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Obama yields to Russia and Iran, puts Assad ouster on back burner

Behind the scenes the White House is embracing a strategy that would leave the Syria President Bashar Assad in place as the world unites against a greater immediate threat from Islamic State terrorists.
The Washington Times – December 21, 2015 – Publicly, the Obama administration says it still believes Bashar Assad must be ousted, but behind the scenes the White House is embracing a strategy that would leave the Syrian leader in place as the world unites against a greater immediate threat from Islamic State terrorists.
Analysts said that was on display at the U.N. last week, when the U.S. agreed to a Security Council resolution on the peace process that made no mention of Mr. Assad, in what was seen as Obama administration capitulation to Russian and Iranian demands that Syria’s president be allowed to stay in power for the foreseeable future.
 “The calculation that the White House has made is that working with Assad is less bad than the alternative of going to war with Russia over Assad, or of sending in a large number of American troops to fight the Islamic State on the ground,” says Joshua Landis, who heads the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
The administration’s approach is facing biting criticism from lawmakers on Capitol Hill, several of whom argue that the White House has no clear strategy for defeating the terrorist group also known as ISIS and ISIL and is badly following Russia’s lead on Syria as a whole.
The issue also has become a divisive one on the presidential campaign trail. Mr. Obama’s former top diplomat, Hillary Clinton, is aligned with Republican contenders Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie in asserting that Assad’s ouster should be a top U.S. priority in any serious strategy to defeat the Islamic State.
With regard to Syria’s dictator, specifically, the issue has been a sticky one for President Obama since April 2012, when Mrs. Clinton, as secretary of state, said the administration felt “Assad must go.”
The White House initially stood by her assertion on grounds that Assad could not be allowed to remain in power because he had authorized his military to use chemical weapons on civilians.
But the administration’s posture began to shift when John F. Kerry took over as secretary of state in early 2013 — and it appears to have swung dramatically since September of this year, when Russia suddenly began ramping up its military support for the Assad regime.
State Department spokesman John Kirby pushed back Monday against the notion that the administration has quietly aligned itself with Moscow over Assad’s fate, asserting that Mr. Kerry’s posture on the issue has remained unchanged for more than a year.
“As far back as a year and a half ago,” Mr. Kirby said, “the secretary was saying that while Assad has lost legitimacy to govern the manor of his departure, it still needs to be worked out, the timing of it.”
But Mr. Kerry has shown rhetorical flexibility on the issue in recent weeks, as he spearheaded a diplomatic push to get Assad-backers Russia and Iran behind a plan for a peace process with Syrian opposition rebels supported by the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Following a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, Mr. Kerry made headlines by asserting that the U.S. and its allies “are not seeking so-called regime change in Syria.”
Then, on Friday, he rejected the notion that international divisions over Assad’s fate had been brushed under the rug in order to secure Russia’s vote for the unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution backing the peace process and potential Syria cease-fire to begin as early as next month.


 

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