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What Will Happen In Syria

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Let us begin with the view that the Obama administration has conclusive actionable evidence on the use of chemical weapons by Assad's side in Syria. Already to many in the world, this would seem a charitable assumption, considering the fraudulent intelligence behind the disastrous Bush-Iraq intervention. But we do know that President Obama desperately wanted to avoid the Mideast quagmire, even to the extent of having no coherent plan for the eventuality.  The leaked details so far seem compelling enough if not conclusive. No one seems concerned with any comparable acts by the opposition. And the momentum looks like the US will go ahead with some sort of military action.

So, we must assume that the Assad regime really did do an irreversibly stupid thing. As the saying goes, supposedly uttered by Talleyrand, “It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder”. Why did Assad do it? According to a typically thorough recent assessment in Der Spiegel the Assadists http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/situation-in-syria-deteriorates-as-west-looks-for-answers-a-919733.html   were actually losing on many fronts, despite Vladimir Putin's claims to the contrary.  They were expecting an assault on Damascus. Their supporters around the country faced isolation and defeat as the state's airfields fell to the rebels inexorably cutting off supply flights. Teetering on inevitable defeat, Assad had nothing to lose.

That's the scenario. Play it out. No US strike will mean more chemical weapons use. A US strike will likely have the effect of tipping the balance and toppling the regime. What then? On this point, the Kremlin is surely right – the resulting power vacuum will ignite all-out civil war, chaos, another million refugees, reprisals, WMD vulnerability and other horrors. Instability will spread to Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey. Preventing all this requires engagement by the US which really means planning  of no-fly zones, arming favorites, protecting refugees and WMD sites. The kind of elaborate involvement Obama never wanted, and the US can ill afford.

A number of commentaries on how to handle the inevitable endgame have popped up. David L. Phillips , Peace Studies professor at Columbia University, expert on the region's conflicts, uses the Kosovo model as a possible precedent http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-l-phillips/intervention-lessons-from_b_3858228.html. Chiefly, he argues that any such situation requires intensive diplomacy saying that 'military action is a tactic not a policy'. He understands that going through the UN won't work so he suggests working with other bodies such as opposition groups and coalitions with neighboring countries and other practical strategies that succeeded in Kosovo, though not without considerable suffering.

President Obama does not want that kind of entanglement. Yet he cannot avoid it. If Vladimir Putin would sign on, the outcome could be managed with some stability. As incentives, the Russians could keep their naval port and their stake in the rebuilding of Syria. They could help redraw the map with Russian allies surviving intact in safe zones, up to a point. But there's the rub. The Kremlin's entire strategic vision for the region involves their Shiite crescent allies linking from Tehran all the way down to Hezbollah in Lebanon. No US president could offer that without getting flamed in the media. And Putin would not accept any offer that palpably defanged Russian leverage. For him, chaos makes no difference as it simply soils US credibility further. He will reject overtures during the upcoming nations  summit in the hope of preventing a US strike or minimizing its effects.

He may not be so obdurate once the strike gets under way and he sees that chaos will erode Russian leverage altogether however much flak the US takes for its actions. One can only hope and pray, he does just that, and President Obama has a deal ready that Putin cannot refuse.

One final afterthought: we've all heard a lot of talk about giving the enemy too much warning, allowing them to disperse personnel and hide their weapons. Don't believe it. There's nothing so demoralizing as waiting for armageddon, forever gearing up and standing down, sending your family away, supplies drying up, watching the skies, moving around incessantly and indefinitely. Delaying the strikes may be the most effective instrument of war Obama will deploy against Assad. The information from Syria is that the President's stop-and-go build up caused Assad's forces to evacuate en masse and then return in confusion. All in all, it will likely mean the regime's end, which brings us back to the beginning.