Leslie Gelb thinks that we should broker a deal between non-jihadi rebels and Assad to fight the jihadis who have entered Syria to wage jihad.
I confess, this whole nuance thing eludes me.
That this makes the non-jihadi rebels an ally of Assad is of no matter. Why it isn't even more nuanced to defeat Assad and then defeat the jihadis is beyond me.
But what really gets me is the ability of Gelb to claim that Assad really isn't so bad at all (from the first link):
The Obama administration started out with the position that President Assad was the most serious threat to us, and that he and his regime had to go. As nasty a dictator as Assad is – and he’s plenty nasty – he isn’t the biggest threat to the U.S. He’s a threat to anyone who opposes him from within. But his external policies, like those of his father, are ones that his neighbors, including Israel, lived with without great difficulty – with the exception of Assad’s efforts to go nuclear in some fashion.
Aside from Boy Assad's support for terrorists in Lebanon and Gaza who target Israel, his loyalty to Iran's foreign policy, his efforts to help Iran get nuclear weapons, his attempts to destabilize (and hopefully control) Lebanon, his past efforts to stoke Kurdish resistance to the Turks, and his father's hostility to Jordan, has Gelb forgotten the small matter of Assad hosting Saddam's thugs after we drove his regime from power in spring 2003? Has Gelb forgotten the "ratlines" that Assad established to funnel jihadis through Syria into Iraq before that war to fill the ranks of Saddam's Fedayeen and to provide the al Qaeda suicide bomber during the counter-insurgency campaign?
And nastiness includes a death toll of over 120,000 Syrians (government forces, rebels, and civilians), including a relatively small number killed with poison gas. But that's a Syrian problem--not ours--I guess. I was nice to know ya, R2P.
So other than those things, Assad's foreign policy has been something we could all just live with "without great difficulty?"
How ... sophisticated.
This is why even as a foreign policy blogger I rarely ever pay attention to the Council on Foreign Relations or read Foreign Affairs articles.
Assad waged war on us in Iraq. Stop looking for ways to "flip" him (as the hope has long been in foreign policy circles if we treated Assad nicely--and even I had hopes if a "flip" was based on an actual change of behavior first) and viewing the rebellion as just a really lucky means of making Assad think "flipping" is a good idea!
My view is that we need to make Assad pay for waging war on us by collapsing his regime and preparing for the post-Assad missions as we do it. The Bush administration didn't make Assad pay during the Iraq War. But the Syrian rebellion is a chance to make good on that failure. I think establishing that we will get you eventually if you are our enemy is a good thing to do.
