most effective Iraqi government troops.
A smart foreign policy by America would convince the Kurds that their best way to protect themselves from eventual Assad retribution would be to send fighters to defeat Assad.
A smart foreign policy by America would convince the Kurds that their best way to prevent Turkey from sending in troops to crush their enclave would be to become the best force trying to defeat Assad--which Turkey continues to say they want.
But for now, with jihadis dominating the northwestern rebels,the Kurda holding the northeast, Hezbollah holding Assad's western flank, and Iraq's government on the eastern borders mostly siding with Iran in bolstering Assad, we need to make the southern front a better place for non-jihadi rebels.
The Saudis are upset that we seem to have fallen away from our goal of defeating Assad. If Kerry is telling the truth that we and the Saudis share the same goal in Syria, we'll not let the WMD deal turn us away from destroying Assad. The southern front might be the only place left to achieve this goal.
