3 flaws in pro-Assad support: Column

The Obama administration appears to be backing away from its stance that Syrian President Bashar Assad must go. Assad has even admitted some level of coordination with the Americans. And President Obama's request to Congress for reauthorization of the use of force makes no mention of ridding Syria of Assad, only the so-called Islamic State.

This apparent policy shift reflects an emerging consensus in Washington that Assad might be necessary to combat the threat of ISIL. And with the administration eager for Assad's backers in Iran to cooperate on a nuclear deal, Secretary of State John Kerry has reached out to Russia to broker a peace deal that would, in effect, leave Assad in power.

The "back Assad" viewpoint portrays our Syria policy as a trade-off between moral and strategic choices. Some analysts reckon that prewar Syria, as it was under Assad, is preferable to an Islamist caliphate or to perpetual conflict. That is, we must make a decision between defeating ISIL (a strategic choice) vs. removing Assad for committing mass atrocities (a moral one).

Faulty reasoning

But there are three central flaws in this reasoning:

• The moral-strategic trade-off is a false one. By tacitly aligning with Assad, and keeping him in power, we are only fueling support for radical groups such as ISIL. That is because so long as Assad stays in power and opposition groups receive wavering support from the outside, then the allure of radical jihadism will remain. The United States is also feeding their narrative of the conflict, which is one of U.S. support for a regime that has slaughtered 200,000 of its own citizens, showing America's true hand as a country that has backed dictators for decades and will continue to be an enemy of freedom.

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• The view that this is a realignment with Assad as part of a wider regional shift is misguided. America is now implicitly aligned with Iran in helping Iraq fight ISIL, and may cooperate with the Houthis in Yemen against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. But a clear lesson of the U.S. occupation of Iraq was that by backing a Shiite-dominated government, the United States drove Iraqi Sunnis into the arms of al-Qaeda. We should not make the same mistake in Syria.
• The back-Assad movement tends to view Syria exclusively as a counterterrorism problem. This misses the larger danger to U.S. interests posed by a continuing power vacuum in Syria, combined with a massive refugee crisis.

Supporters of the back-Assad strategy may see the Syrian opposition's inability to topple the regime as a fact of life. But the reverse is also true: Despite substantial financial and military support from Russia and Iran, the Syrian regime has not been able to defeat the opposition.

By backing Assad in a counterterrorism mission against ISIL, the U.S. should not expect to restore Syria to its prewar self and thus leaves the real dangers of Syria unresolved.

Stay the course

To be sure, arming and training the opposition is unlikely to produce quick results. And the Syrian opposition remains a fractious movement. But to switch course now would throw away important advances made in recent months. Largely thanks to U.S. military support, the Kurdish border town of Kobani did not fall into the Islamists' hands.

Moreover, a Pentagon program to train Syrian rebels in countries such as Saudi Arabia is finally getting off the ground.

Some argue that removing Assad will usher in Libya-like chaos or Benghazi-style attacks against American targets in the region. Yet, a power vacuum in Syria exists even with Assad still in power.

Another common argument is that only a negotiated settlement will end the conflict in Syria. Indeed, Assad said so himself in a recent interview with Foreign Affairs. Yet holding out hope that somehow the Russians will broker a peace agreement acceptable to all sides simply defies logic. What is certain is that pushing for a negotiated settlement will only buy Assad more time to rebuild his military and continue his killing spree.

Let's face facts: This conflict won't end until one side achieves a military victory. To back Assad in hopes that the victory will be his is to dangerously ignore the process by which radical groups such as ISIL arise in the first place. In Syria, the enemy of our enemy is not our friend.

Lionel Beehner, editor ofCicero Magazine, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl is an assistant professor of politics at the University of Virginia.

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