5. Assad flees or is killed and Alawite members of the SSRC, the Republican Guard and former regime elements - including thousands of private Alawite militia, retreat to the Latakia Province and create a defensive enclave, armed with Syrian regime weapons, perhaps including chemical and biological weapons (a sectarian-driven future) - perhaps the most likely future now.
The FSA and remnants of the Assad regime fight a protracted, zero-sum conflict, during which time both sides commit thousands of atrocities. The fate of Syrian chemical and biological weapons is uncertain. Desperate Alawites may consider transferring such weapons to al-Qaida in Syria, which likely will oppose any new government that does not adopt Sharia, or to criminal elements that make trouble for the new Sunni-dominated FSA government.
The West has no choice but to involve itself in Syria's future. President Obama's passivity only allows Russia and Iran to better influence the ultimate outcome and allies al-Qaida in Syria with the opposition. With no US leadership, the war may degenerate into a human rights nightmare, with a desperate Alawite insurgency armed with chemical and biological weapons.
In order to accrue necessary political capital with the incoming regime and to forestall Russian or Iranian influence over the new Syrian government, the United States ought to consider military action, such as a stand-off air suppression campaign or a no-fly zone, to signal American support to the Free Syrian Army and its goals. (Such action alone might push Assad to flee.) Neutrality risks the appearance of indifference to the plight of the people of Syria. Military involvement of some kind is imperative to accrue some credibility and influence over a post-Assad Syria.
Similarly, the United States ought to signal to the Alawites that once (and only once) Assad flees, they would become a protected minority, roughly analogous to Bosnian Serbs in Bosnia, and ideally part of the new, non-sectarian government; and thus that the quick and early end of the Assad regime is ultimately in the interests of all Syrian religious minorities, Alawites, Shi'ites, Christians, Druze and Kurds.
Syria is intractably hostile to the West; a client state to Iran; a WMD proliferator; a threat to Israel; and a brutal dictatorship. Iran is desperate to keep the Assad regime for all these reasons.
No regime that follows the current regime can be worse, though it may not be much better in the near term.
The United States used to be the champion of the oppressed, clever in perceiving and implementing a political solution and magnanimous in the end state. President Obama seems arrested by policy uncertainty and blind to the reality that he has to support the opposition or he will be perceived as supporting the regime.
