I think Marcy Wheeler’s analysis on Syria is very good. As I’ve mentioned before, there seems to be buy-in even from the neo-conservative crowd that conditions on the ground in Syria are not yet ripe for regime change. Specifically, during the debate in the Senate over authorizing military force in Syria, John McCain insisted on an amendment that read, in part, “absent decisive change to the present military balance of power on the ground in Syria, sufficient incentives do not yet exist for regime change.” You can throw a metric ton of rhetoric in the wastebasket about how the president is weak and indecisive and was asking for authority to carry out a too-small attack. But, below the surface, the neo-cons know that the rebels are not ready to try to govern Syria. As presently constituted, we do not want them to win.
As for Obama, I do not think that he ever wants to them to win. He wants them to be strong enough to force Assad into exile but not strong enough to carry on the sectarian civil war into the area of genocide. In this, he is a lot closer to the thinking of Putin than most people realize, which is precisely why they had enough mutual self-interest to call off the dogs of escalation.
Everyone who insists on seeing this conflict as a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia or the U.S. and Iran, is misunderstanding the president. He is trying to stop or change the sectarian element to the conflict. He’s trying to tamp down the extremism on both sides. As to Putin, he has no particular use for the Assad regime, but he does have an interest in maintaining Syria as a client state, or at least a state that isn’t completely hostile. He doesn’t want to abandon an ally, empower Sunni extremists, or risk losing his equities in Syria completely. The only way he can hope to accomplish those things in the long-term is if the regime is able to negotiate a cease-fire that protects the Alawites from brutal reprisals and gives them some share of power. In the end, the Russians probably would need to get credit for forcing Assad out to even have the remotest amount of good will from the rebel side of the conflict. The only way to solve this problem, if it even can be solved, is for Obama and Putin to work in this narrow area where they share a common interest, and that means that we, on our side, have to completely abandon the paradigm that we’re fighting a proxy war against Russia on behalf of the Sunnis.
Obama has never believed that, but our foreign policy establishment can’t seem to shake that paradigm off.
