The Obama administration’s fear of blowback in Syria — weapons falling into the hands of jihadists and other bad guys — can be avoided in only one sure way: Throw America’s support behind Bashar al-Assad , the vile dictator the White House wants gone. This contradiction is at the heart of President Obama’s incoherent Syria policy. If Assad loses, it will be the Middle East version of Black Friday, with door-busting sales on all the latest weapons, batteries included. If he wins, the door remains closed.
But we don’t want him to win — and the way it’s looking, he won’t. The Syrian rebels already control large parts of the country, and the war has now entered its third year. Trouble is, inaction on the part of the administration — a refusal to arm the rebels or impose a no-fly zone — has allowed what was once a protest movement by some nice professionals to turn into a bloody vendetta without end. More and more, the hard fighting is being done by the very jihadist groups we fear. Syria is an Afghanistan in the making.
It is useless now to point out how this could have been avoided or mitigated. It is far more useful to ask the administration just what its policy is. We know now that three former senior officials — CIA director David Petraeus, secretary of state Hillary Clinton and defense secretary Leon Panetta — supported arming the rebels. This, too, is the position of Britain and France, the former colonial powers in the region. The president’s thinking may be evolving, but for the moment, Washington is doing very little.
Recently, however, Secretary of State John Kerry suggested a reappraisal might be under way. In his first Middle East tour, he said in Saudi Arabia that the Syrian opposition had the “clear ability . . . to make certain” that the weapons going to the “moderate, legitimate opposition [are], in fact, getting to them.” These weapons, though, are not coming from the United States. They are from Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations. If the Saudis can supply weapons, why can’t the United States? A weapon is a weapon no matter who supplies it.