WORLD_ Assad is an enemy of Isil, but not the West’s ally- Telegraph View

The Telegraph

Assad is an enemy of Isil, but not the West’s ally

Telegraph View: The persistence of the odious Syrian president in the face of Isil has exposed the incoherent of Western foreign policy

By Telegraph View
8:15PM GMT 10 Feb 2015 
Comments : 1

The BBC’s interview with President Bashar al–Assad was a reminder of an inconvenient truth for Western policy-makers: the Syrian leader is still in place and is no closer to being ousted than he was before the civil war began four years ago. It can sometimes be hard to reconcile Assad’s soft-spoken emollience with the tyrant who has countenanced the gassing of his own people and the destruction of much of his country. But for all his efforts to convince international opinion that he is the injured party, he bears the greatest responsibility for the disaster that has overtaken Syria.

Moreover, his refusal to accept any blame for the baleful progress of the war, or to acknowledge the appalling behaviour of his armed forces, is an insult to our intelligence. His flippant denial of the use of barrel bombs against civilians was especially egregious.

None the less, Mr Assad is still ensconced in Damascus, seemingly immune to the international opprobrium heaped upon him and protected by Russia and China in the UN Security Council. It is increasingly hard to see, therefore, how any solution to the Syrian tragedy is possible without involving him.

Western policy until recently has been clear: there could be no settlement that envisaged a continued role for the ruling regime, even one that involved carving out a separate Alawite enclave in a fractured Syria. President Obama and David Cameron have both gone on record to insist that Mr Assad can never be part of Syria’s future. But as he reminded his BBC audience, the Islamist insurgency in Syria and Iraq has suddenly placed the West and President Assad on the same side, against a common enemy.

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If the realities of his continued presence need to be faced, however, the West cannot simply desert the non-Islamist, anti-Assad Syrian forces whose rebellion they have encouraged but who face isolation. In the end, the slow collapse of Syria’s economy may sweep away the Assad regime into the sands of history; but for now, if the suffering in Syria is to end soon, new ways must be explored to establish whether some sort of political settlement is possible.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor, suggested that the fact that Mr Assad was prepared to give him an interview indicated that the dictator is feeling as secure as at any time since the war started. Above all, his durability has exposed the incoherence of Western foreign policy towards the Middle East, which on almost every occasion – from the invasion of Iraq to the enthusiastic support of the so-called Arab Spring – has been naive at best and calamitous at worst.

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