02-25-2017, 04:08 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-25-2017, 04:11 PM by Eric the Green.)
(02-25-2017, 03:06 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: The Russians are not going to abandon their client state. I doubt very seriously that toppling what's left of Assad's government, as repressive as it is, is going to weaken Islamist forces in the region.
What's the track record of that policy the last several times we tried it?
I don't see much hope for toppling Assad at the moment. The best we can hope for is a partition, as Warren Dew suggested. Assad will not agree to this though, and maybe not Iran.
Toppling Assad would greatly strengthen the anti-terrorist Islamic forces. A new Free Syrian state, if supported by its many allies (unlike what happened in Libya), could roll back the Islamic State easily and hold the territory. Remember many defected Syrian soldiers are in this group. As for other Islamist fighter forces, they were allies, so they could be handled peacefully by buying them off rather than giving them power. They don't represent any government, but just came in to fight Assad.
As of now though, partition seems the answer. Perhaps if the Free Syrians were given territory backed by Turkey, both of them could roll back the IS with help from their allies, and Assad could brutalize his domain without doing it beyond his partition borders. Still an unstable situation, but at least it would be confined to one that people could escape from to a safer area. I don't know if Russia and Turkey will be able to work this out. If Drump gets involved, he would probably just screw it up like he does everything.