Waiting for America

America's Syria Abdication -Fouad Ajami

A no-fly, no-drive zone on the border with Turkey would critically alter the terms of engagement and encourage greater defections from the regime's forces.

Everyone is waiting on Washington's green light and its leadership. Turkey would act, but only under the banner of NATO. In the markets in Dubai, the Assad dictatorship is dumping its gold reserves - at a discount. In the long run, this regime is doomed.

The writer is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

(Wall Street Journal)

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Confronting Damascus: U.S. Policy toward Syria  -Andrew J. Tabler

[T]he U.S. should share limited intelligence with the opposition inside Syria concerning the deployment and movement of regime forces, especially as they approach population centers for an assault.

Second, the U.S. should assess ways to support popular self-defense alongside civil resistance as two sides of the opposition coin.

Third, Washington should immediately expand contingency planning about possible direct U.S. military support as part of actions to head off massacres or a humanitarian disaster. This includes supporting the creation, with allies such as Turkey, of safe havens inside Syria.

Greater U.S. involvement would increase the chances that the new Syria is much more democratic and closer to American interests than Bashar al-Assad's regime.
The writer, a fellow in The Washington Institute's Program on Arab Politics, testified before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee on April 25, 2012.
(Washington Institute for Near East Policy)

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