Reuel Marc Gerecht has a typically perspicacious op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today advocating a stepped-up CIA campaign to oust Bashar al-Assad. He notes: “A coordinated, CIA-led effort to pour anti-tank, anti-aircraft, and anti-personnel weaponry through gaping holes in the regime’s border security wouldn’t be hard.”
Not only would this help to end the bloodshed (estimates are that close to 20,000 people have already been killed), as Gerecht argues, but it would also, as I have previously argued, give the U.S. the ability to shape a post-Assad regime. There is great danger not only in the continuing consequences of all-out civil war in Syria, which could give al-Qaeda and other extremists room to operate, but also great danger in a splintered, chaotic post-Assad environment where the most organized groups could be composed of Sunni fundamentalists backed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. An active American role now, whether overt or covert, could give us great influence with the rebels and help to avert some of the worst dangers if and when Assad is eventually topped. That is what happened in Libya, and the result is that a secular coalition has won its recent election.
