The Syria Analysis Thread

Trump never really expressed a vision for the Middle East on the campaign trail beyond killing Sunni terrorists. As he was forced to fill his government with veterans from previous Republican administrations, it was probably inevitable the default ME policy (Israel-SA = allies, divide and conquer everyone else) remained the same. The spooks will be allowed to continue to run amok there.

I do think there is some sort of game plan here. Trump/Tillerson want to keep their attention on where it needs to be, Asia and trade issues, so the chance of Trump getting dragged into a big war in the ME seems remote, imo. Instead, I think the play is that the White House wants to get to a détente with Russia, but domestic politics makes that impossible without a big pound of flesh in return for lifting the sanctions. It sounds like the first option (Flynn’s idea) was to try and separate Russia and Iran, but I doubt the Russians were receptive in the back-channel talks.

They now think that Assad can be that pound of flesh. If everything goes the way they want, they would get some sort of agreement where Russia and the US agree to work together to wipe out the Islamic State (which Tillerson has always said is priority #1), sanctions on Russia are lifted, and Assad gets replaced by one of his flunkies that is acceptable to Russia and the US gets to say it got something. I don’t know how Russia would react to such a deal but I suspect Iran and Hezbollah would be suspicious of it though.

Of course, I could always be wrong, and if that’s the case this country is fucked.

I also think there is a big problem with this idea, namely that Israel is not going to want a Assad-lite regime in Syria, period even without Assad there. They want to use this opportunity to take out Iran's land-bridge to Lebanon so they can take a crack at Hezbollah in the next couple of years. I suspect the usual suspects will start amping up the Russia baiting big time if Trump were to ever go back to the Congress with such a deal.

In general the strategic situation is far better for Assad today that it was in 2013. The biggest boost for Damascus was the capture of Aleppo. Together with the suppression of the rebellion around Damascus itself, the capture of Aleppo massively reduced the options for the US and allies to partition the country or push for full regime change. The rebellion is now constrained to insignificant parts of the country and that limits what realistically the US can do.

Also, the fall of Mosul in 2014 led to the creation of the Iraqi Hashd al Shaabi bolstered Assad tremendously by providing a bottomless well of manpower that provides effective reinforcement for many fronts in Syria and links any conflict in Syria to Iraq in a way disadvantageous to the US.

Most obviously, the Russian intervention has tightly linked the fate of Assad to Russia and made it basically impossible for him to be removed without some kind of reckoning with Russia.

The wider Russia-US balance is also more favorable to Assad and Russia than it was in 2013. Russia's military modernization is about halfway done. The ballistic missile forces and the Air Force are mostly operating new systems. Iskander, Topol-MR, Su-30M and Su-35, upgraded MiG-31, Kalibr and S-400 are all in service in large numbers and provide a significantly more powerful deterrent than NATO faced in 2013. The Navy lags behind but the first production units of the new classes of subs and surface combatants have entered service although in small numbers. The Black Sea Fleet is about half modernized while the other fleets are getting along; most significantly new SSBNs and new or modernized attack subs are getting into service. The annexation of Crimea and the rest of the Ukraine crisis also closes off another avenue for pressure against Russia that could have been brought in 2013. Russia is less susceptible to nuclear pressure and conventional attack than it was in 2013.

In general, if the removal of Assad was frustrated in 2013 by Obama, it will be significantly harder to accomplish now.

EDIT: Only an hour later, headlines have made my point for me :

Syria & Iraq as of April 2017

assadist commander of the tiger(pink panther) forces brigadier general suheil al-hassan with young boy, jealous boyfriend in background.

Sam Heller of War on the Rocks says that Idlib is lost to al-Qaida no matter what is done by the USA and its allies and that Idlib itself will fall to the regime.

Evacuation is America's Moral and Strategic Imperative in Idlib