One issue that came up several times in the congressional hearings on the authorization for the use of force in Syria is whether or not the U.S. will markedly weaken the Assad regime in its targeted bombing campaign. Secretary of State John Kerry equivocated when asked this question several times, careful not to indicate that weakening the Assad regime would necessarily mean strengthening the Syrian rebels.
In other exchanges, Kerry, along with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey, spoke favorably about the rebel opposition, claiming it “has increasingly become more defined by its moderation, more defined by the breadth of its membership and more defined by its adherence to some, you know, democratic process and to an all-inclusive, minority-protecting constitution, which will be broad-based and secular with respect to the future of Syria.”
Apparently in answer to such claims (which, by the way are new and came only after President Obama decided to bomb the Assad regime “to make a point”), the New York Times today has published a sickening video of the same kind of barbaric rebel behavior we’ve been seeing for years. It depicts seven Syrian soldiers bearing signs of torture, bent down in front of their executioners, the rebels, and dumped into an unmarked grave somewhere in Idlib, Syria in April 2013.
A report in Foreign Policy magazine, published just as John Kerry was making dubious claims about rebel secularism to a Senate panel, also threw water on the administration’s new pro-rebel propaganda, claiming the leadership of the Free Syrian Army (supposedly the counterweight to the jihadist, al-Qaeda-linked rebels) is “on the verge of unraveling.”
Although the timing of the Times piece on “rebel brutality” is probably intentional, it’s not much different, in effect, from the video in which a rebel commander is seen mutilating a Syrian soldier, taking out his organs and biting into them. Note, also, that rebel groups have said they would use chemical weapons if they got the chance.
With regard to the first question, of whether these savage rebel groups are ones that we’d be bolstering by bombing the Assad regime, the answer is an unambiguous yes. The question then becomes, is Obama’s vaunted “credibility” more important than helping these guys make battlefield gains in a war for control over Syria?
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