By Jim Hoagland, Washington Post
Saturday, December 29, 3:01 AM
Jim Hoagland is a contributing editor to The Post. His e-mail address is jimhoagland@washpost.com.
Syria’s Alawite regime collapses from within and without. High-level defections march in step with rebel gains through the Sunni heartland. The Obama administration’s signature regional strategy — described in a Freudian slip by a French career diplomat here as “waiting from behind” — now badly trails events.
That would not constitute a disaster for Washington if the fate of Bashar al-Assad’s clan-dictated rule was an isolated affair. But there are moments when timing is everything in statecraft. Syria’s impending implosion is coming to a head just as President Obama runs out of time on his promise to keep nuclear weapons out of Iran’s hands.
His last best hope may now lie in linking the two crises in bargaining with Russia and Iran, Assad’s two most important foreign backers. They risk losing everything they have invested in that country by continuing to bet that Assad — and the Syrian state — can survive this war. That gives Obama leverage to use in countering Iran’s accelerating nuclear enrichment program.
“Iran has responded to the toughening of sanctions by speeding up its work on a bomb, not slowing it down,” says Jean-David Levitte, former French ambassador to Washington and, until May, then-President Nicolas Sarkozy’s diplomatic adviser. “We now have only a relatively few months to act before Iran’s nuclear effort becomes irreversible.”
Levitte believes that the six powers conducting nuclear negotiations with Iran have to make a final comprehensive offer. Failing Tehran’s quick agreement to such a proposal, the only courses left open will be acceptance of an Iranian bomb or military action to prevent it, he argues.
This is where Syria comes in. It is stomach-churning for me to suggest that Americans should work to salvage any part of Assad’s regime, which has slaughtered tens of thousands of Syrians. But the least bad option available may be for all powers to pursue two overriding, interlocking goals: Syria’s descent into a total bloodbath must be stopped. And Iran must agree to live up to its nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations by forswearing atomic weapons.
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Categories: Arab World, Asia, Iran, Russia, Syria