The Diane Rehm Show , May 11, 2012
MS. DIANE REHM
Thanks for joining us. I'm Diane Rehm. Twin
suicide bombings in Syria kill at least 55 and injure hundreds. Voters in
France and Greece oust incumbent leaders and Russia clamps down on protests of
Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency. Joining me to talk about the week's
top international stories on the Friday News Roundup, David Sanger of The New
York Times, Susan Glass of Foreign Policy magazine and Matt Frei of the UK's
Channel 4 News
GLASSER
You have an al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen,
you have the al-Qaida affiliate now in Somalia where the homegrown
terrorist group, al Shabaab, .. becoming part of the broader al-Qaida
franchise.
Look at what happened yesterday in Syria
with the largest bombing to date so far in that long running brewing
civil war against the Assad regime. There's
real questions about who exactly carried it out, but there's real concern
that al-Qaida-like or possibly even al-Qaida affiliated fighters have joined
the broad-based fight against Assad.
SANGER
.. who it is who's fighting Assad and it's
the reason that the United States has not come in to go arm
the rebels in Syria. You're never quite sure who it is you're arming and if
you do arm them, how long will those arms stay around? ..
the defining experience was arming the
mujahidin against the Soviets in the 1980s and then discovering that those
anti-aircraft weapons were being used, and other weapons were being used
against the United States after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
American officials who I've talked to in
the past few days about Syria tell me that it is precisely this problem that is
likely to keep the U.S. from either directly intervening or directly arming.
However, there's always the possibility
that Gutter or the Saudis or somebody is going to end up arming
the opposition here.
FREI
I was speaking to senior British officials
a few months ago and they made it quite clear that while there was no policy to arm the rebels from the UK
or France or from the United States, there is a clear policy to allow the Saudis and the Qatars to send money,
if not turn a blind eye to weapons.
We're going to see more and more of this using Saudi Arabia as a conduit for
basically doing, conducting in our policy in that part of the world.
.. this is the reason why the U.S. policy
towards arming the Syrian rebels has stopped short. But at the same time,
this is a very split opposition. The legitimate, popular opposition, you
know guys, “if you're not going to send us any help we're going to
have to turn to people like al-Qaida. We're going to increasingly flirt
with those extremist elements because for us this is an extensional battle and
if we don't get help from more legitimate quarters, we're going to have to go
less legitimate ones.”
GLASSER
the sort of policy dilemma that the United States and its Western allies find
itself in because in the end what's happening right now without major
support from the West is that both sides are being pulled towards their
extremes. And if the U.S. doesn't find a way to support the sort of popular
middle of this uprising, then increasingly it may be taken over by the kind of
extremists who remember drove events in next door Iraq for many years.
REHM
What happened to the cease-fire back on
April 12th?
SANGER
The Kofi Anon mission, nobody thought that
Kofi Anon was going to be able to go pull this off. No one really expected this to go very
smoothly.
The problem is that Assad knew from the
moment that he signed this that the West did not have a plan B. It is not as if he violated this and it was
clear what penalty he was going to suffer. Russia and China were still
blocking significant UN action, the Iranians have continued to send in
enough to keep the regime alive.
Now, there are sort of two ways to
look at what the ultimate survivability of the regime is. Many American
officials, including President Obama, have said that over the long term this is
fatal to Assad. That he can't hold on. Nobody's defined what the long
term is okay. He is certainly running out of money. The efforts to look at
where their current is suggests that they've depleted the treasury by at least
half since all of this started. There are lots of embargos. That said, there's no
sign the Syrian military has cracked.
