Report: Obama Administration to Increase Aid to Syrian Rebels

The Wall Street Journal reports today that
President Obama’s national security advisers have agreed on a proposal to
increase US aid to “moderate” Syrian rebels. Although the advisers disagree on
the advisability of more aggressive military intervention, they have apparently
coalesced around a plan for US Special Forces to train and equip the moderates.
This is in line with a report on Walter
Russell Mead’s blog that Obama agreed during a recent visit to
Saudi Arabia to supply the rebels with shoulder-launched anti-aircraft
missiles, or “manpads.”

One can understand the Administration’s frustration.
Two-and-a-half years after Obama said that Assad would have to go, and several
months after the President’s about-face on chemical weapons, the Assad
regime seems more secure than it has for a long time. But two factors counsel
strongly against more aggressive assistance to the rebels. First, as Patrick Brennan writes,
“for months and months now, it’s been obvious that the effective parts of the
Syrian opposition are militant Islamists” like the Nusra Front and
the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Pro-Western moderate rebels,
the sort the Administration likes to promote, are more or less
“powerless.” If the opposition were to succeed in overthrowing Assad, it’s
quite possible that the Islamists would overwhelm their secular allies—perhaps
through a democratic election, as in Egypt in 2012–and transform Syria into an
Islamist state. How would that advance America’s interests?

Second, assistance to the rebels would almost certainly
worsen the already dire situation of Syria’s Christians. Just in the last
two weeks, the Nusra Front attacked the Armenian town of Kessab, displacing
thousands of Christians. Fortunately, first reports of a massacre seem to
have been unfounded. Indeed, the rebels are conducting a PR offensive to
assure Kessab—and the world community—that they mean no harm. Christians are
skeptical, and with good reason. ISIL recently imposed
the centuries-old dhimma in a different Christian town, Raqqa, and, as
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon observed this morning, “gross
human rights violations undeniably continue.” Islamists have kidnapped
nuns and bishops and murdered clergy. Only today, masked gunmen,
presumably Islamist rebels, murdered
a Catholic priest in a rebel-controlled district in the
city of Homs. For these reasons, Syria’s Christians mostly support the
Assad regime, usually quietly, sometimes vocally.

At this writing, it’s not clear whether the plan to equip
and train the Syrian rebels will be adopted. In the words of the Journal report,
“It isn’t clear where Mr. Obama stands.”