Mick Hartley

Written just before Trump's surprise strike on Friday, Michael Totten's latest is still very much to the point:

[W]e need to get a couple of things straight here. Bashar al-Assad is not fighting ISIS in Syria. Not really. Nor are the Russians. Assad and the Russians are fighting every rebel army in the country except ISIS. Look at a map of the country. ISIS’s territory is centered on its “capital” in Raqqa in the northeast, but Assad and Russia’s theater of operations is in the west and along the coast. Only the United States has bombed ISIS in Syria, and only Kurdish militias have seriously resisted ISIS on the ground.

Assad did, however, facilitate ISIS’s rise in Syria and Iraq. Thousands of Americans and Iraqis are dead thanks to his sponsorship of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq—the precursor to ISIS—during the Iraqi insurgency.

This is hardly a secret. “We in Syria intelligence opened all the doors for [the jihadists] to go to Iraq,” Mahmud al-Naser, an intelligence officer who defected to the United States, told the Daily Beast.

Before writing off Syrian malfeasance during the Iraq war as irrelevant history, understand something else: ISIS in its current form is also a creature of the Assad regime. Assad wanted ISIS to rise. He needed ISIS to rise. He made damn sure that ISIS did rise and that it did so inside Syria.

In 2011, Assad’s regime shot, tortured, raped, and mutilated peaceful protesters while calling them terrorists. Everyone in the world knew he was lying, including his Iranian and Hezbollah allies. He had to say it, though, because after American-led regime-changes in Iraq and Libya, he had every reason in the world to fear that he might be next.

You can’t fight a war against terrorism if there are no terrorists, though. He needed to create a terrorist threat inside Syria. So he released the most extreme Islamists, including battle-hardened al-Qaeda fighters, from Sednaya prison north of Damascus. Some of them dutifully went out into the desert and established the Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. Others joined the remnants of the then-largely defunct al-Qaeda in Iraq and renamed it the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.

Then Assad effectively told the world, “either I rule or they rule,” and the world bought it….

ISIS is the most deranged terrorist army on earth, but Hezbollah, the joint Syrian and Iranian proxy militia in Lebanon, remains the most powerful. It is more powerful, in fact, than many of the Middle East’s national armies, including Lebanon’s. Its missile arsenal is now robust enough to strike targets anywhere and everywhere in Israel, including as far south as the Red Sea city of Eilat and the Dimona nuclear power plant.

After years of a slow-motion war led by the United States and its regional partners, ISIS is on the ropes, but the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah axis is stronger than ever, especially now that the Russians are fighting alongside it. Russia’s alliance with Syria and Iran is not new, and it’s perfectly natural. Syria has been the Kremlin’s chief client state in the Middle East since the 1970s, while Iran has received almost all its nuclear weapons technology from Moscow.

We are all tired of war, but we’re likely to get more of it if the United States effectively gives the world’s largest terrorist axis a pass. And we should not be the least bit surprised that the Assad regime resumed its use of chemical weapons just a few days after the White House indicated as much.

Removing Assad from power need not be America’s first priority in the Middle East, but outsourcing American counterterrorism to him, of all people, makes about as much sense as Churchill and Roosevelt leaving it to Mussolini and Franco to save Europe from Hitler. A course correction from Washington—if one is actually coming—will be as welcome as it is overdue.

And a course correction duly came. It may mark a significant change in US policy. Then again, it may just be a one-off shot across the bows by Trump to demonstrate that he is not Obama, just as Obama made sure to mark himself out as not Bush. We shall see.