How to End the Civil War in Syria

http://www.thenation.com/article/the-syria-crisis/

As for broader American policy toward Syria, it has reached a dead end. The air campaign begun more than a year ago has failed to turn the tide against ISIS, and the US effort to train and field a “moderate” Syrian rebel army to complement the air strikes has collapsed. While the Kurds in the north have proved to be useful allies in the fight against ISIS in Syria as well as Iraq, the same cannot be said of Washington’s regional Sunni allies, who continue to pursue their own particular interests, with Turkey more focused on targeting the Kurds than ISIS, and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states still funding jihadi rebel groups in Syria, even as they pretend to join the war against ISIS.

To avoid an even greater catastrophe, the administration must decisively reverse course and take the only road that has a plausible chance of stabilizing Syria and eventually defeating ISIS and other Islamist radical groups. That road entails, first, the recognition not only that there is no military solution, but that military action actually impedes progress on the diplomatic front. Second, the United States must work toward a solution with all of the parties to the conflict: the Syrian government, Hezbollah, and the various rebel forces and civilian opposition groups; regional powers including Iran, Turkey, and the Gulf states; as well as countries like Russia and the other permanent members of the UN Security Council. The only exception to this all-inclusive rule should be ISIS, which—quite apart from its theatrical, murderous nihilism—rejects as a matter of principle the very idea of negotiations.

The Geneva Communiqué of 2012—the result of a conference initiated by then–UN and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan and attended by the United States, Russia, China, and Britain—was stillborn, primarily because of disagreements over the status of Assad and the definition of what a “transition” to a more representative government would entail. The follow-up Geneva conference, in 2014, collapsed mainly over a dispute about whether Iran should attend. The parties must now restart those talks, avoiding ultimatums, exclusions, or bottom-line demands about Assad’s status, even as they try to narrow their disagreements over what a workable transition would mean in a country now devastated and deeply traumatized by civil war.

In his UN speech this September, Putin may have sounded bellicose in his insistence on the legitimacy of the Assad regime, but that posture obscures long-standing Russian indications that the fate of Assad is less important than the need to ensure that any transition results in stable governance. Putin is correct in pointing out that the violent removal of dictators without retaining some functioning government structures to replace them—as with Gadhafi in Libya and Hussein in Iraq—has led to regional chaos and extremism. On the other hand, Obama is surely correct in his insistence that the Assad regime’s brutality “is not just a matter of one nation’s internal affairs—it breeds human suffering on an order of magnitude that affects us all.” And it’s certainly reasonable for Obama to call for “a managed transition away from Assad and to a new leader, and an inclusive government.”