Obama Dumps Syria's Rebels

The White House has officially scrapped its policy of training Syrian rebels now that Vladimir Putin is killing them.

Normally we might call this a surrender, but at this point, abandoning the rebel training would be the right call even if Vladimir Putin decided to help us instead of obstruct us.

Three years ago I wrote in this magazine that it was in America’s interests to see Bashar al-Assad overthrown.

The Arab Socialist Baath Party regime, beginning with its founder Hafez al-Assad and continuing through the rule of his son Bashar, is the deadliest state sponsor of terrorism in the Arab Middle East. It assisted the bloodthirsty insurgency in Iraq that killed American soldiers by the thousands and murdered Iraqi civilians by the tens of thousands. It has used both terrorism and conventional military power to place Lebanon under its boot since the mid-1970s. It made Syria into the logistics hub for Hezbollah, the best-equipped and most lethal non-state armed force in the world. It has waged a terrorist war against Israel and the peace process for decades, not only from Lebanon, but also from the West Bank and Gaza. And it is Iran’s sole Arab ally and its bridge to the Mediterranean.

That was in the early days of this conflict. Before ISIS took over a huge swath of the country. When the Free Syrian Army could have been molded into at least a semi-moderate force.

Arming and training a rebel army to fight the Assad regime and Hezbollah would have been extremely risky, obviously. It could have gone wrong in any number of ways.

But ISIS, the Al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, and other Islamist totalitarians are so thick on the ground now that arming and training a rebel army is not even risky. It’s guaranteed to fail or blow back in our faces. Our brief opportunity to maybe stave off a local apocalypse is long past.

The battlefield in Syria has already been shaped, and there is no longer any room for even a semi-moderate force outside the Kurdish region.

Nearly all the political moderates in Syria have fled the country or are hiding under their beds. The US can have no leverage in the Arab parts of the country. All we can do at this point is back the Kurds.

In case there was any doubt left, Putin made it absolutely clear yesterday that Russia is intervening strictly in order to bolster Assad’s regime, which puts him clearly on side with the Iranian-Hezbollah axis.

Maybe he’ll get rid of ISIS while he’s at it, but so far that isn’t his plan. ISIS and Assad for the most part haven’t been fighting each other anyway—they’re both too busy fighting everyone else. Which all but guarantees that everyone else, with the possible exception of the Kurds, is going to lose.