Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad (Reuters, RTX34BQA)
Of course I loathe Assad. And
of course I despise the Obamans for that phony red line and the
subsequent retreat-and-bogus-Russian-deal. But just carrying out
vengeance against Assad isn’t good enough. It fails to address the
central problem of our time: the global anti-American alliance.
There is no Syria any more, and
the enemy forces on the Middle Eastern battlefield come from various
jihadi groups, and three regimes: Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus. We have
to defeat them all, and other members of the enemy alliance, including
Cuba and North Korea. Nikki Haley has it right: “The truth is that Assad, Russia and Iran have no interest in peace.”
Indeed, they are waging war,
and the principal force driving that war is not Assad, but Iranian
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Khamenei’s killers have been alongside
Assad’s from the very beginning, as the survival of the Syrian dictator
is crucial to Iranian ambitions and quite likely also the survival of
the Islamic Republic itself. Listen to Defense Secretary James Mattis a
few days ago (from Reuters):
Asked about comments Mattis made in 2012 that the three primary threats the United States faced were “Iran, Iran, Iran,” Mattis told reporters that Iran’s behavior had not changed in the years since.
“At the time when I spoke about Iran I was a commander of US central command and that (Iran) was the primary exporter of terrorism, frankly, it was the primary state sponsor of terrorism and it continues that kind of behavior today,” Mattis said.
True, and Mattis’
characteristically strong language points the way to the best American
action in the region, namely bringing down the Tehran regime. Lashing
out at Assad isn’t nearly good enough. After all, what strategic
objective would we accomplish by smashing, even removing, Assad? The
Iranian and Russian fighters would still be there, as would the Islamist
forces. The demands on our military would dramatically expand. We do
not want to occupy a significant land mass in what used to be called
Syria, nor do we seem to have sorted out what we want to do with the
Turks and the Kurds.
Punishing Assad would be
satisfying, but we’ve got a big war to win. It’s smarter and more
effective to go after the regime in Tehran. Not militarily, but rather
supporting the tens of millions of Iranians who detest the Khamenei
regime. Call it political warfare, or subversion, or democratic
revolution. It worked against the Soviet Empire, and there are good
reasons to believe it would work in Iran as well. Most Iranians,
suffering under the failed regime, want a freely chosen government that
will address their problems instead of dispatching their husbands and
sons sent to the battlefield.
Regime change in Iran would be
devastating to Assad and Putin, and its positive effects would be felt
in North Africa and our own hemisphere, striking at the Revolutionary
Guards and Hezbollah in Latin America. And it would remind the tyrants
that America’s greatest weapon is political. We are the most
revolutionary country in the world, and we should act like it.
