The case for arming the Syrian opposition

The U.S. secretary of state should have more to say than simply that anti-Assad forces will 'somewhere, somehow, find the means to defend themselves'

Paul Wolfowitz, Mark Palmer

While the slaughter continues in Syria, the U.S. is in danger of repeating the mistake made 20 years ago when we refused to arm the Bosnians. We left them at the mercy of Serb militias for three horrendous years with well upward of 100,000 deaths, until finally—after the massacre at Srebrenica and thousands more dead—NATO was forced to intervene directly and send 60,000 peacekeepers.

There may be a way to avoid such a scenario in Syria. Yet today, while Iran, Russia and China—the new authoritarian capitalists—solidly support Bashar al-Assad's brutality, the U.S. seems capable of nothing more than rhetorical condemnations and sanctions, neither of which can possibly persuade the Syrian regime to surrender power. Apparently that's why Burhan Ghalioun, the leader of the opposition Syrian National Council, declared that the recent "Friends of Syria" conference in Tunis did "not meet the aspirations of the Syrian people."
Although the U.S. has concluded that the viciousness of the Assad regime toward its own people exceeds anything that we can tolerate, we are paralyzed by fear that intervening to strengthen the opposition will escalate the violence and leave post-Assad Syria even more devastated and fragmented.
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