The glaring weakness in President Obama’s new Middle East strategy, unveiled on September 24 at the United Nations, is the lack of troops on the ground in Syria. In Iraq, the Kurdish peshmerga, a reformed and remotivated Iraqi army, and the Sunni tribes that played a major part in the success of President Bush’s surge can all be brought into the fight against ISIS. But in Syria—whose disintegration directly threatens the five nations on its borders and indirectly the entire region—there is no one. The Pentagon has made its timetable starkly clear: it has announced that it will take three to five months to identify and vet fighters from the Syrian opposition and another year to train them. What will happen, other than air strikes, in the interim?
No matter how seemingly intractable a problem, reexamining deeply buried core assumptions can sometimes point the way to a solution. The drastic shift in priorities for every country in the Middle East occasioned by the frighteningly rapid rise of ISIS over the past several months may have made it possible to do just that in Syria. Two assumptions that have steered policy from the beginning of the crisis—that the eventual outcome must hinge on whether Bashar al-Assad stays in power or goes, and that the framework of a political agreement must precede any cease-fire—ought now to be rethought.
Notwithstanding the appalling human cost of this war—now standing at 200,000 dead, three million refugees, and six million forced out of their homes—President Obama has clung (and may well have been wise to do so) to what he sees as the lesson of prior American military interventions abroad. He has insisted from the outset that the US not take the relatively easy step of deploying its immense power until there is at least the outline of a political agreement among the warring factions. He couldn’t find one, and neither could anyone else.
In August 2012, not long after former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan stepped down as the international community’s special envoy on Syria, he and I shared a coffee break between airplane flights. Speaking with deep sadness, this consummate international negotiator said he’d never worked harder on a problem with less to show for it. Since then, the widely respected former Algerian foreign minister and international civil servant Lakhdar Brahimi has done the same, with the same result...
Comments(4)
There is food analogy for " Is there an answer for Syria". How do you follow a recipe that ends up cooking nothing. ISIS has seized on a simple strategy: wherever there is a diplomatic void in the Middle East today ISIS will fill that void with their bestial version of militant Islam.
Like so much of what has been tried to negotiate "peace" in Syria, Jessica Matthews' proposals ultimately seem like more wishful thinking. This is because they are based upon too many assumptions that are unlikely to work : First, Keeping Assad as a figure head and devolving power to a prime minister and regional governors assumes that the latter are not from the same brutal Alawite Baathist regime as Assad. But they probably are. Assad is quite likely more figurehead than strongman. So, how would that change anything on the ground? Second, the Assad regime - whatever that is - collective or strongman ? - has an almost total monopoly of heavy weaponry and organized armed forces in Syria. Brutal regimes with such a monopoly of arms never consider they need to negotiate to relinquish part of their power - as Israel regularly shows us. So long as they are stronger, they, like Hobbes, believe might is right. Third, behind the growing Sunni-Shia sectarian divide across the Middle East are the two regional major powers - Saudi Arabia and Iran. The former has harbored theo-imperial ambitions of spreading their form of Islam as a governing principle in politics for over four decades now. In the process, they have destabilized and radicalized politics from across West Africa - Note that Boko Maram os a Wahhabi creation - through the Middle East to Pakistan and even Indonesia. The chances they will stop now and reach any lasting understanding with their theocratic nemesis, Iran, seem quite slim indeed. Fourth, and perhaps most fundamentally, many in the West - and I count myself among them - could not countenance one of the world's most brutal war criminals being formally accepted to stay in power in any capacity. Too many innocent Syrians have lost their lives, their livings and their homes. I admire Jessica Matthews for creative thinking. It's desperately needed on Syria now. But I don't consider this is the right way to go. Better for the US to focus on the humanitarian goal of protecting the innocent through limited military engagement - such as no-fly zones to at least ground Assad's air force, and a buffer zone to protect innocent civilians and re-establish some normalcy. Then support the opposition to Assad, especially the moderates, by evening out the imbalance in fire power. Meanwhile reach out to moderate Shia not tainted by Assad's brutality and bring them together with the Sunni moderates to form a government after Assad.
Only the UN Security Council can provide Syria with the one hundred thousand blue helmets necessary to initiate the Geneva 2012 June 30 agenda. This would require a level of international cooperation between Russia and the US that is now impossible to achieve due to the friction over the post-Cold War division of Europe. Syria cannot be solved without a solution to NATO hegemony in Europe. A major reconceptualization of US grand strategy in the face of the obvious collapsed model of economic globalization (working people's stagnant incomes) is long overdue. Sooner or later the American people will demand a new foreign policy from its intellectually bankrupt two-party political system.
Ms. Mathews (I think) wrongly assumes that Assad, like the U.S. sees ISIS as his no. 1 enemy. Assad sees all moderate Sunnis as his mortal enemies first, ISIS second. And Assad will never give up since he thinks he can win (with help from Russia and Iran) The whole article is wishful thinking and pointless dreaming,imo
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