Assad victory won't stabilize Middle East: Column

The final conquest of Aleppo will mark another sad episode in the greatest humanitarian tragedy to befall the Middle East in modern times. The temptation in Western chancelleries is to concede to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s gain and organize various conferences to address offshoots of the conflict, such as the plight of the refugees. There has always been an asymmetry of commitment in Syria between Assad and his Russian and Iranian enablers, and America and its band of rebels. Still, it is too soon to accept defeat, as a stable Syria under Assad can only mean an unstable Middle East.

The hard lesson that America learned in Iraq is that it is not simple to win civil wars. Clear, hold and build became the mantra of the United States’ successful surge policy in Iraq, meaning that merely conquering a city does not mean its actual pacification. Once an area is reclaimed, it still has to be cleansed and a new order constructed in place of the old.

Assad and his troops may be able to evict the rebels from their urban strongholds, but they still face the daunting task of governing people whose family members were slaughtered by their barrel bombs. A sullen citizenry acquiescing to superior force is not the same as being welcomed back as liberators. So long as Assad presides over the population centers, there is the possibility of an insurrection and return of rebels to places they left under the barrage of Russian air power and assault of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. After what has taken place in Syria over the last five years, Assad can never be the undisputed master of his own house.

There is no denying that reclaiming most of Syria’s urban areas is an important triumph for Assad and a critical turning point in the history of the civil war. But the conflict will persist in the vast ungoverned spaces of Syria. These regions are populated by the Islamic State, by other Islamic terrorists, and by rebels struggling for a better future for Syria and open to a constructive relationship with the United States. It is the conceit of the Obama administration that it is hard to disentangle these myriad groups, a spurious claim offered to justify inaction. It is the last group that is still worthy of America’s support. Today, their plight may be desperate, their prospects more limited, but their cause is still worthwhile.

Only U.S. resolve can save Syrians: Column

For those wishing to reconcile with Assad, they should know that the region can never be at peace with itself so long as he rules over a truncated Syria. The Syrian civil war is fueling the sectarian divide that plagues the Middle East. Assad is after all yet another instrument of Shiite Iran, as are Hezbollah and the Shiite militias that Tehran deploys around the region as its auxiliary force. So long as Iran and its Shiite surrogates rampage across the Middle East, they will elicit a response from the incumbent Sunni powers led by Saudi Arabia.

America cannot remain aloof from this conflict and dismiss it as an age-old blood feud of limited importance to its core concerns. It is time to take sides and buttress the battered Arab alliance against the revisionist Islamic Republic and its clients. Syria is just one of the battlegrounds of this conflict. Iraq and the Persian Gulf remain its two other essential theaters.

As Washington considers its path, it should be reminded that the fates of Assad and his Islamist nemesis, ISIL, are strangely intertwined. The destruction of the terrorists necessitates the demise of the dictator. The Islamic State after all is the latest militant manifestation of Sunni grievances. Assad’s killing machine at the behest of Iran is the principal recruiter of Sunnis to the cause of radical Islam. If the Islamic State were to disappear tomorrow, another radical group would emerge to take its place. So long as Sunnis remain aggrieved and beleaguered, there will be fertile ground for the rise of more Islamic States to come.

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Obama did too much in Syria, not too little: Column

As the Obamians leave the White House, they take with them the burdens of Syria. The Obama presidency will remain tarnished by the human carnage that it left behind in the Levant. The administration’s memoirists will brandish various defenses of their eight years of rule, but the specter of Syria will always be there. If President-elect Donald Trump and his team would like to escape this shadowed legacy, then they should think of ways to defang Assad.

Syria today is unofficially partitioning between urban areas tenuously controlled by the government, and the periphery where the rebels roam. It may still be possible to formalize these zones and make them safer. The costs of such policy should not be underestimated — but the on other side of the ledger is the price of inaction.

Ray Takeyh is the Hasib Sabbagh Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and co-author ofThe Pragmatic Superpower: Winning the Cold War in the Middle East.

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