Ally With Assad?

by Dish Staff

Assad and ISIS as drawn by Iranian artist Mana Neyestani who exposes Assad's brutal manipulation of terror. http://t.co/oy2XHYny1k—
Larry Deyab (@larrydeyab) August 25, 2014

Hassan Hassan argues that we shouldn’t, because he hasn’t really been fighting ISIS in the first place:

One might argue that Assad’s strategy was a cynical game and that once he is assured of his survival, he would be well-positioned to fight the group. But even that argument ignores basic dynamics: If Assad genuinely wants to fight ISIS today, he is as capable of doing that as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was when ISIS took over three Iraq provinces. ISIS controls large swathes in rebel-held Syria, areas that have been outside the regime’s control for one to three years. How could the Assad regime fight against ISIS in Raqqa or Deir Ezzor, for example? Would the local population fight side by side with the regime? That is extremely unlikely, given that people have condemned reports that the United States intends to strike against ISIS in Syria while ignoring the regime’s atrocities for more than three years.

A more prudent approach is to look at the rise of ISIS as a long-term menace that can only be addressed through a ground-up pushback. The opposition forces are not only possible partners, they’re essential in the fight against ISIS. After all, they’re the ones who have been fighting ISIS since last summer, and drove it out of Idlib, Deir Ezzor and most of Aleppo and around Damascus. It cost them dearly: more than 7,000 people were killed. Fighting ISIS should be part of a broader political and military process that includes both the regime and the opposition, but not Assad.

Max Abrahms sees the situation differently:

Our national security ultimately depends on crushing ISIS not only in Iraq, but also in Syria. In the past, Assad’s forces were reluctant to engage ISIS directly. But the gloves have come off in the last couple of weeks. If Assad perceives ISIS as an existential threat, he will tolerate — even secretly welcome — U.S. military assistance. This is an opportunity Washington should seize not for him, but for us.

But James Antle seeks out the genuinely “realist” position:

Contrary to the BuzzFeed headline, few foreign-policy experts want a full operational alliance with Syria or Iran. Some have called for what Crocker, Luers, and Pickering have described as “mutually informed parallel action” against ISIS. Others have merely suggested the U.S. not destabilize ISIS’s enemies in the region, while the al-Qaeda offshoot is beheading American journalists and terrorizing religious minorities in Iraq. Even without any practical cooperation, it is hard to see how Syria and Iran wouldn’t to some extent be beneficiaries of any successful military action against ISIS. But for all the tyranny and terror ties of those regimes, ISIS is most directly the progeny of those who toppled with twin towers and attacked the United States on 9/11. After more than a decade at war in Afghanistan in response to the Taliban providing a safe haven for Osama bin Laden, wouldn’t an ISIS state in parts of Iraq and Syria be a worse outcome?

Keating believes Assad has played his cards perfectly and gotten just what he wanted:

There’s been speculation for some time that the Syrian leader would seek to use the crisis in Iraq to his advantage. It’s pretty apparent that Syrian forces tolerated the rise of the group in a bid to divide the rebels and scare off wary Western supporters, and only began attacking it after the Iraq crisis began this summer. It was a high-stakes gamble given that ISIS now reportedly controls about a third of Syrian territory, but one that could finally be paying off for the internationally isolated Syrian leader. …

Even if the U.S. doesn’t coordinate with Assad’s government—the White House position as expressed by Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes is still that he’s “part of the problem”—the shift in priority to ISIS does make it more likely that the American government is going to accept Assad remaining in power. Or at least it makes it less likely that the U.S. will take any major steps to remove him. Assad played the long game with a pretty weak hand and now appears to be winning.

Although they don’t necessarily make the case for an alliance, Ishaan Tharoor observes that the events of the past three years have sort of proven Vladimir Putin right about the folly of pushing regime change in Syria:

In his New York Times op-ed, Putin reminded readers that from “the outset, Russia has advocated peaceful dialogue enabling Syrians to develop a compromise plan for their own future.” That “plan for the future,” the Russians insisted, had to involve negotiation and talks between the government and the opposition, something which the opposition rejected totally at the time. In November 2011, Putin’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov criticized other foreign powers, including the United States, for not helping pressure opposition forces to come to the table with the Assad regime. “We feel the responsibility to make everything possible to initiate an internal dialogue in Syria,” Lavrov said at a meeting of APEC foreign ministers in Hawaii.

The Arab Spring was in full bloom and U.S. officials thought regime change in Syria was an “inevitable” fait accompli. That calculus appears to have been woefully wrong. Now, the conflict is too entrenched, too polarized, too steeped in the suffering and trauma of millions of Syrians, for peaceful reconciliation to be an option.