WarSclerotic

WPR Article | The New Rules: Assad’s Ouster Best Chance to Stave off Israel-Iran Conflict.

The debate among U.S. foreign policy analysts over the wisdom of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities — and whether or not America should allow itself to be drawn into an ensuing conflict with Iran should Israel strike — has largely taken place parallel to the debate over whether to pursue an R2P, or responsibility to protect, intervention in Syria. It bears noting, however, that forcing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s departure may be the best near-term policy for the U.S. to avoid being sucked into an Israeli-Iranian war.

Clearly the Assad ruling clan deserves our best efforts short of an all-out invasion to bring about its forcible removal. Now that Assad is perpetrating the same mass violence against innocent civilians on a town-by-town basis to which his father, Hafez, once resorted, there should be no pretense of suggesting that this is none of the world’s moral business.

That argument can’t be applied universally, of course. If the Assad regime was powerful enough, the West would naturally have to let it get away with its vicious assault against its own people. But it is not, which means we now possess both the motive and opportunity to do the right thing.

The opportunity cost here is acceptably low. Outside of leaving Russia fuming and China indignant, America’s relations with the rest of the world will suffer little damage. Instead, we’ll further strengthen our ties with Israel, Turkey and the GCC countries, which have already decided, in the form of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait, to arm the Syrian rebels. For a Washington contemplating a strategic “pivot” to East Asia, buttressing all those key relations is a worthwhile goal.

And while President Barack Obama’s unstated doctrine of “leading from behind” by letting the local critical mass for intervention build before supporting it is laudable, the decision by the GCC countries to arm the Syrian rebels is firm proof that the time has now come for the president to move beyond his decidedly cautious approach. Politically, it will cost him little with his voting base, and it will further insulate him from Republican charges of “appeasement” and other such nonsense. And when Assad does fall before the U.S. presidential election in November, it will represent another brilliant notch in Obama’s ever-lengthening belt of foreign policy successes.

In short, the time has arrived for this administration to move beyond righteously castigating Moscow and Beijing for their intransigence in the United Nations. When more than 60 nations beg the U.N. to send in civilian peacekeeping troops, they’re really asking Washington to pull the military trigger — pure and simple.

Assuming our covert presence is already deep at work inside Syria concerning its large cache of chemical weapons, we ought to be able at least to match the GCC’s willingness to offer material support to the rebel forces. And when that proves not to be enough, then we ought to encourage Turkey’s invocation of its NATO membership to request alliance military operations designed to enable a Syrian rebel victory. The pattern here should mirror that of the Libyan operation, but with Turkish military forces playing the lead role wherever possible in securing sanctuary for civilians and rebel forces.

That doesn’t mean putting U.S. or NATO boots on the ground, beyond the prudent application of covert elements and special forces to target the regime’s chemical weapons and al-Qaida operatives as opportunities arise.

Let’s not kid ourselves here: Israel is making similar moves, and Iran already has personnel in country doing dirty work on behalf of the Assad regime. With Hamas already abandoning Assad, there is some hope that Hezbollah can be eventually convinced to accept the inevitability of that regime’s demise.

The larger opportunity here is maintaining the Arab Spring’s momentum, while directing it decidedly in the direction of Iran. The golden chance to knock off Iran’s prime ally in the region’s “Shiite crescent” is clear, as is the tremendous geostrategic value in doing so. What might be less clear is how making this effort will also favorably alter the dynamics surrounding Iran’s persistent reach for the Bomb.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the crisis represented by Syria’s expanding civil war doesn’t encourage Israel to contemplate provoking a second crisis in the form of an attack on Iran. Instead, history shows time and again that regional balance-of-power players focus on the game at hand, preferring to exploit its opportunities and wait out its immediate implications on the correlation of forces. Thus, the more we ratchet up the Syrian dynamic, the more we freeze both Iran and Israel on the subject of their inevitable showdown.

Plus, quite frankly, it behooves America to continue processing the Arab Spring’s “one damn thing after another” dynamic. That’s how past administrations deftly handled the sequential collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s and Yugoslavia’s similar dissolution across the 1990s. We can always argue on the speed of our responses, which are invariably too slow, but the underlying principle of accepting the sequencing — that is, as it comes — is sound. Simply put, we pull out our long knives on the Assad regime right now because we can and because it’s the next thing up.

Once Assad falls, whatever the outcome, we have isolated Iran further, lessening its bravado and increasing its desperation. If you want to stave off an Israeli attack, this is the route to go. Moreover, removing Assad will create an exit scenario for Syria short of true chaos — meaning civil war, with all the locals driving the process to deeply conflicting ends — which could easily become the trigger for direct Israeli-Iranian kinetics, first inside Syria and then beyond. Syria is simply too important an outcome for both of them, as well as for Turkey and the GCC countries, for any of them to eschew the dangers associated with interventions of some level.

With all that ambition at stake, it’s better for the West, along with Turkey, to impose an overarching and overwhelming dynamic upon the situation to steer it toward the preferred outcome of Assad’s fall. Again, Moscow and Bejing will shriek in response, but we’ll get what we want in the end — namely, Iran’s top lieutenant dethroned and the Arab Spring’s momentum extended to Iran’s doorstep. That outcome will do more to stay Israel’s hand on Iran’s nuclear program than anything else we might manage to come up with. Indeed, compared to the Western embargo of Iranian oil, which will eventually push Tehran into forcing the issue of war with Israel, Assad’s fall is far more likely to force some Iranian compromise with the West’s resolute opposition to its nuclear ambitions.

There is nothing new or fantastic about the logic tendered here. We are simply killing the chicken to scare the monkey.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is chief analyst at Wikistrat and a contributing editor for Esquire magazine. His eBook serial is “The Emily Updates: One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived” (September-December 2011). His weekly WPR column, The New Rules, appears every Monday. Reach him and his blog at thomaspmbarnett.com.

This entry was posted on March 5, 2012 at 5:38 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.