Is Syria Iran's Stalingrad?

Gary Gambill at the Foreign Policy Research Institute argues that Syria is the Iranian Stalingrad.

I think he’s a little more confident than he should be, but he makes a good case and may turn out to be right.

The growing infusion of Iranian-backed Lebanese and Iraqi Shiite fighters into the Syrian civil war is causing some veteran pundits to panic. Vali Nasr, dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, warns that “Iran is beating the U.S. in Syria.” Former Bush administration deputy national security adviser Elliot Abrams sees “a humiliating defeat of the United States at the hands of Iran.” 

Nothing could be further from the truth.  Setting aside the matter of how Washington can be losing a war it is not fighting, the claim that Iran is winning is dead wrong.  The Islamic Republic’s headlong intervention in Syria is akin to Nazi Germany’s surge of military forces into the Battle of Stalingrad in the fall of 1942 – an operationally competent, strategic blunder of epic proportions.

To be sure, the influx of thousands of foreign (mostly non-Iranian) Shiite fighters into Syria in recent months has enabled pro-regime forces to regain some ground in the Damascus suburbs and a belt of territory linking the capital to Homs and the coast.  The town of Qusayr, critical to both rebel and regime supply lines into Lebanon, fell on June 5.

That’s a shame, but the Iranian surge won’t prevent the overwhelmingly Sunni Arab rebels from eventually prevailing on the battlefield. Sunni Arabs have a 5-to-1 demographic edge over the minority Alawites who comprise most uniformed and paramilitary pro-regime combatants, and a 2-to-1 advantage over all of Syria’s ethno-sectarian minorities combined.  The rebels are strongly supported by the overwhelming majority of Arabs and Muslims worldwide who are Sunnis, and their four principal sponsors – Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan – have a GDP well over twice that of Iran. Russia continues to do business with the regime, but it won’t intervene decisively enough to change the math.