Halting Syrian Chaos

Stratfor ^ | July 4, 2012 | 1102 GMT | Robert D. Kaplan and Kamran Bokhari

[robowombat]

What if Syrian President Bashar al Assad really goes? There is an assumption in the West that the way to win a strategic victory over Iran and improve the human rights situation inside Syria is to remove the Syrian leader.

...... Chaos in Syria benefits nobody. The Turks do not want a long-running refugee problem on their border. The Lebanese are afraid of their own state becoming a battlefront in an intensifying Syrian civil war. The Jordanian regime, already unpopular at home, is also afraid of regional upheaval. The Saudis, even more so than the Jordanians, are terrified of the specter of a major Arab state crumbling -- something they know is not out of the question for their dynasty of octogenarians now in its own tired, Brezhnevite phase. Simply because Riyadh wants to topple the pro-Iranian al Assad does not mean it would be pleased with an extended situation in which nobody is in charge in Damascus. The Israeli viewpoint is similar. The Shiite government in Iraq fears Sunni terrorists being given free rein in the Syrian border area. As for the Iranians, they will do all they can to keep the current Syrian regime in place even as they may privately abhor al Assad's inefficient brutality. (The Iranians effectively crushed the Green movement in 2009 by killing hundreds, not thousands.) The Russians require stability in Damascus only partly for the sake of naval rights in the port of Tartus. Syria and Iran are the two remaining levers the Kremlin has in the Middle East. .... As for the Americans, they don't want a Yugoslavia-style situation where they are under pressure to militarily intervene.

Read more: Halting Syrian Chaos by Robert D. Kaplan and Kamran Bokhari | Stratfor

[robowombat]

You have to readthe whole convuluted text to get the message that the US should try and slow down the fighting and ease Assad out and then help referee a coalition of some sort. Kaplan is considered to be 'A VERY WISE MAN' inside the Beltway so his opinion pieces are significant representations of what some part of the foreign policy establishment is pushing. One way or another i suspect the US will either by plan or inertia be drawn into some sort of a role in the Syrian mess. Perhaps air bombing and SOF such as Libya on a bigger scale followed by another essay in 'nation building' for our over stretched military. (Amazingly there are now about 10,000 US Navy personnel in Afghanistan. More of that if Syria is our next adventure.)

[kenavi]

Little we can do with Assad.