Whereas the U.S. wants to see the Assad regime go and is willing to see it replaced with a Sunni Islamic state hopefully no more radical than Moslem Brotherhood the Israelis are most leery of such and prefer to see a defanged Assad regime continue because the Assad family has kept the common Golan border quiet for four decades.
Syria today is a nation state that is in the midst of a terrible civil war in which some 82000 of her citizens have died in the last twenty-eight months. Although the Sunni rebels have made impressive gains and bloodied the regime of Bashar al-Assad in significant ways the regime with the aid of its allies has showed itself to be pugnacious and resilient in its response to the rebellion. After almost two and a half years of fighting the situation looks to be stalemated.
The question confronting the West and the United States in particular is what to do next. President Obama has mentioned red lines" around the question of the use of chemical weapons but that line is proving to be somewhat fuzzier than originally anticipatedespecially since it appears that the rebels recently may have used sarin gas in the north>. The Assad regime has played it very coyly escalating slowly and testing each incremental increase in its use of WMD. But the general direction is clear and the words truce" negotiated settlement" and surrender" are not part of Assads vocabulary. This latter fact being the case we return to the question of what the West should do next.
Before we attempt to answer this last question it is important to realize that the West is not a monolitheach nation-state of those that make up the West" has its own set of interests. This fact is especially salient as regards the European Union and the United States as well as the U.S. and Israel. Whereas the U.S. wants to see the Assad regime go and is willing to see it replaced with a Sunni Islamic state hopefully no more radical than Moslem Brotherhood the Israelis are most leery of such and prefer to see a defanged Assad regime continue because the Assad family has kept the common Golan border quiet for four decades. Israels recent attacks on Syria had very little to do with trying to topple the regime; they were strictly an attempt to deny Hezbollah any upgrade of weaponry that the receipt of Iranian Fateh-110 missiles would cause.
The United States and the E.U. tend to be conservative in their thinking concerning the Middle Eastthat is they are not inclined to see utility in dividing up broken states and forming new ones other than to create an Arab Palestinian state. Israel on the other hand sees the utility of promoting Kurdish nationalism and the establishment of a Kurdish national state that would include sections of Syria Iraq Iran and probably Turkey. Israel can also see that a Sunni Islamist state in all of current Syria is very likely to be much more belligerent towards the Jewish state than has been the Assad regime which has been content in allowing the Lebanese Hezbollah to engage the Israelis in occasional provocations while the Syrians watch with glee from the sidelines. These points mitigate for Israel to promote a situation in which the Assad regime neither wins the upper hand nor succumbs to Islamist-dominated Sunni rebels. Indeed the formation of a Kurdish nation-state would do much to break the Shiite Crescent" as well as to curtail the power of a Sunni Islamist Syria bent on regaining control over Coele-Syria. Israel thus can look at Syria and recognize that if she is about to become Humpty Dumpty Israeli interests may be well served.
The question that now needs to be raised is whether the United States and the E.U. can be brought to realize that a degree of Balkanization" of Syria is advantageous given the current power politics in the region. For Syrias minorities the prospect of a Sunni takeover is nothing short of catastrophic. The Alawite Christian and Druze communities all have been protected by the Assad regime and they only need to look across their borders to Iraq or Egypt to see how well minorities fare when a new fundamentalist majority comes to power. The Kurds of northeast Syria have managed to remain relatively neutral in the hopes of establishing their own autonomy as their brothers have done in Iraq or to lay the ground-works for the establishment of a future Kurdish state.
Memory in the West unfortunately is very short. Western diplomats forget that the borders of the various Arab states in southwest Asia are less than a century old. The modern Arab states of the region and their borders are all the result of the Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916 anticipating the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Borders at that time were drawn with little regard for ethnic identities and/or religious sensibilities. Maybe its time for that egregious error to be corrected. The civil war in Syria should prompt consideration of such a possibility before a decision to tilt the current playing field in Syria is made and implemented. A lot more is at stake than the borders of the Assad family empire; stopping Islamist attempts to resurrect the caliphatewhether Sunni or Shiitemay be accomplished here if the correct moves are made. Careful thought and coordination are of the essence as well as common sense and courage.
To my friends in the Iranian resistance: be careful about supporting the Syrian rebellion. Not that Assad deserves to stay in powerthat is clearly not the case since he is guilty of crimes against humanity. But be careful whom it is that you supporta lesson that you learned the hard way when overthrowing the Shah thirty-five years ago. Remember that a secularist like Mubarak is preferable to an Islamist like Morsi. Not all change is necessarily for the better.
To my friends on the Hill: do your homework; know to whom it is that you give support. Learn some lessons for the mistakes made in Libya; a defanged dictator may be despicable because of his past misdeeds but being defanged he is harmless. Overthrowing such types sometimes brings much worse in its place. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Al-Qaeda is a far greater threat than the late Muammar al-Gaddafi ever was.
To our intelligence community: invest in the right people to restore a creditable intelligence network in the region so as to know whats going on at ground level. Our humint" capabilities currently are sub-standard especially in the Arab world; thats a situation that must change if we are to succeed in the region. In the meantime take a lesson or two from the Israelis whose skills far outstrip ours. And remember believe only half of what you see and a quarter of what you hear.
Reuters Observatory: Syrian war death toll rises to 82000" The Jerusalem Post May 12 2013 http://www.jpost.com/Syria-Crisis/Syrian-war-death-toll-rises-to-82000-opposition-group-312932. Estimates that the total dead in the civil war reach 120000 are presented as well.
Liz Sly Assad forces gaining ground in Syria" The Washington Post May 11 2013http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/assad-forces-gaining-ground-in-syria/2013/05/11/79147c34-b99c-11e2-b568-6917f6ac6d9d_story.html.
Stephanie Nebehay U.N. has testimony that Syrian rebels used sarin gas: investigator" Reuters May 5 2013 http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE94409Z20130505?irpc=932.
The SykesPicot Agreement officially known as the Asia Minor Agreement was a secret agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and France with the assent of Russia defining their proposed spheres of influence and control in the Middle East should the Triple Entente succeed in defeating the Ottoman Empire during World War I. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SykesE28093Picot_Agreement.