Assad’s propaganda didn’t do quite so well at first because peaceful protestors preceded armed combatants as his opponents and because horrifying atrocities captured on film or in NGO reports eclipsed self-evident nonsense. But now that the IS monster looms large in the American imagination, his argument is beginning to find purchase. Events from 2011 until now are being forgotten and forgiven; for all intents and purposes, Syrian history began for many when Foley’s head was sawed from his body. So what if Assad is a war criminal who gassed 1,500 people in a capital city and continues to drop barrel and chlorine bombs on many thousands more? Who cares if evidence has come to light of the regime’s industry of torture and murder, the scale and barbarity of which invoke the Holocaust (to use one State Department official’s historical reference point)? Assad’s well-documented record of harboring and dispatching al-Qaeda operatives into Iraq to blow up American soldiers? Well, that was six years ago – a millennium in geopolitical terms. Can the US really contain or defeat Sunni terrorism by seconding Shiite and Alawite military power? Hey, it’s a worth a shot. The period of condemning him or planning Assad’s “transition” from power is at an end, we are told. The only recourse is to hold our noses and face the harsh reality that he and his security master, Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani, are our only credible partners in confronting the IS. After all, they’ve been confronting it for two years, haven’t they?
This thesis has been regurgitated lately by a number of people who should know better and by a number of people constitutionally incapable of knowing better. Room-temperature establishment elders Richard Haas and Leslie Gelb have advanced it, prompting whispers and nudges in the Beltway that this “unthinkable” policy option has indeed been thought on and entertained at the highest levels in the White House. Based on a few suspect and anonymously sourced news articles, it may now even be a reality.
Already there are allegations of indirect US-Assad intelligence sharing on the IS appearing in Britain’s Independent and Agence France-Presse, albeit written by journalists whose accommodationist posture toward Damascus is an open secret among journalists. The State Department vehemently denies that these reports have any merit whatsoever, but even if that’s true, the allegations are plausible enough to help further the regime’s self-congratulatory plot-line that America has at last come around to agreeing with its own – not to mention Russia and Iran’s – original prescription.
Precisely because this rapprochement argument is gaining ground in many policy and analysis circles, and because it objectively furthers a case for a different kind of US intervention in Syria, editors are now willing to commission articles proving that an alliance with Assad out of pragmatism or necessity is wrongheaded or at least highly suspect – confirming, however joylessly, what many prior interventionists and Syrian opposition figures have been saying all along. Namely:
-- Assad never really made war against the IS a priority until recently, as one of his own advisors (in the Ministry of Reconciliation, no less) has just felt confident enough to admit to the New York Times. In fact, Assad financed ISIS through oil sales and let many of its mid- or top-ranking figures out of Sednaya prison in 2011, knowing full well they’d go back to jihad, and largely left it alone to establish a command center in Raqqa, where it runs military training camps and administers a totalitarian form of government, replete with the brainwashing of Arab youth. Only after the IS sacked Mosul on June 10 – and probably only because Suleimani ordered it – did a Syrian Air Force campaign against the terrorists begin in earnest, ending what Ambassador Fred Hof has called the “de facto collaboration” between Assad and the IS.
-- Unlike the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, which helped expel it from Idlib last February (and which is even now turning on Jabhat al-Nusra), and unlike the Islamic Front, which helped expel it from most of Aleppo, the regime is quite lousy at fighting the IS. In the past few weeks, IS militants overran the Shaer gas field in Palmyra in July, killing or executing close to 300 regime forces and/or militiamen from the Quds Force-trained National Defense Forces. The IS suffered only a fraction of those losses before the field was ultimately retaken. Syrian regulars have fared no better at the Division 17 installation or Tabqa air base, which the IS seized last week, giving them total control over the entire province of Raqqa and a straight shot to the putatively no-go Alawite coast. Severed heads of regime troops and militiamen from Division 17 have been stuck on pikes and paraded on social media in another clear endorsement of the kind of deal many are advocating Washington make with an incompetent devil.
-- Assad’s belated interest in combating the IS and his piss-poor performance has been so conspicuous that even his supporters have begun to notice. “The jihadist offensive has prompted some panicked supporters of the Syrian government to sharply criticize the leadership,” the New York Times’ Beirut correspondent Anne Barnard wrote last week, “questioning why it appeared to allow ISIS to build a base in the northern Syria province of Raqqa over the last year while claiming the Syrian Army was fighting terrorism.” Some loyalists have blamed the regime in general for not sending the necessary reinforcements into Raqqa, and the Syrian Defense Minister Fahd Freij in particular for ensuring that his own “sons are safe in Damascus.” Assad’s propaganda has boomeranged; the stooges have at last begun to sound like dissidents.
-- The IS’s dominance in non-regime Syria owes plenty to ideology, sophisticated recruitment efforts, and confiscated materiel, but also to resources that no Western or allied regional powers has ever even tried to match. The International Business Times reported this week that a 5,000-strong moderate rebel faction of the FSA which has been taking the fight to the IS in Aleppo pays its fighters $100 a month in salary, which is $300 less than the IS pays its own. Roughly the same ratio applies to the number of bullets each group respectively doles out. The name of the faction, now in talks with Washington for real support, was withheld by the State Department for “security reasons,” indicating a level of trust and protectiveness that probably rules these Syrians out as head-loppers.
-- The US military can penetrate Syrian airspace with ease, and without the world even knowing about it. News leaked by the Defense Department to preempt noisy reporting that in early July, dozens of Special Operations forces landed in Raqqa via helicopter, and were given air cover by drones and manned fighter jets, confirmed that not only is the White House not at all concerned about Syria’s “sovereignty,” but, contra much of its own past rhetoric, it knows exactly where and how to enter Syrian territory when it wants to. Jeffrey White and Maj. Chandler Atwood of the US Air Force noted back in May that since the civil war began, Assad’s air defenses in the north and south of the country have been degraded to such a degree that the rest could be destroyed “with relatively limited risk.” Such operations, moreover, could be prelude for a much-needed no-fly zone over opposition-held territory in Idlib and Aleppo (which is what the rebels asked for long before they asked for firepower), or for surgical airstrikes against the IS and regime positions in contested territory. The rebels America claims to support could then breathe a little easier and also work to keep the IS at bay and away from the Syrian-Turkish border, which is the jihadists’ vital entry point for receiving more foreign fighters. (If anything, White and Atwood’s assessment has only improved with time, as attrition, hardware neglect and continued regime losses in the north and south have taken a further toll on air defenses.) A tandem attack strategy would also foreclose on the possibility that the IS’s loss would translate into an Assad gain, and also signal to Syria’s embattled Sunni population, without which the jihadists will never been contained or defeated, that its two main oppressors are now declared and targeted enemies of the United States.
It’s a curious feature of American journalism that a story is not deemed newsworthy until the U.S. government behaves in such a way as to make it so. It’s also an irony of recent history that just as Assad’s lies are beginning to find an influential audience abroad, they are also exposing and overtaking him at home. Obama is now in search of a viable war plan for Syria. One can only hope that, as a result of his lack of one hitherto, he realizes that Assad was never an asset in the fight against ISIS, but rather the ultimately liability.
