Syria: Should the U.S. send arms?

It’s time for the U.S. to intervene in Syria, said Elliott Abrams in NationalReview.com. Over the past year, more than 5,000 people have died in President Bashar al-Assad’s bloody crackdown on protesters. The regime’s tanks are now pounding the western city of Homs, killing hundreds of residents every week. America simply can’t allow Assad to win this civil war—he is, after all, “Iran’s only Arab ally, and the armorer of Hezbollah.” To stop him, the Obama administration should begin supplying the rebel Free Syrian Army with “plenty of money and arms, training and intelligence.” Instead, the Obama administration is taking “the Big Bad Wolf” approach, said Jackson Diehl in WashingtonPost.com. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seem to think that if they huff and puff and denounce Assad loudly enough, his regime will collapse like a house of straw. But Assad is calmly slaughtering the opposition, which needs weapons to fight back—not gusts of hot air from Washington.

“To whom would these weapons be provided, exactly?” asked Marc Lynch in ForeignPolicy.com. The so-called Free Syrian Army is actually a mishmash of fighting groups, split along religious, regional, and sectarian lines. If the U.S. arms some militias and not others, we would exacerbate those divisions, and our weapons might be turned not on the Syrian army but on civilians. Even with more guns, the opposition has no real chance of defeating Assad’s forces, said Trudy Rubin in The Philadelphia Inquirer. The 7,000 members of the Free Syrian Army “are up against a huge government army of about 300,000 men,” equipped with tanks, rockets, and modern weapons purchased from Russia. If military aid doesn’t turn the tide, would the U.S. be willing to escalate and take on another Middle East war? “I’d say the answer is no.”

Smart diplomacy is our only hope for ending this conflict, said Larry Diamond in The New Republic. The U.S. should offer Assad and his aides the option of exile, warning them that if they cling to power and compel their people to remove them by force, they “will have no safe exit.” As they watch their country disintegrate, some members of the regime might take up that offer, or push Assad aside and make a deal. “Yes, negotiating with people who are responsible for crimes against humanity will be morally distasteful.” But the alternative—a prolonged bloodbath—“would be the greater moral and political disaster.”

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