Resolve

With dozens of attacks on Aleppo Sunday and more yesterday, Syria’s President Assad has made it perfectly clear he regards the cessation of hostilities as ended. There will now follow a few days of diplomatic efforts to restore it, with Washington bringing serious pressure on the High Negotiation Committee to return to talks in Geneva and Russia pretending to pressure Assad. There is no telling whether those efforts will be successful, though The Economist is surely right that the talks are doomed so long as they don’t deal with the issue of Assad himself. A transition away from his rule is the only thing that will get much of the opposition to lay down its arms.

That is not however what is killing the cessation of hostilities at the moment. The immediate issue in Geneva has been Assad’s refusal to release detainees and permit serious humanitarian deliveries in most opposition areas. If there had been progress on those “files,” the opposition would not have left Geneva. Despite occasional reports of relief supplies getting through, the overall picture is grim. Millions remain in need and the regime has besieged hundreds of thousands. Tens of thousands of prisoners are incarcerated in regime prisons (the opposition holds a tiny fraction of that number).

The Americans remain not so much indifferent as unwilling to do what is needed to compel Assad to do what the cessation of hostilities was supposed to do. Even a few antiaircraft weapons would send a strong signal to the regime and its pilots. President Obama however remains unwilling to take the risks involved: the weapons could fall into extremist hands, they could be used against commercial aircraft, or they could bring down Russian planes and helicopters. These risks are real, though reducible to relatively low levels.

The Russians and Iranians are not showing any comparable hesitation. Whatever drawdown Moscow conducted last month, this month they are beefing up again and moving artillery so that it can bombard Aleppo. Iran’s forces in Syria go up and down, but there is every indication Tehran will do whatever it thinks necessary to prevent a political transition that inevitably will end its carte blanche in Syria. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has a lot to lose if its link to Hizbollah in Lebanon is weakened or even broken.

The cessation of hostilities proved to have great virtues: it relieved a lot of pressure on civilians in opposition-held areas, it gave those civilians an opportunity to demonstrate their opposition to extremists associated with Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra,  and it showed that relatively moderate rebels could make headway against the Islamic State if they didn’t have to also fight the regime. Re-initiation of the fighting will weaken relative moderates and drive some into the arms of extremists.

I continue to hope that Barack Obama, whom I voted for twice and support in many things, will realize the error of his ways and intervene in Syria in ways that communicate to the regime, the Russians and the Iranians that they have something to fear. Hizbollah is a terrorist group responsible for killing hundreds of Americans. If we are attacking terrorists in Syria, why not Hizbollah?

But that is a pipe dream. President Obama is highly disciplined and does not want to go down that slippery slope, which could end with an expensive and difficult effort to rebuild a Syria that has suffered enormous physical and psychological damage. All his predecessors since the end of the Cold War have felt the same way about rebuilding collapsed states, a category Syria certainly belongs in. But none of them had his iron will. It makes me laugh when my Republican colleagues say he lacks “resolve.” That is certainly not the case. But his resolve in this case is applied in what they and I regard as the wrong direction.