Tread carefully.
By John Judis
When pressed during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings, Secretary of State John Kerry admitted
that the goal of an American military strike against Bashar al Assad’s
Syrian government would not merely be to punish him for his use of
chemical weapons, but to inflict “collateral” damage that would have a
“downstream impact” on his regime’s survival.
That position was
affirmed by the Foreign Relations Committee, which in approving a
resolution authorizing a military strike added an amendment
proposed by Senators John McCain and Chris Coons that the American
objective was to “change the momentum on the battlefield.” In other
words, an important purpose of the military strike would be to get rid
of Assad by weakening his military.
But
that stance has invited the question of whether, in replacing Assad,
the United States would be paving the way for Islamist rebels allied
with al Qaeda to take power in at least a part of Syria. Senators Ron
Johnson and Tom Udall, both of whom voted against the resolution, voiced
this objection in the Senate hearings. Texas Rep. Michael McCaul raised
the same point in the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing last
Wednesday. “Who are the rebel forces?” McCaul asked. “My concern is any
strike against this regime, as bad as it is, will empower these radical
Islamists, these extremists.”
Until this summer, the administration had expressed similar
concerns. It had opposed sending lethal aid to the rebels for fear it
would fall into the hands of Islamist extremists. But in the hearings,
Kerry expressed confidence that the “moderates” of the Free Syrian Army
(FSA) now had the upper hand in the struggle and could be expected to
benefit from an American military strike. Kerry assured Johnson that
“the opposition has increasingly become more defined by its moderation.”
And in the House hearings, he told McCaul that “there is real moderate
opposition that exists” and that it is “getting stronger.”
Is the
administration right about rebels? Or has it changed its line to accord
better with the case it wants to make for military action in Syria? One
cannot answer this question definitively. Reporters and independent
researchers have very limited access to Syria; and the situation on the
ground continues to shift. When I asked Yezid Sayigh, who is a senior
associate with the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, about the
relative strength of the moderates and extremists, he said, “None of use
really knows, not us outsiders and not most Syrians.” But this much can
be said: There is at least as good evidence against the
administration’s claim of rising moderation as there is for it.
Kerry, McCain, and others who claim that moderates have gained the upper hand cite a report on the Wall Street Journal
op-ed page by Elizabeth O’Bagy. (It is a “very interesting article,
which I commend to you,” Kerry told McCaul.) O’Bagy is identified by the
Journal as a senior analyst at the Institute for the Study of
War, but she is also the political director of, and under contract to,
the Syria Emergency Task Force,
which is lobbying the White House and Congress to aid the rebels. That
makes O’Bagy a less-than-disinterested researcher. And her op-ed itself,
which paints the “moderate opposition forces” leading the struggle
against Assad includes claims that I found difficult to believe.
O’Bagy,
for instance, says that the opposition forces, which are led by
ex-Assad military people “have struggled to ensure that their fight
against Assad will pave the way for a flourishing civil society.”
Really? Post-Assad Syria as the Levant’s answer to the Netherlands?
Bagley acknowledges that the extremists have won control in parts of the
north, but writes that during her visit to Syria, she “witnessed nearly
daily protests by thousands of citizens” against the Islamist groups
that have taken control in parts of the north. When I looked for other
accounts, I did find reports and videos of
demonstrations against groups like Islamic State of Iraq, but they
didn’t appear to involve “nearly daily protests by thousands of
citizens.”
Thomas Pierret, who is a lecturer in contemporary Islam at the University of Edinburgh, makes a more credible case for the moderate opposition in Foreign Policy.
Pierret acknowledges that by the end of 2012, “the rise of hardline
Salafi factions like the al Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra and the
Syrian Islamic Front (SIF) led by Ahrar al-Sham, a faction with strong
roots among Syrian veteran fighters of the Iraq war, was apparently
irresistible, as FSA-affiliated battalions played the second roles in
the rebels' major conquests at the time.”
But
Pierret argues that the Islamist forces have been weakened by internal
rifts, popular resistance to Islamist rule, and by the growing
importance of state-aid to those fighting Assad. Writes Pierret:
Recent military developments show that Syrian insurgents have become increasingly dependent on state supporters for their logistics. Gone are the days when rebels could storm lightly defended regime positions with assault rifles and a few RPGs. The retreat of loyalist forces on heavily fortified bases last winter has required a major quantitative and qualitative increase in the opposition’s armament. This is something only foreign governments, not jihadi utopians, can offer. Given Saudi Arabia’s apparent determination to lead the way in that respect, this situation will probably continue to favor mainstream insurgents over their radical brothers in arms in the foreseeable future.
There are, however, a credible array of reports that the Islamist role in the opposition remains significant and worrisome. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey voiced these concerns in a letter to Rep. Elliot Engel last month. But he appears to have been echoing analyses from government intelligence. At the Aspen Institute’s Security Forum in late July, David Shedd, the deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, warned that groups affiliated to al Qaeda “have grown in size, grown in capability and ruthlessly grown in effectiveness. Their ability to take the fight to the regime and Hezbollah in a very direct way has been, among those groups, the most effective." They “would not go home” if Assad were ousted, he said, but will “fight for” a place in a post-Assad Syria.
British
intelligence experts have also warned of growing extremist influence in
Syria’s opposition. Charles Lister, an analyst at IHS Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre, wrote recently
that “the most notable trend in Syria in 2013 has been the increasing
strategic supremacy of Islamist groups, particularly in the northern
half of the country. Every major opposition military victory since
September 2012 has been Islamist-led.” He concludes that “there is a
power shit underway within the Syrian insurgency and it is not one that
will be welcomed in western government circles.”
There have been
also repeated reports of disarray within the Free Syrian Army and its
coordinating group, the Supreme Military Council (SMC), that belie the
Obama administration’s current optimism about the opposiiton. In a report
in late August, Justapha al-Sheikh, a defector from the Syrian army and
a member of the FSA, cast doubt on the group’s strength. The West’s
lack of support has turned the FSA, Al-Sheikh said, into “an empty
address without any real substance,” while leaving Islamists as “the
real power on the ground.”
This month, Kirk Sowell, the head of an Arab language research firm, reported
that the FSA and the Supreme Military Council appeared to be “on the
verge of unraveling.” Sowell claimed that on August 22, four of the
SMC’s five commanders threatened to resign, calling for the group to
work with “all forces fighting in Syria,” a reference to the Islamists.
“The SMC has been something of a shell for months… and when
opportunities have arisen to make command decisions, it has fallen
flat,” Sowell writes.
Sowell notes that “even more embarrassing
are major operations in which the jihadists clearly out-organize and
out-fight the SMC groups. This happened a few weeks ago in the rebel
Latakia offensives, in which the jihadists formed a ‘Mujahidin
Operations Center’ and bore the brunt of the battle.” Pierret
acknowledges this point. He writes, “Hardline Salafis certainly remain
important players in Syria, as recently illustrated by their role in the
capture of a dozen Alawite villages in the province of Latakia,” but he
claims that they now face “unprecedented difficulties” in fighting
Assad’s forces.
I think that anyone reading these different
accounts has to admit to confusion and to be skeptical of the
administration’s contention that “the opposition has increasingly become
more defined by its moderation.” If the administration is going to make
its case over the next days for a military strike, it needs to take
this into account. If it is going to argue that its purpose is not only
to enforce a norm against the use of chemical weapons, but to aid in
Assad’s overthrow, it has to lay out a credible scenario by which that
could happen without ceding parts of Syria to groups allied to the
perpetrators of September 11. They have yet to do so.
SoRo:
‘Israel is an enemy country. I say this loud and clear.
It occupies Syrian lands. The FSA will not change its position regarding
that country before it withdraws from the Syrian lands, and recognizes
the legitimate rights of the Arab Palestinian people.’
- Brigadier General Salim Idris, Chief of Staff of the US-backed Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army
Those would be the same ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels that idiots like Kerry, McCain, and AIPAC want us to aid, assist, and arm.
* Abu Osama al Tunisi, the Commander of the Syrian Free Army, pledged allegiance to and said that SFA members were joining al Qaeda; and,
* Colonel Abdul Jabbar al-Okaidi, the head of the United
States-backed opposition’s Syrian Free Army, appeared in a video
alongside Abu Jandal, a leader of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State
in Iraq and Syria; and,
* 4 out of 5 Syrian Free Army commanders have demanded that they be able to work with al Qaeda; and,
* Syrian rebels have admitted (and the UN has agreed) that they have used chemical weapons; and,
* The rebels are into cannibalism and beheadings; and,
* The ‘moderate’ rebels have attacked the predominantly Christian
village of Ma’aloula, which is home to some of the most ancient Orthodox
Christian relics, a major pilgrimage destination, and is on the UNESCO
list of tentative world heritage sites – all of which has caused the
community of Trappistine nuns to condemn Obama for his silence on the
atrocities being committed upon Christians ‘despite all justice, all
common sense, all mercy, all humility, all wisdom;’ and,
* They have been committing documented atrocities all over Syria.
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