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Romney’s Bad Syria Plan

Mitt Romney has a not-so-cunning plan for intervening in Syria: But in Syria, with Assad in trouble, we need to communicate to the Alawites, his friends, his ethnic group, to say, look, you have a future if you’ll abandon that guy Assad. We need to work with — with Saudi Arabia and with Turkey to […]

Mitt Romney has a not-so-cunning plan for intervening in Syria:

But in Syria, with Assad in trouble, we need to communicate to the Alawites, his friends, his ethnic group, to say, look, you have a future if you’ll abandon that guy Assad.

We need to work with — with Saudi Arabia and with Turkey to say, you guys provide the kind of weaponry that’s needed to help the rebels inside Syria.

In short, Romney thinks the right policy on Syria is to increase the supply of weapons to the predominantly Sunni opposition (which is already receiving some weapons from Sunnis in Iraq) to give them a better chance of fighting and killing predominantly Alawite regime supporters, and at the same time he wants to tell the Alawites that they have a future in a country run by the people Romney wants to arm. What might the flaw in this plan be? Romney’s proposal is guaranteed to produce more instability and bloodshed without any real prospect of success (assuming that toppling the government is the desired goal). Encouraging the arming of the opposition is more likely to cause Syria’s minority groups to turn to the regime out of fear, because they will understandably conclude that they are at risk of becoming the targets of armed opposition forces. Naturally, Romney reduces the Syrian crisis to an opportunity to weaken Iranian influence, but what he doesn’t even try to explain is how contributing to an escalation of a conflict that the regime is more likely to win does much of anything to reduce Iranian influence in Syria or Lebanon.

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