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Posts Tagged ‘Syria’
December 4th, 2015 at 8:07 am
Video: Obama’s Dereliction of Duty
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In this edition of the Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses President Obama’s handling of the growing threat from ISIS and how ensuring America’s national security must come first, before acting on any humanitarian impulse to help the true victims of the chaos in Syria.

November 17th, 2015 at 9:30 pm
“President Obama’s Cynical Refugee Ploy”

To understand the Syrian refugee crisis, Walter Russell Mead’s analysis in The American Interest is a must read and then must read again.  Mead is not a politician; he’s a Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and Professor of American foreign policy at Yale University.
 
He asks and answers, in no uncertain terms, “Why is there a Syrian refugee crisis in the first place?”

Read the piece here.

March 13th, 2015 at 6:30 pm
Obama’s Legacy: Pieces of Iraq Now Part of ‘Greater Iran’

It’s gotten so bad in Iraq that Iranian-backed militias are fighting ISIS soldiers for control of large swaths of territory. And while these two factions redraw the map of the Middle East, American military advisors and the Iraqi army have been rendered largely irrelevant.

That prompted Richard Haas, president of the Council of Foreign Relations, to give this grim analysis: “I think [Iran] will win this battle, but… I think we have to understand, Baghdad and the south are now part of Greater Iran. This is what it is… ‘Iraq’ is over. Rest in peace. The era where you had an intact Iraq and an intact Syria is over. So what you’re looking at is an Iraq where part of it is an extension of Iran…”

Maybe this is why President Barack Obama is so repulsed by Senator Tom Cotton’s letter to Iran: It threatens our dependence on a known sponsor of terror.

September 12th, 2014 at 6:57 pm
ISIS or ISIL?

If you’re confused about what to call the newest terrorist threat – ISIS or ISIL – Daniel Pipes, the renowned conservative Middle East expert, has an answer.

Whichever one you want.

The Obama administration prefers “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” (ISIL), while almost everyone else uses “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” (ISIS). At first blush, some commentators think they detect a subtle framing effect to blur any possible links between the rise of this group with Obama’s blundering Syria policy.

Pipes isn’t one of them. According to him, “both translations are accurate, both are correct, and both have deficiencies – one refers to a state, the other has an archaic ring.” Pipes should know since he wrote a book about the underlying history that gives rise to the translation difficulty.

Whatever one calls ISIS/ISIL, Pipes rightly focuses on the most important issue: “…ridding the world of this barbaric menace.”

December 5th, 2013 at 8:57 am
Ramirez Cartoon: The Obama Foreign Policy
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Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

October 1st, 2013 at 5:20 pm
Putin for the Peace Prize?

Unlikely? Sure. But nonetheless a group of pro-Putin Russians sent a letter to the Nobel Peace Prize committee requesting consideration for their country’s president.

“The group says Putin deserves the honor for his efforts in brokering an agreement for Syria to hand over its chemical weapons under international control, a plan the group says helped avert a ‘new world war,’” according to Breitbart.com.

Then the story stops being funny.

Drawing a contrast to President of the United States Barack Obama, the group’s leader says that Putin, “who is trying to stop the war and suggest a political solution, is more worthy of such a title.”

Now, of course Putin – the man who invaded South Ossetia during the 2008 Summer Olympics – is no peace-loving reincarnation of Ghandi. The lifeline he threw to Obama over Syria was nothing more than a canny power politics move that makes it easier for his authoritarian allies in Damascus to oppress their people with impunity.

Still, the argument that Putin deserves a fair hearing to receive the Peace Prize is at least plausible since the committee in charge of conferring it debased its standards by awarding its 2009 installment to Obama on the pretext that he might do something worthy to receive it.

Four years later, Obama was poised to start a war until Putin negotiated a European-style system of endless weapons inspections and diplomatic meetings. Had the roles been reversed, Obama supporters would be claiming their man made good on the Nobel’s committee’s prediction. But since history played out the other way, perhaps the American president can do the Norwegians a favor and mail their devalued token to Russia.

September 20th, 2013 at 5:36 pm
The Sting of Friendly Rebuke
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The Second City is far from the first place one would expect to produce a devastating satire of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. The Chicago improv troupe, which — along with the Groundlings in Los Angeles — is one of two major feeder programs for Saturday Night Live, is part of an artistic community whose political sensibilities overwhelmingly incline towards the president. Moreover, they’re located right in his back yard.

The video below, however, — produced back when it still looked like the president would pursue an inept war with Syria rather than the inept peace we have now — is a brilliantly pointed takedown of Obama and his apostles — and also of the entire political sensibility they represent. That it is clearly done through the clenched teeth of sympathists only makes it all the more enjoyable.

September 16th, 2013 at 10:44 am
Ramirez Cartoon: Syria Policy
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Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

September 13th, 2013 at 12:50 pm
Podcast: Executive Power and Syria
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In an interview with CFIF, Captain Glenn Sulmasy, Fellow for Homeland and National Security Law at the Center for National Policy, discusses whether President Obama has the constitutional authority to strike Syria without Congressional approval, the chances of an escalation of hostilities in Syria if America does strike, and Russia’s latest proposal regarding Syria’s chemical weapons.

Listen to the interview here.

September 10th, 2013 at 3:40 pm
Obama’s Peculiar Habit of Persuading Americans… to Oppose His Position
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It’s a particularly strange dynamic for an attorney and politician, given those professions’ reliance upon the art of persuasion.  But the more Barack Obama talks, the more he seems to dissuade rather than persuade.  Recall the signature act of his presidency to date, ObamaCare.  The more Obama has attempted to sell it both before and after its enactment, the less popular it has become.

Today, we’re witnessing that same lack of persuasive skill with regard to the question of military intervention in Syria.  According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey released this morning, public opinion on intervention has reversed in the past two weeks, from 50% to 44% in favor to 51% to 44% opposed:

At the end of August, and NBC News poll found that half of Americans backed a limited set of airstrikes to destroy Syrian military units in response to an alleged government-directed gas attack that killed more than 1,400 civilians.  In less than two weeks since then, support for a limited attack dropped to 44%, the new poll found.  ‘As the public hears more information, they are coming down on the side of ‘don’t do it,” said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducted the survey with Democratic pollsters Fred Yang and Peter Hart.”

I was asked yesterday on Cam & Company on NRA News whether Obama can recover politically from his current debacle.  Given his performance to date in the art of persuasion, that prospect certainly doesn’t appear likely.

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September 9th, 2013 at 6:35 pm
Obama’s Syria ‘Message’ a Bay of Pigs Redux?

How bad has President Barack Obama mishandled his possible Syria bombing campaign?

“…President Obama finds himself in the biggest and ugliest public mess of his career, with a total policy meltdown playing out on the front pages and cable TV studios of the world,” writes Walter Russell Mead.

“It is like a slow motion Bay of Pigs, unrolling at an agonizing, prestige wrecking pace from day to day and week to week. It is almost impossible to defend whatever policy he actually has in mind at this point, yet the consequences of a congressional vote that opposes him are grave.”

Mead’s allusion to JFK’s Bay of Pigs fiasco is instructive. In 1961, the Kennedy administration armed and sent 1,400 Cuban exiles to topple Fidel Castro. However, they didn’t have air support or reinforcements from the U.S. military, and were quickly defeated.

Like Obama, Kennedy wanted to ‘send a message’ on the cheap, and got what he paid for.

The consequences to America were nearly disastrous. Not only did Castro and his Soviet Union patrons humiliate the United States in front of the world, they interpreted the defeat – and the resulting timidity – as a free pass to put ICBMs 90 miles from Florida. Without the Bay of Pigs fiasco as a precursor, it is almost impossible to imagine the following year’s Cuban Missile Crisis.

With this in mind, Members of Congress should be extremely skeptical about the Obama administration’s claim that those we attack won’t be “arrogant and foolish enough to retaliate.”

History indicates otherwise, and in ways we can’t easily predict.

September 6th, 2013 at 6:58 pm
Let’s Cool it with the “Chicken Hawk” Nonsense
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I sometimes find the best way to settle your views on an issue is not to read the opinion of those you admire, but rather those whom you despise. Even my favorite thinkers go astray sometimes. The hacks are slightly more consistent.

One of the kings of errancy is the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, who spends today’s column trying to act as a moral backstop for President Obama in regard to Syria. It’s a throwaway remark early in the piece, however, that gets my hackles up:

At Wednesday’s hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I thought for a moment that [Secretary of State John] Kerry was going to blow. Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., launched into a self-righteous soliloquy about Benghazi, the IRS, the National Security Agency and what he portrayed as Kerry’s longtime aversion to using military force.

Kerry, you may recall, is a highly decorated Vietnam combat veteran. Duncan is an armchair warrior.

A few quick thoughts:

    — I’ll grant you that Duncan comes off as a blowhard in his questioning of Kerry. Hearings on the possibility of war are about as serious a task as a member of Congress faces and his insistence on turning it into a glorified campaign ad are both misplaced and unimpressive. He comes off like a guy trying to sell you insurance at a funeral. That being said, non sequitur droning constitutes about 90 percent of all congressional questioning. You know who used to be the king of that? John Kerry. So forgive me if I can’t muster sympathy when he’s on the receiving end of the same kind of firehose-intensity stream of inanity he spent over two and a half decades dispensing.

    — I’ve never understood why, in a nation that from its inception has insisted upon civilian control over the military, we try to settle policy arguments by determining who’s the closest approximation of Leonidas. You know who else was an “armchair warrior”? Franklin Roosevelt, who prosecuted World War II and never served in the military. Abraham Lincoln spent three months in the Illinois State Militia.

    And Mr. Robinson should be careful about tying credibility on foreign affairs to time in uniform. Barack Obama didn’t serve. Neither did Joe Biden. And neither did Eugene Robinson, who spends the rest of this column telling us how we should think about Syria.

    Liberals spent the last decade mocking conservative “chicken hawks” who had never served in the military but advocated for American intervention overseas. It was a bogus argument then and it’d be bogus (if not satisfying) to turn it back on them now. If we’re going to debate ideas, let’s do it on the merits, not according to the resumés of the people advancing them.

    September 6th, 2013 at 2:31 am
    Syrian Resolution Looks Doomed to Failure
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    Earlier today, Rick Klein, Political Director for ABC News, tweeted out that 217 members of the House of Representatives have gone on record “as likely to oppose authorizing military force against Syria,” giving those opposed to the resolution a majority in the lower chamber (if we have any pedants in the audience shouting about the fact that it takes 218 to reach a majority, note that Alabama and Massachusetts both currently have one vacant seat).

    Now, “likely to oppose” isn’t the same thing as definitely voting no, but anyone who’s staking out territory this early in the process is disproportionately likely to to stick to his guns. And it’s clear that the momentum on this is all going in one direction — and it’s not the president’s.

    That’s remarkable, but not particularly surprising. Sometimes you can get a member to vote against his political interest for the sake of ideology. Sometimes you can get him to vote against his ideology for the sake of his political interest. But when both are imperiled simultaneously, the whipping gets much harder. That’s precisely the case with a potential military offensive that polls terribly and hits intellectual pressure points for liberals and conservatives alike.

    One dispiriting aspect of this debate is the chorus of conservative voices such as Jennifer Rubin, Hugh Hewitt, and Bret Stephens who’ve conflated opposition to feckless, limited airstrikes in Syria with “isolationism.” It may be fair to say that nearly all isolationists are opposed to taking action in Syria. It does not follow, however, that all who are opposed to taking action in Syria are isolationists. The scope of opposition is far too large to be constituted entirely (or even primarily) of those opposed to American action overseas in all but the most limited circumstances.

    I suspect that there are a fair number of conservatives like me — as far removed from the reflexive international reticence of Rand Paul as we are from John McCain’s “anytime, anywhere, for any reason” school of intervention — who just don’t see the strategic payoff here, especially given the manner in which the Obama Administration would be likely to conduct the fight.

    America has played too fast and loose with defining our national security interests in recent years. Doing so again — especially when it’s clear that the Obama Administration has no plan that will actually result in a change of circumstances on the ground in Syria — is an exercise in futility. The measure deserves defeat.

    September 4th, 2013 at 6:16 pm
    Senate Lying to Self with ‘Tailored’ Syria Resolution

    A highly regarded separation of powers expert says the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s oddly worded resolution to authorize military force in Syria might be more expansive than its drafters intend, according to the Washington Times.

    At issue is the resolution’s use of the words “limited and tailored” in the phrase giving President Barack Obama power “to use the armed forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in a limited and tailored manner against legitimate military targets in Syria…”

    Louis Fisher, a former long-time expert at the Congressional Research Service and author of a leading treatise on presidential war powers, says the word choice is unprecedented and could be so vague that it creates space for an escalation.

    “What could possibly be the meaning of ‘limited and tailored’? I doubt if I’ve ever seen the word ‘tailored’ in a bill,” Fisher told the paper. “Even if the ‘intent’ of Congress is a limited war, war has its own momentum.”

    In other words, use of the word ‘tailored’ in the resolution can mean anything to the clever lawyers who will twist it however they please, so in reality that word, and any limiting effect it is designed to have, is meaningless.

    It is impossible for me to imagine that the people drafting this resolution don’t know this. Therefore, it seems almost certain that the underlying intent here is to sound like they are limiting the President’s options while in fact not doing so at all.

    If we’re going to bomb Syria then we are going to war with Syria. If that’s in America’s national security interest, Congress should declare it in unambiguous language.

    To my mind it’s better to do nothing than to say something that means nothing.

    Otherwise, Congress is just lying to itself so that it can act outraged when the President uses the resolution to wage a war the Senate and House impliedly authorized.

    September 4th, 2013 at 1:09 pm
    Obama’s Syria Policy Incoherent at Home and Abroad

    McClatchy news ran a piece yesterday describing how President Barack Obama’s seeming indecision on striking Syria is being interpreted by Middle Easterners.

    “Obama’s abrupt decision on Saturday to delay the strikes that seemed just hours away is being seen in the region as the latest confirmation of an incoherent U.S. approach of mixed messages and unfulfilled threats that have driven America’s standing to a new low,” the paper said, citing numerous interviews with Syrian rebels and others.

    The confusion wasn’t helped during Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. There, the Vietnam veteran and anti-war hero did an about-face. Without a hint of irony he argued that in asking for congressional approval to fire missiles at Syria “President Obama is not asking America to go to war.”

    Instead, the President was “asking only for the power to make clear, to make certain, that the United States means what we say,” when the Commander-in-Chief threatens military force.

    But the fact remains that firing missiles into another country is an act of war, a fact that didn’t escape Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) before heading into the hearing.

    “This is the most serious policy decision any senator will make,” reports the Daily Caller. “Authorizing the use of military force is, let’s face it, is a declaration of war against another country, no matter how limited it is, that’s what it is.”

    Kudos to Senator Corker for saying the truth out loud. He understands the real world consequences of this decision, as do the Syrian rebels, Syrian President Bashar Assad and every other sentient being paying attention.

    So far, the Obama administration is doing itself no favors by pushing forward an ad hoc, incoherent rationale for bombing a government whose actions – while immoral and deplorable – don’t necessarily threaten America’s national security interests.

    September 4th, 2013 at 9:37 am
    Ramirez Cartoon: Look! Syria! Miley Cyrus?
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    Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

    View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

    August 30th, 2013 at 6:00 pm
    The Hollywood Slander of Ronald Reagan
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    Ronald Reagan may have been the only American president to emerge from Tinseltown (excepting the fact that Barack Obama is clearly a character created by Aaron Sorkin), but that hasn’t inspired any loyalty. The new movie, The Butler, is rife with mischaracterizations of racial progress in America (as ably pointed out by Richard Epstein for the Hoover Institution) — and it’s especially unkind to the Gipper. As Steve Hayward, Paul Kengor, Craig Shirley, and Kiron Skinner — Reagan biographers all — note in today’s Washington Post, Reagan demonstrated a lifetime’s worth of tolerance and enlightenment on racial issues.

    One of the film’s larger errors is an implicit assertion that Reagan opposed economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa out of simple indifference to black suffering. But as his chroniclers note, the reality is much more complicated:

    The unfairness of this scene can be demonstrated by any number of historical facts. In June 1981, still recovering from an assassination attempt, Reagan sent his closest foreign policy aide, William Clark, on his first official trip; it was to South Africa to express America’s disapproval. An unsmiling Clark told Prime Minister Pieter W. Botha to his face that the new president and administration “abhorred apartheid.” Clark walked out on Botha.

    While accurate in depicting Reagan’s opposition to sanctions against South Africa, “The Butler” does not explain why he opposed them. Reagan saw sanctions as harmful to the poorest South Africans: millions of blacks living in dire poverty. He also feared that the apartheid regime could be replaced by a Marxist/totalitarian one allied with the Soviet Union and Cuba and that communism would spread throughout the continent. South Africa’s blacks were denied rights under apartheid, but communism would mean no freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion, conscience, emigration, travel or even property for anyone. Moreover, in communist nations such as Cambodia and Ethi­o­pia, people had been slaughtered and starved on mass scales. Nearly a dozen nations had become part of the Soviet orbit in the immediate years before Reagan became president. He didn’t want South Africa to undergo the same catastrophe.

    Reagan adopted a policy of “constructive engagement,” seeking to keep South Africa in the anti-Soviet faction while encouraging the country toward black-majority rule — no easy feat. In one of his finest speeches, he told the United Nations on Sept. 24, 1984, that it was “a moral imperative that South Africa’s racial policies evolve peacefully but decisively toward . . . justice, liberty and human dignity.” Among his administration’s successes was the Angola-Namibia agreement, which led to the withdrawal of the white South African regime from Namibia and paved the way for that nation’s independence.

    Moral preening is always easiest when one bears no responsibility for the consequences. Statesmen weigh trade-offs. Ronald Reagan knew that. Thanks to the current situation in Syria, Barack Obama is about to get a master’s class on the topic.

    June 19th, 2013 at 4:33 pm
    Obama Admin at War over Syria

    Jeffrey Goldberg says debate is white-hot inside the Obama administration over whether to use U.S.-led airstrikes against Syria’s airbases.

    According to Goldberg’s sources, Secretary of State John Kerry is calling for immediate and sustained airstrikes to punish Bashar Assad’s regime for using chemical weapons against rebels. Earlier, President Barack Obama had said that such use would justify an increased American response to the rising number of deaths in the war.

    But Kerry’s airstrikes idea was shot down in a tense Situation Room exchange by Army General Martin Dempsey, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Pentagon estimates that at least 700 sorties would be needed to effectively destroy the airfields. That increases the probability an American pilot would be shot down, killed or taken as a prisoner of war.

    The dilemma on Syria is this: No one wants the conflict to turn into another occasion of genocide like Rwanda or Darfur, but no one is eager to get involved in a fight where the choice of ally is either the Hezbollah-aligned regime or the al-Qaeda-aligned rebels.

    So far, the Defense Department is winning the argument. The absence of a clear definition of victory means the Obama administration likely won’t do much else than send small arms and ammo to the rebels – a symbolic gesture that won’t do much to change the course of the war.

    Considering the information available, that’s probably the best move to make.

    June 14th, 2013 at 8:12 pm
    How the Russians Roll Us
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    John Bolton has a characteristically clear-minded op-ed just out in the Wall Street Journal about Russia’s antagonistic position vis-a-vis our interests in Syria. Quoth the former UN Ambassador:

    Since Syria’s civil war began, Mr. Obama has insisted, contrary to fact, that the U.S. and Russia have a common interest in resolving the crisis and stabilizing the Middle East. Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent efforts to secure Russian co-sponsorship of a peace conference, at which Washington will push for Assad’s ouster, reflect Mr. Obama’s illusion.

    The objective evidence consistently demonstrates that Russia has no interest whatever in eliminating its only remaining Arab ally. Moscow’s military and financial assistance to Damascus continues undiminished, along with its hold on the Cold War-era Tartus naval base, strategically positioned on Syria’s Mediterranean coast—but now facing only a phantom U.S. Sixth Fleet. Despite the hoopla surrounding the announcement of the proposed peace talks, their starting date, attendees, agenda and prospects all remain uncertain.

    Most dramatically, Russia last month reaffirmed its commitment to deliver sophisticated S-300 air-defense missile systems to Assad. Although Israeli leaders have played down the sale’s significance, this combination of advanced radars and missiles, which can defeat any non-stealthy aircraft (and Israel does not now have stealth planes), could change the strategic balance in Syria as well as in Lebanon and Iran—to Israel’s detriment and ours.

    These are not, needless to say the actions of a friend.

    Scratch the surface a bit and you’ll see the folly not only of the Obama Administration’s Russian “reset” policy, but also of every one of our “peace through vacuous niceties” diplomatic endeavors, whether in the former Soviet Union, China, or the Muslim world.

    Our differences are not the product of misunderstandings. All international conflict does not stem from a global game of telephone gone horribly wrong. States and certain non-state actors (such as terrorists) rationally pursue their interests, which are defined both in material terms (economic advantage, balance of power considerations) and ideological ones. If those interests are fundamentally incompatible, no measure of sweet reason will make them otherwise. In the case of Russia, which defines one of its imperatives as checking American power wherever it can, that is precisely the case.

    May 31st, 2012 at 12:07 pm
    On Evil and Limitations: The Situation in Syria
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    Throughout the year, I’ve repeatedly been critical here at CFIF of the atrocities occuring in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and the feckless Western response they’ve engendered. What I haven’t done, however, is called for regime change.

    There’s a reason for that. In the hornet’s nest that is the Middle East, even regimes seemingly superlative in outright evil (such as Assad’s Syria and Gaddafi’s Libya) can’t be displaced with any certainty that the successor regime will be better. Writing for the Texas-based private intelligence firm Stratfor (of which he is and founder and CEO), George Friedman gives an excellent summary of why that is, using Egypt and Syria as examples:

    What was misunderstood [in the West] was that while there was in fact a democratic movement in Egypt, the liberal democrats who wanted a Western-style regime were not the ones exciting popular sentiment. What was exciting it was the vision of a popularly elected Islamist coalition moving to create a regime that institutionalized Islamic religious values.

    Westerners looked at Egypt and saw what they wanted and expected to see. They looked at Egyptians and saw themselves. They saw a military regime operating solely on brute force without any public support. They saw a mass movement calling for the overthrow of the regime and assumed that the bulk of the movement was driven by the spirit of Western liberalism. The result is that we have a showdown not between the liberal democratic mass and a crumbling military regime but between a representative of the still-powerful regime (Shafiq) and the Muslim Brotherhood.

    If we understand how the Egyptian revolution was misunderstood, we can begin to make sense of the misunderstanding about Syria. There seemed to be a crumbling, hated regime in Syria as well. And there seemed to be a democratic uprising that represented much of the population and that wanted to replace the al Assad regime with one that respected human rights and democratic values in the Western sense. The regime was expected to crumble any day under the assaults of its opponents. As in Egypt, the regime has not collapsed and the story is much more complex.

    Syrian President Bashar al Assad operates a brutal dictatorship that he inherited from his father, a regime that has been in power since 1970. The regime is probably unpopular with most Syrians. But it also has substantial support. This support doesn’t simply come from the al Assads’ Alawite sect but extends to other minorities and many middle-class Sunnis as well. They have done well under the regime and, while unhappy with many things, they are not eager to face a new regime, again likely dominated by Islamists whose intentions toward them are unclear. They may not be enthusiastic supporters of the regime, but they are supporters.

    It’s long past time that those of us in the West allow the Jeffersonian reveries that accompanied the genesis of the Arab Spring to fade. In most nations in the region, we are faced with one of two choices: secular dictatorships or Islamist totalitarianism. In general, the former will be preferable to the latter, though only marginally less despicable. In Syria, the brutality of the Assad regime — combined with its alliance with Iran — makes the situation virtually unnavigable.

    These are loathsome choices. But that fact shouldn’t lead us to the delusion that they are false ones.