DAILY BEAST: The president’s call for the ouster of Bashar al-Assad and decision to foster regime change with tougher sanctions came slowly—but will push the Syrian people a step closer to freedom, says Martin Indyk.
Obama came to this decision at an agonizingly slow pace for the people of Syria, especially compared with his immediate calls on Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi to leave office when they unleashed violence against peaceful demonstrators in their countries. This seemed particularly strange. Mubarak had been a friend and ally of the United States for three decades; Gaddafi had surrendered his nuclear program, paid generous compensation to the American victims of Pan Am 103, and cooperated in the war on al Qaeda. Egypt was our strategic ally; Libya had almost no strategic weight at all.
Assad, by contrast, had been an ally and partner of America’s would-be nemesis, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Assad turned Syria—an Arab regional power—into a conduit for Iranian influence and troublemaking in the Middle East heartland. He allowed Sunni insurgents access from Syria into Iraq to kill American soldiers. He supplied rockets and other advanced weapons systems to Hizbullah. He gave succor to Hamas, hosting its external headquarters in Damascus. He developed a clandestine nuclear-weapons project in abrogation of Syria’s Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations. He used murder and assassination in an attempt to regain control of Lebanon from democratic forces there… (more)
