Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) looks at Syria and sees “a dog’s breakfast of violence, terrorism, deceit and carnage that’s gone on for three years.”
Which is to say that it’s a mess.
In search of insight, if not a road map to success, I sought out Robert Ford, our ambassador to Syria from 2010 to early this year. Few understand the country in such granular detail.
And while Ford did leave his job chagrined with overall Obama policy, he personifies the best of our foreign service. Respect for him is ample and bipartisan.
That was clear at a recent Senate Foreign Affairs Committee hearing at which Ford had the unfortunate task of following Secretary of State John Kerry.
In his testimony and the answers to questions, Ford provided committee chairman Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and the precious few reporters who remained an exceedingly valuable minit-utorial on the country.
I tracked him down Friday for more. Here are his experienced, nuanced thoughts on key matters:
Q: Do the non-Islamist rebels have any hope?
Yes, they do. They have been slowly making ground south of Damascus and holding their own against ISIL (also known as ISIS) in northern Syria. They’ve just taken a few small villages from ISIL. There’s hope but they need help.
Q: How do we ensure we arm the right guys? Are you confident we will?
We have been sending and allowing our friends to send U.S. anti-tank weapons to a series of groups for months and there’s no evidence of their being misused. So there are people we are already working whom we can trust.
Q: Is there a danger to trying to simultaneously weaken Syrian dictator Bashar Assad while we’re going after ISIS?
We’d like to see him weakened, since we want new negotiations for a new government, and it’s Assad who has refused to bargain. So weakening him would be a better strategy.
Q: What’s the danger of failing to do that?
Then it’s sort of like the clapping of one hand in going after ISIS.
Q: How long of a project is this if you’re going to be committed to succeeding?
A couple of years at least.
Q: How many distinct rebel groups are there, and how do they relate to one another?
We’ve identified about 1,500, but many are just four guys with a video camera. There are perhaps 15 to 20 serious ones. Many operate in only one or two geographic areas.
They coordinate loosely with others in their areas. We have seen some who operate in one or two areas forming military councils with unified command structures. So in the Aleppo and Damascus areas, in the Golan area, they have formed broader provincial commands.
Q: Does weakening one or two of them strengthen the others?
It helps us achieve our goal if we weaken some of the opposition by strengthening others.
Q: Will bombing ISIS fighters produce more ISIS fighters? What do we do after we hit the obvious targets from the air and they melt into the civilian population?
Bombing will produce more in the short term, but if we combine this with increasing assistance to more moderate groups, there will be fewer recruits going to ISIS, because they see they have other alternatives.
And their melting into the civilian population means we need quality ground troops.
Q: What worries you the most?
Well, instead of empowering the moderate armed groups we will depend on, we will disempower them by not coordinating with them in advance and working with them. We could continue to aggravate the fragmentation among multiple groups by supplying multiple groups directly instead of sending all materials through one unified Syrian opposition command.
Such a unified opposition command would then be responsible for allocating the material assistance. That will make one powerful command structure.
In fact, I was talking to the French ambassador to Syria, who noted how, after the Nazis took over France, our aid wasn’t sent to many opposition groups but largely funneled through (legendary resistance leader and future French President Charles) de Gaulle.
He made the key decisions, and it was obviously effective.
Q: Where does this end?
It only ends with a new government in Syria, a unity government that can rally most Syrians, a large majority, against ISIS.
jwarren@nydailynews.com
