In Assad’s Syria, the Lesser of Two Evils is Still Evil

I finished my latest piece for The Tower magazine mere hours before the White House ordered a battery of missile strikes against Syria’s Assad regime. Here’s the first part.

Last week, the Trump administration replaced Barack Obama’s spineless and counterproductive Syria policy with an even more spineless and counterproductive policy of its own.

For five years, the Obama administration impotently called for the removal of Syria’s blood-soaked tyrant Bashar al-Assad, but UN Ambassador Nikki Haley said Washington wouldn’t even go that far. “Our priority,” she said, “is no longer to sit and focus on getting Assad out.” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson basically said the same thing at the same time in Ankara, and did so while repeating almost verbatim the talking points of Assad’s Russian and Iranian allies. “The longer-term status of President Assad,” he said, “will be decided by the Syrian people.”

Then the Trump administration did an abrupt about-face this week after the regime’s chemical weapons attack in Idlib province and suggested that regime-change may in fact be Washington’s policy going forward. “Assad’s role in the future,” Tillerson said, “is uncertain clearly and with the acts that he has taken, it will seem that there would be no role for him to govern the Syrian people.”

After blowing up hospitals and schools and butchering hundreds of thousands with chemical weapons and barrel bombs, there is no chance Assad could win a free and fair election in Syria, but his allies in Tehran and Moscow need never fear a free and fair election as long as he is in power. Assad is the kind of ruler who “wins” elections with 97.6 percent of the “vote.”

His regime has killed almost 500,000 people and displaced millions, triggering the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II, but at least he doesn’t massacre cartoonists in Paris or nightclub-goers in Florida. He’s a monster, but he’s not ISIS. In that sense, at least from the standpoint of faraway Washington, he’s the lesser of two evils.

But we need to get a couple of things straight here. Bashar al-Assad is not fighting ISIS in Syria. Not really. Nor are the Russians. Assad and the Russians are fighting every rebel army in the country except ISIS. Look at a map of the country. ISIS’s territory is centered on its “capital” in Raqqa in the northeast, but Assad and Russia’s theater of operations is in the west and along the coast. Only the United States has bombed ISIS in Syria, and only Kurdish militias have seriously resisted ISIS on the ground.

Assad did, however, facilitate ISIS’s rise in Syria and Iraq. Thousands of Americans and Iraqis are dead thanks to his sponsorship of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq—the precursor to ISIS—during the Iraqi insurgency.

This is hardly a secret. “We in Syria intelligence opened all the doors for [the jihadists] to go to Iraq,” Mahmud al-Naser, an intelligence officer who defected to the United States, told the Daily Beast.

Read the rest in The Tower magazine.