What the US ought to be doing in Syria
Max Boot has some good ideas for what the US ought to be doing in Syria short of military intervention. Rather than continue to kowtow to Assad, Ginsberg writes that “President Obama needs to ratchet up the rhetoric against Assad and his regime to provide far more moral support to the protestors. . . . Washington,” he says, “should begin seizing the assets of prominent Syrian government officials directly responsible for the violence, including members of the Assad family.” Also: “[T]he White House should marshal global cooperation to impose the same set of economic sanctions imposed on Libya.” And: “[T]he U.S. should immediately begin providing Syria’s activists the same forms of social networking and internet technology assistance that it is providing Egypt’s activists.” Finally: “[P]lace Assad on notice that the U.S. will lead efforts to present international criminal charges against him and anyone else in his government directly or indirectly responsible for killing innocent Syrians unless he yields power in a negotiated exit.”Ginsberg is a former ambassador to Morocco under the Clinton administration.
These all sound like excellent ideas to me. Having thrown our weight behind the protesters in Egypt and Libya, it is hard to see why we are not doing more to help topple Bashar al Assad—one of the linchpins of the Iranian strategy to dominate the region.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Barack Obama, Bashar al-Assad, Syrian regime change
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:50 AM
1 Comments:
Um, the current American President doctrinally has some bedrock preconceptions (UN good, settlements bad; Islam: religion of peace, etc.) and, tactically, the attention span of a three year old on a sugar high.
None of this, unfortunately, adds up to the Assad containment strategy suggested here.
Do those Syrian activists golf?
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