Every once in a while, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey steps in to pour some much-needed cold water on the red-hot rhetoric in favor of escalating US military support against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. These days in Washington, Assad is the closest one gets to Osama bin Laden. No one has a good word to say about him. Even if there were, one would hardly dare suggest it, so unassailable are the moral choices posed by Washington. Whatever qualms exist about increasing US support for the opposition are a function of the opposition’s own shortcomings, from its political incoherence to the growing prominence of bin Laden wannabes in numbers that threaten to exceed anything in the last two decades. The list is long and getting longer by the day.
Changing the debate in Washington on the question of investing US power on behalf of the rebels is therefore no easy task, but Dempsey’s July 19 letter to Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has done just that by forcing the policymakers to confront a fact that a majority of the American public, hesitant to invest US power in yet another Middle East military adventure, has almost instinctively grasped.
