That has been the American position and its perhaps the most fucking stupid idea anyone has had since Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Blair’s little field trip to Mesopotamia.
The US is pursuing two contradictory positions, getting rid of Assad and defeating ISIS. Its trying to ride two horse which are moving in opposite directions, simultaneously.
ISIS and the whole motley crew are not going to just disappear because baby Assad leaves. That has never happened anywhere. The fall of the Syrian Government is going to leave Syria even more divided, and the groups are not going to " form a respectable government and turn against ISIS". They are going to start fighting amongst each other, like the Mujahideen did after 1992. They are armed militias for fucks sake. They don’t respond well to things like governing.
For there to be peace, there needs to be a restoration of central authority, which means either a large occupying force or Syrian government.
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I don’t know that I believe Russia has enough desire to commit the muscle required to alter the balance in Syria to the point that Assad wins, though.
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Their strategy seems to be to use the Syrian Army as ground troops (they have poured a lot of money there) and employ their airforce to support them. Its a sound strategy. Has a chance of success.
[QUOTE=Peremensoe]
Assad’s loss of control is a result of Assad’s brutal dictatorship.
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That is true. And ISIS is a result of that loss of control. They are not contradictory.
this is a joke, right?
There is zero chance of a respectable government stepping in.
Assad’s government will eventually collapse, because he is outnumbered. (He has already abandoned about 75% of the land he once ruled.)
And the vacuum left behind is being, and will continue to be, filled by whichever group of jihadists has the most guns. Mainly ISIS, which is well on the way to becoming a major political power, even though westerners pretend to ignore it.
Look, if Assad stays, the options are to massacre the non-extremist rebels or just acknowledge the fighting will continue for years. Assad has barrel bombed the shit out of civilian areas, prompting tens of thousands of non-terrorist people to take up arms against him. The idea that these people are just going to lay down their arms, or join up with the same Syrian army that slaughtered their uncles, brothers, children and friends.
Uh, really? That’s what you propose, for these guys to surrender, salute Assad, and go fight alongside the Russians that gave Assad the weapons to do his worst?
Get real.
Syria’s going to remain a mess for many years no matter what happens, but part of the solution is Assad and his inner circle to go. Thinking otherwise is like suggesting that we could have put Iraq back together in 2006 if we had only put Saddam Hussein back in power.
Again, the Kurdish areas encompass a nearly contiguous block of northern Syria…and they aren’t a ‘group of jihadists’ (nor do they have ‘the most guns’). There are other moderate groups (well…sort of) in Syria as well who will most likely carve up chunks of it. The flaw here is to think that there will ever be a contiguous ‘Syria’ that comes out of this mess. It’s gone too far and you can’t put the genie back in the bottle at this point. Going back to Assad et al in charge of a contiguous Syria is ridiculous AND unrealistic…it ain’t gonna happen. The only way to move forward at this point is for Assad to go. The sooner the better.
Except that the US isn’t actually doing much of anything against Assad.
It’s hard to see how Syria could be much more divided than it is now. What remains of the Assad regime is hardly more worthy of the term “government” than the Islamic State’s own civil administration.
And the anti-Assad forces are already fighting ISIS; of all players on the Syrian stage, they’ve fought ISIS more than anyone to date.
Yup.
The Assad regime in Syria, as an essentially peaceful and stable unitary state, is already over. No force on Earth will restore it. His only role now can be to delay and complicate the eventual partitioning, and to make the meantime bloodier.
What will happen to Assad or ISIS is kind of beside the point. This is a complex system, where there is not a straight line between inputs and results. We can’t know what the ultimate outcome of any given action is right now. Things are just too complex and unstable to forecast ahead. Logic doesn’t work. It’s not the realm of grand planners.
In complex systems, the best strategy we have is to make small interventions, constantly assessing and adjusting as the landscape changes. Eventually, a critical moment will appear where there is an oopportunity to tip the scales. But until that moment comes, we aren’t going to be able to have a coherent strategy, no more than you can have a map of a maze with constantly shifting walls.
Okay, that was poorly worded. What we predict will happen to Assad or ISIS is besides the point, because we are all basically working with nothing when it comes to making predictions.
The PKK is not a Turkish group, it is a Kurdish group of Kurds who live in Turkey. The PKK is a terrorist group, but not all of the Kurdish fighters in northern Syria are members of the PKK. Most Kurdish fighters view the PKK as allies, and that’s a thorny issue. FWIW the Turks and the PKK have been trying to work through a ceasefire for some time now. The current level of terrorist behavior from the PKK is minimal versus historically, it’s akin to the IRA after the Good Friday Accords.
As to why they do not have the manpower, the Kurds are a smaller portion (9%) of the Syrian population than the Shia. I do not see how they have the manpower to control the country. They have the manpower to control areas of high Kurdish population in Syria.
I doubt that is true. Syria has been stable for much of its history, and it didn’t require control by a “regional power”, it was stable on its own accord. It may be set up for generations of civil war, or maybe not. But I see no reason to assume Syria will never have a government that runs the entire country again. Never is a long time.
“Much of its history”? I’m talking about since the French mandate ended–not that much history in total. Most of that has been under two generations of Assad dictatorship–a regional power, in in its time, now past.
In terms of the general effectiveness of Russia’s airstrikes there is also the fact that the Rules of Engagement are different for Russia. We don’t know what they are but theres a good reason to think they are considerably looser than the US ROE.
I’m sure the US could flatten ISIS in a couple of weeks if pilots were given “weapons free” orders and they didn’t care about civilian casualties.
And neither Assad & co., nor the Islamic State, nor the Kurds, nor anyone else, will be able to reconstruct a Syria of comparable borders and stability to the one turned over by the French on their departure. There’s too many people now, too much oil, too many weapons, too much blood already spilled. Who’s going to make a country out of that?
The point you’re all missing is Putin’s engagement with this is entirely a product of the USA’s clown car foreign policies.
While Obama is out back smoking a fat one trying to work his life out, Vlad is John Travolta on the dance floor in Saturday Night Fever, thrusting in all directions.
i.e. there has been a vacuum in relation to Syria but it’s now been filled, and the world sees a hierarchical adjustment.
The US is right to keep out of the clusterfuck as much as possible, let Iran and Russia waste their resources propping up an unsustainable ally. (Even the Saudis are wasting their money funding all their armed Islamist proxies) The best the US can do is keep support relegated to airstrikes and supply drops whilst having allies do the grunt work.
Syria is in no way our problem or our responsibility. If Putin wants to take this one, he can have it for all I care.
I’m baffled by people who think everything in the world is the product of America’s action or inaction. Obama has never been enthusiastic about Syria because he understands that it is none of our business.
I’m going to second the ‘what planet are you from’ comment. The US didn’t send a ship to ‘cruise off China’, we sent a ship into international waters in the disputed South China Sea region which is over a thousand kilometers FROM China. Just because China has decided to build some islands to attempt to swipe the region by fiat doesn’t make it ‘China’.
As to your rant, it’s pretty clear you are drinking the Putin kool aide and, as always, are so ridiculous anti-American that you are practically a parody of yourself (Obama the drug smoking pot head and Putin has Saturday Night Fever :p:p). But you just keep telling yourself that the US isn’t relevant in the world today, but that Russia is.
I was just thinking yesterday about how all this panic about Russia drinking our milkshake is really reminiscent of the panic over Iraqi drones flying over New York City spraying bio-death fluid made in Tikrit Babby Milk Factory #4.
Get a grip, people. Russia is aggressive, but they are a second rate power that has limited influence in the Middle East, and they are in a desperate situation to save one of the few Middle Eastern regimes that actually cares about Russia at all. The idea that the U.S. is losing when we are still the 800 pound gorilla that is an indefensible friend to Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, UAE, Oman, and Egypt, is silly. It isn’t really an idea that would be worth responding to if it weren’t parroted so much by folks who have simply lost all perspective.