Free Syria: What To Do- Or Not Do?
Maybe the murder of an American journalist in Syria last week will focus the American president’s mind. Marie Colvin was killed, along with a French photojournalist, when troops loyal to -President Bashar al-Assad shelled the opposition’s makeshift press center in Homs. This city on the western plain, -Syria’s third largest, has been the conflict’s center of gravity for almost a month now. It is where the regime means to end the nearly yearlong uprising once and for all. The siege of Homs, in Colvin’s last published words, is “merciless”—“the scale of it is just shocking.”
The death of a 56-year-old reporter who took dangerous assignments around the world might seem a small thing when more than 7,000 Syrians have been killed by their own government simply for living there. But the Damascus regime targets reporters for a reason: It is vulnerable, and its war on its own people is indefensible. To survive, Damascus needs the world to ignore what it is up to. It particularly needs indifference in Washington, where the Obama administration has seemed sadly oblivious to the fact that what a regime does at home is indicative of how it will act abroad—or, in the case of Syria, a state sponsor of terror and ally of Iran, how it has acted over the last 40 years, targeting especially American citizens, interests, and allies.
For all that, the administration just wants the Syria issue, the uprising, the opposition, to go away. It would prefer not to deal with it and thus has come up with all sorts of excuses to do just that.
It was five months, and many thousand dead, into the uprising before Obama called on Assad to step down. Instead of leading, the president tasked Syria policy out to Turkey, then to the Arab League, which sent a monitoring delegation led by a former Sudanese intelligence chief suspected of war crimes in Darfur.
Next, the administration found itself blocked at the U.N. Security Council by Russia with a veto that may have surprised U.S. ambassador Susan Rice but cannot have come as much of a shock to most observers: Moscow has made it clear that it wants to see the Assad regime survive. To Putin, Syria represents not merely a customer for Russian arms, but—much more important—a foothold in the eastern Mediterranean. He sees a Syrian port for the Russian Navy as a core interest, not to mention recently discovered energy resources in the Levant basin that he would like to control, so as to make Europe even more dependent on Russia’s natural gas industry.