Fate chooses allies.
Sitting on our arse isn't an option.
We really don't need to side with Assad. We just need to tell him to stay out of the way.
ISIS needs to be removed from the playing field, permanently. Iraq is a disaster, but an ISIS controlled Iraq is worse.
Col. Peters says it better:
Iraq is GONE.
Syria is not that far behind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu0KXwUJgbI
Full disclosure: I did not read whatever Buchanan proposed and I am not favoring some outright “alliance” with Assad. With that in mind I still have some objections to what the author had to say.
“Assad is getting his ass kicked by ISIS and most of the other rebel groups.”
No. He’s avoiding ISIS, for the moment, and concentrating on the others in the “rebellion”. He will attack ISIS in Syria more directly when we start attacking ISIS more often in Iraq.
“What exactly is the upside of taking on Assad as a client? His military proved to be even more useless than Iraq’s. Are we supposed to act as his air force now? Give him weapons? Train his death squads? The Iranian seem to have that one covered.”
No need to take Assad on as a client. All we need to do is to have Assad’s agreement with our attacking ISIS inside Syria. He knows we are capable of doing it without his agreement and would likely not want to get into a military confrontation with us, if we did it anyway. An agreement whereby he accepts our going after ISIS inside Syria and OUR upholding it and avoiding doing anything else could lead to other discussions with Assad.
“Picking the Shiite side by making a nuclear deal with Iran helped cause this mess in the first place.”
No way. The causes began long before that.
“If there’s anything guaranteed to get the Saudis and Qataris to start backing ISIS to the hilt, it would be allying with Assad.”
I believe Qatar already is and that wealthy money from the Saudi side flows into Qatar for it also (leaving the kings men without their hands getting dirty).
“This is a religious war. Buchanan suggests that we hop onto the Shiite side all the way without considering the implications.”
We entered this religious war on the Sunni side when we tied our own regime change agenda against Assad to a Sunni Islamist putsch against Assad. Apparently we did so without considering the implications of THAT.
“Backing Assad would likely lead to a Sunni alignment behind ISIS. Any of the Jihadist groups that are fighting it or moving back and forth would see no reason not to join together with it.”
It would only show that they were always more aligned with ISIS than with us philosophically all along. ISIS is already a “Sunni” aligned outfit and we ARE against ISIS and ISIS and “other jihadist” groups are already against us. Our attacking ISIS in Syria would not make them more against us than they already are.
Now then, the reasons for our attacking ISIS inside Syria, from my point of view, has less to do with solving things in Syria than with helping Iraq fend off ISIS by helping to deny it sanctuary in Syria. The side issue of any benefit to Assad can await whatever deal he and the formal “Syrian opposition” can make (which they will both have to come to as stalemate seems all they can achieve militarily).
“Backing Assad would likely lead to a Sunni alignment behind ISIS.”
They already do. Saudi Arabia & the Gulf State basically pay the Jihadi-radicals to play in another sandbox (stay away from the Kingdom).
When are people going to figure out there are NO good guys there. Get the Christians out. Keep Muslims out of US. Let the rest kill each other until none left standing. Make popcorn and watch.
http://buchanan.org/blog/let-congress-vote-iraq-war-iii-6879
I think Pat Buchanan mentioned some options that diplomats discussed in the above column, I don’t think anywhere did Pat B. say we should side with the Iranians, he just mentioned that diplomats might have mentioned it because in WWII, we sided with Stalin who was a bad person.