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Syria: The New Problem from Hell - Aaron David Miller

(Foreign Policy) - By any standard, Syria is a disaster. President Barack Obama has avoided intervention because his options aren't just bad, they're terrible. Syria is already a disaster, but a ham-handed intervention could make matters worse, certainly for America. None of the incremental steps proposed so far have answered the following questions: Can these actions degrade Syria's military power so that President Bashar al-Assad's regime collapses? Or, alternatively, can they produce a stalemate that would force the regime, the Russians, and Iran to accept a negotiated transition? But by the end of the summer, more than 100,000 Syrians are likely to have died in a calamitous civil war that shows no signs of abating. As a result, the pressure to intervene will mount on the Obama administration. Obama knows that Syria is the key story line in the so-called Arab Spring and that his own legacy will suffer unless he moves to counteract the negative appraisals currently gathering force. The odds that Geneva negotiations will succeed are long indeed. Will the Russians really pressure Assad to leave? Will the Syrian dictator agree, particularly at a time when his regime is scoring military gains? Can anyone really speak authoritatively for the rebels inside and outside Syria? Too much blood has flowed in Syria to imagine a quick, negotiated settlement. The longer the conflict continues, the greater the odds that some new kinetic element - an Israeli-Syrian confrontation, massive use of chemical weapons, or some atrocity that surpasses previous horrors - will occur.
2013-06-12 00:00:00
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