Islamic State
President Barack Obama says Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has to go. Republican Sens. John McCainand Lindsey Graham agree.
I say Assad has to stay.
Syria’s civil war began in March 2011 as part of the broader so-called Arab Spring, when protests erupted in the southern city of Daraa against Assad’s cruel treatment of anti-regime youths. Since then, the conflict has morphed into a regional power play, pitting Shiite forces led by Iran, which is perhaps Assad’s staunchest ally, against Sunni forces helmed by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Last week, pro-Assad Russia also joined the fight. Nearly a quarter of a million people have died between the beginning of the conflict and August, according to an article in Britain’s The Independent.
Although the moderate Free Syrian Army still fights Assad, Islamist groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra, an offshoot of al-Qaida, have emerged. Iran has dispatched Hezbollah fighters — battle-seasoned from fighting Israeli troops — to Assad’s aid. And of course, the Islamic State, an Islamist group composed of former Iraqi Baathist officers and al-Qaida jihadis, has seized territory in Syria and northern Iraq, raping, plundering and beheading its way to an Islamic caliphate. In an Islamist-infested situation like this, the good old “dictator bad, opposition good” theorem doesn’t quite work.
The Assad regime — brutal and iron-fisted though it might be — is a secular dictatorship with only one goal: to stay in power. Assad may be a wolf, but he has always been a tame wolf. The Islamic State, on the other hand, openly seeks to expand globally. The group, led by seventh-century throwback Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, rules its subjects in accordance with a barbaric, literalistic interpretation of Islam. Should Assad fall, better-funded, more heavily armed Islamist groups like the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra are better situated to fill the power vacuum than are more moderate groups.
So here is my advice for Obama: Stay out of it for now.
The Daily Beast reported in an Aug. 31 article that former CIA Director David Petraeus was quietly urging U.S. officials to arm so-called moderate factions of Jabhat al-Nusra (again, an Islamist group backed by al-Qaida) against the Islamic State. McCain and Graham have supported similar strategies.
The problem with supporting al-Nusra against the Islamic State is that ideologically, for the most part, they are one and the same — out with one Islamist group and in with another. If al-Nusra were to defeat the Islamic State and Assad failed to persevere, the next logical step is to assume al-Nusra takes over Syria. This would result in yet another terrorism-sponsoring theocracy — Iran’s Sunni counterpart — in the Middle East, thus destabilizing even further the least stable region on earth.
So let Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin destroy the Islamists. As of now, there is no viable alternative.
