THE SYRIA CAMPAIGN

Wall Street Journal,
Sept. 17, 2014

American bombs aren’t yet falling on Syria, but on Tuesday Chuck Hagel suggested they soon will. “This plan includes targeted actions against ISIL safe havens in Syria, including its command and control, logistics capabilities and infrastructure,” the Secretary of Defense told the Senate. Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, added that the attacks “will be persistent and sustainable.” Let’s hope so, because no campaign to destroy the Islamic State can succeed without waging a campaign on both sides of an Iraqi-Syrian border that the terrorist group long ago erased in the name of its caliphate. The Islamic State’s capital is in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which it has held for over a year. It has recently scored major military victories against Bashar Assad’s regime and moderate rebels of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), particularly in the embattled city of Aleppo.

Those ISIS victories are a reminder that time isn’t on America’s side in this fight, even as the Administration contemplates a long war. That’s especially true if President Obama wants to avoid helping the Assad regime and its allies in Hezbollah and Iran. Mr. Obama is three years late in making a serious attempt to train and equip the FSA. Now that he’s at last publicly promised U.S. support, he needs a military strategy that helps them win. Attacking the Islamic State advances that goal, and not only because of its military gains against the FSA. As the Journal reported Tuesday in an online video of life in Raqqa, the Islamic State rules in totalitarian fashion, complete with public crucifixions. The brutality has created conditions similar to those that preceded the Sunni Awakening in Iraq in 2007—the revolt by ordinary Sunnis and their tribal leaders in Anbar province against al Qaeda. The awakening would not have succeeded without the aid of U.S. forces, which were available in adequate numbers thanks to President Bush’s surge. Nothing similar can happen now because of President Obama’s short-sighted pledge to put no U.S. troops on the ground. But a devastating air campaign against the Islamic State might at least weaken the group sufficiently to embolden a revolt and send new recruits to the FSA. The model here is the air cover NATO gave to Kosovars as they fought Serbian aggressors in 1999 in the Balkans.
 
Defeating the Islamic State will also require attacks on the Assad regime. Sunnis will not support the campaign against Islamic State if they think our air strikes are intended to help the regime in Damascus and its Shiite allies in Beirut and Tehran. Assad had previously helped the Islamic State by releasing its fighters from his prisons and supplying it with oil in order to isolate the FSA and consolidate his political base among Syria’s Alawites and Christians. Yet now he claims he is the only plausible alternative to the Islamic State. The U.S. will have to ensure that the Islamic State’s losses benefit the FSA and not Assad. The best way to start would be for the U.S. to end the siege of Aleppo, where FSA forces are trapped both by the Islamic State and Assad’s forces. Saving the city—Syria’s largest—would end a humanitarian calamity and provide a major psychological boost to the FSA.
 
Sooner rather than later the U.S. will also have to do what Mr. Obama wanted to do a year ago and bomb Assad’s airfields. His air force consists mainly of training aircraft dropping primitive—but devastating—munitions, some of them loaded with chlorine gas. Air power is one of his principle advantages over the FSA, and removing it would make Assad more likely to negotiate with the FSA rather than risk falling to Islamic State. Mr. Obama first promised to train and arm the FSA a year ago, but that effort was microscopic and half-hearted. That helps explain why neighboring Arab states like Jordan abandoned the effort or began aiding jihadist groups instead. They will help now only if they believe Mr. Obama is serious.

Some conservatives are criticizing any intervention in Syria, but House Speaker John Boehner is right to support Mr. Obama’s funding requests, no matter GOP doubts about Mr. Obama’s strategy and resolve. The Republicans who opposed Mr. Obama’s short-living plan to intervene in Syria a year ago have been discredited by events. That walk-back gave Islamic State time to expand and take more territory. The political lesson is that the GOP should not be the midwife for Mr. Obama’s weakness, much less as a pretext for his inaction. In foreign policy the best politics is to support the right policy. The U.S. is taking sides in Iraq and Syria against two entrenched enemies of American interests. Our key allies are the Kurds, the parts of the Iraqi military that aren’t dominated by Iran’s militia, and the moderate Sunnis in Syria and Iraq. They must win on the ground to defeat ISIS. Early action in Syria might have spared us this predicament, but that’s all the more reason to act decisively now.