The Missing Link

Here’s another op-ed with a single, crucial paragraph. In Josh Rogin’s Washington Post op-ed on U. S. policy with respect to Syria, here’s the paragraph:

Last week at the Aspen Security Forum, CIA Director Mike Pompeo laid out what he sees as U.S. interests in Syria. He said the United States has two principal enemies there, the Islamic State and Iran. In addition to stopping Iran from establishing a zone of control that spans the region, the U.S. goal is “providing the conditions to have a more stable Middle East to keep America safe.”

I guess it’s to be expected that a spy chief be less than candid. If those are the U. S. interests they could have been accomplished long ago if the U. S. had assisted the Assad regime rather than arming its adversaries. It seems to me that some goals are missing from that list.

Mr. Pompeo followed that up with this remarkable statement:

“We don’t have the same set of interests” in Syria as Russia, said Pompeo. What are the Russian goals in Syria? “They love a warm-water naval port and they love to stick it to America.”

There seems to be quite a bit missing from that statement as well. It’s all very puzzling. Isn’t it the case that if the U. S. hadn’t armed, trained, and supported Syrian rebels including Al Qaeda in Syria, the Syrian government wouldn’t have needed to summon outside help from Iran and Russia? Didn’t some of the arms we provided fall into DAESH’s hands?

Update

Michael G. Vickers is more candid in his Washington Post op-ed:

Acquiescing to Assad remaining in power, and ending support for the Syrian moderate opposition, would strengthen our adversaries, further convince allies that the Trump administration places Russian interests above our own, enable Iran to consolidate strategic gains, increase the global jihadist threat to the United States — and make a stable Middle East that much harder to achieve.

Abandoning the goal of removing Assad from power will place the United States on the side of not only the barbaric Syrian regime, which has American blood on its hands dating to the early 1980s, but also Iran, Hezbollah and Russia. This is strategic folly.

I believe he has stated the sequence of events incorrectly and, consequently, got his causality reversed. The “Syrian moderate opposition” exists only in the imaginations of people inside the Beltway. The choices have always been between tolerating the truly reprehensible Assad regime and radical Islamist terrorism. We’re on the wrong side.