A Blog by the Editor of The Middle East Journal

Putting Middle Eastern Events in Cultural and Historical Context

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Bassam Haddad: Syria Debate has Reached a Dead End

The debate over the rights and wrongs of the war in Syria and what the policy of the US and other powers should be has sometimes seemed as endless as the war itself. Let me commend to you an incisive, if sobering, analysis by Bassam Haddad at The Nation: "The Debate Over Syria Has Reached a Dead End."


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

One might be grateful for the author's recognition that the Syrian "revolution" has been captured by extremists with no interest in a secular Syria.

But the attempt to create a false equivalence between the two "arguments" is rather unwelcome.

The choices in Syria are very simple: Assad or the jihadists. Another failed state or a functioning state.

Pretending that there are other options prolongs the war and causes more harm to the Syrian people.

Failure to recognize this after the results in Iraq, Libya is astounding. It bespeaks willful ignorance or suggests the real motives may not be as professed.

David Mack said...

Agree with the gist of the comment by Anonymous. You don't have to be an apologist for the Assad regime to recognize that the alternatives are either jihadis or ineffective secular opposition groups. At some point, we have to stop blaming Obama for the failure to turn the latter into a viable alternative.