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US experts on Mideast see "no end in sight" to war in Syria

By Ronald Baygents

WASHINGTON, April 13 (KUNA) -- A bipartisan panel of former ambassadors and US officials with deep experience in the Middle East discussed the future of Syria on Thursday and agreed that the end of the six-year conflict is "nowhere in sight," regardless of which US military or diplomatic approaches are taken.
In conjunction with the release on Thursday of a task force report on "Managing Disorder in the Middle East," four members of the task force discussed "What's Next on Syria? Principles for US Engagement in the Middle East" during a forum at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank.
The report proposed six "strategic principles" for the US: confront Iranian expansionism and Sunni extremism together in Syria and Iraq; avert new regional conflicts; recognize Russia is not the primary cause of -- nor the solution to -- the region's disorder; pursue stability through inclusive governance; prioritize order, not borders; and create common purpose among US allies.
"It remains the case that success in the Middle East can only come through long-term US engagement that seeks to establish a sustainable order capable of resisting key threats at a sustainable political, military and financial cost," the report concluded.
Ryan Crocker; a former US ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan and Kuwait, said of the conflict in Syria, "I don't see how this will end," and that it depends primarily on what positions the Iranians and Russians take.
Jake Sullivan, one of the task force co-chairs who served in the Obama administration as national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said if circumstances on the ground change in Syria, and Russia and Iran lose confidence in achieving "total victory," then those key players will "be open to an alternative arrangement ... but not in the near term." He said it was a "reasonable scenario" that eventually Iran and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will "leave the eastern Syria desert alone, and it becomes a terrorist state." The US needs to work toward a diplomatic solution that ultimately leads to a transition of power in Syria, Sullivan said.
Eric Edelman, the other task force co-chair -- a former US ambassador to Turkey who served as undersecretary of defense for policy during the George W. Bush administration -- warned that if the US does not remain involved in the region and states in the region collapse, "we will pay for it in terms of terrorism in the homeland." James Jeffrey, a deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration with a special focus on Iran who also served as US ambassador to Iraq and Turkey, said there was "no telling" how long the war in Syria will last.
It largely depends on how the push and pull between Iran and the Sunnis in Syria plays out, he noted. "If Assad tries to take the whole country back, which he is, this will war go on for a long time," Jeffrey said.
The Sunni-Shia fault lines in the region are out of control, Jeffrey said, and while Saudi Arabia does not view the region in the same way as the US, the Kingdom "is a status quo" country, while Iran is not. Saudi Arabia is key to mobilizing the rest of the Gulf countries, he said, and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are now moving closer to Saudi Arabia.
Crocker said the US should stop giving Iran more opportunities in the region as it did with the US exit from Iraq. Some in Iran favor "permanent instability" in the region because they see that situation as posing less of a threat to Iran, Crocker said.
Despite decades of officials and academics predicting otherwise, the traditional monarchies in the region "are doing OK," Crocker noted. While the US is "all for democracy," he said, "maybe the way they (the Gulf monarchies) govern is OK." Asked by KUNA how they saw the Trump administration approach to Syria playing out in the next four years, Crocker said the good news is that there "looks to be real continuity" from the Obama administration to the Trump administration. But the bad news is that some in the Trump administration see the situation in Syria and Iraq as "a purely military-counterterrorism issue." Noting the rhetoric of the Trump administration since it launched its missile strike on a Syrian military base last week, Sullivan said the Trump team turned to the Obama policy in the region within seven days after criticizing that policy during the presidential campaign and the early weeks of being in the White House.
If the Trump administration is willing to provide more military support to the Syrian government opposition or provide more direct US military support in the region, Sullivan said, it will find the "same uncomfortable, complicated approach" as it "bumps into the realities of the region." Asked how the US can disentangle from its military role in the region, Edelman said that at some point, Mosul and Raqqa will be liberated, and the challenge will then be how the US and its allies hold those cities. This will require some combination of local forces providing day-to-day security, as well as a "regional arrangement" to keep the situation in place, he said.
Jeffrey said that Raqqa would not be taken without a role by US forces as well as its allies, and the situation with Turkey and the YPG, the national Kurdish army in Syria, makes this complicated. The Trump administration "must still work things out with the Turks," he added.
A key question is what will happen with the 10,000-plus US forces in Iraq and the 1,000-plus US forces in Syria, Jeffrey said. If the so-called Islamic State (IS) is defeated and these US troops then pull out, that "will be seen as a victory for Iran," he said.
Crocker said that if Kurdish forces help take Raqqa, this will raise their expectations for their future. "Then what?" he asked. For the US to just defeat IS and move on "would not be victory," Crocker said.
Touching on the Kurdish conundrum, the task force report said that US policymakers "should promote power-sharing with a strong preference for maintaining existing borders. But they should not be absolutist. If stability proves impossible with Syria and Iraq's current cartography, the US government should no longer regard questioning of national borders as a strict taboo". (end) rm.hb