Neocon vernacular on Assad: 'Back in Service!'

Via FLC

"... Speaking by phone from Washington, Doran said White House policy toward the Bashar Assad regime should aim to weaken the Iranian axis stretching from Tehran through Damascus to Hezbollah and Hamas, and not on Syria's effect on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. "The primary driver of Syrian foreign policy is not the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Arab-Israeli conflict is the arena, in my view, in which the Syrians influence the Americans and the one they used to get legitimacy in international politics," he said. "So they're very interested in the Syrian-Israeli process, but not at all in its outcome."

Doran said the administration hoped to pursue the Syrian-Israeli track in concert with Turkey. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's "no problems with neighbors" policy and the White House's "desire to reach out to Iran and Syria and reduce the American profile, particularly the military one, in the region - as well as solve the Arab-Israeli conflict - dovetailed perfectly with Erdogan. Syria was right at the heart of that, and I think that was a strategic miscalculation from day one." 

"I think the Obama administration was already going in the wrong direction. Then the Arab Spring hit, and you'd have thought the administration would have seen very quickly that Assad wasn't good for anything. I think it's obvious to everyone now that he's not going to make peace with Israel. So that argument was off the table," said Doran, the George W. Bush administration's senior NSC director for the Near East and Africa from 2005 to 2007. "The other argument was 'better the devil you know than the one you don't.' But I think that argument is also off the table, because clearly he's the primary agent of instability in the region. But this connection between Obama and Erdogan carries on." 

"The result is that we have fallen short of calling for Assad's ouster, and that's a policy that's incomprehensible to me. It seems all the strategic rationale, and all the moral rationale, point in the same direction - and that's for him to step down," he said. "It used to be that in debates about Syria, it was the 'crazy neocons' against the realists. And the realists would make the 'devil you know' argument. But now it seems the realist position is 'This guy is going down.' There are those who say he could still pull through, but I don't see how that would happen." ..."

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