I wanted to highlight another passage from the editorial I remarked on earlier. Here it is:
Moscow recently began bombing rebel-held areas in strikes that appeared designed to cripple the opposition groups that pose the gravest threat to the Syrian government. That approach will almost certainly prove to be self-defeating even if the Assad regime, after gassing and slaughtering thousands of Syrians, were to stay in power in the short run.
They may be right but there’s precedent for questioning that assessment. Saddam Hussein remained in power a full 15 years after gassing thousands of Kurds at Halabja. And after killing many thousands of “marsh Arabs”, the Shi’ite Arabs native to the south of Iraq. Sometimes tyrants are removed by spontaneous revolts of the people but it wasn’t true in Iraq and there’s reason to question that it would occur in Syria. IMO Syria’s revolt has been fomented and fueled by outsiders, among whom are the United States and Gulf Arabs, intent on spreading their own Salafist version of Islam.
If there’s any reason to prefer that over the Alawite regime that presently rules Syria, I certainly don’t see it. Quite to the contrary, why don’t we stop supplying the rebels entirely and start putting pressure on our notional allies in the region to do the same.
Dictatorial regimes cannot afford one thing: to be too gentle. Better to stay in power by killing vast numbers of people than to ease up and appear weak.
I would be interested to learn where a revolution went well, and I do not mean independence. (There is a difference.)
ISIS is able to take apart Iraqi soldiers trained by the US for years, but they are going to be beaten by rebels trained in a few months. Once these rebels are in power, they will be able to defend and defeat the number one threat to the US. ISIS can destroy the US, but Syrian rebels can do what the US military cannot.
Maybe the US should fire its soldiers and hire Syrian rebels. Apparently, they are the most formidable fighting force in the world. The Russians are in for a world of hurt.
For people who want Assad gone, they do not think about the logic of their argument. It makes perfect sense to them. It could defy the laws of physics, and they would still believe it was possible.