Syria: U.S. Is Quietly Getting Ready for Syria Without Assad (Cooper)

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The Syrian President, Bashar al Assad, has stubbornly clung to power since March, despite massive protests and a growing number of defections. Protests show no signs of going away, and the Syrian opposition is trying to organize under the leadership of the new Syrian National Council, which reportedly met inside Syria in recent days.

Still, the pace of defections remains a trickle, and Assad is not backing down. Is his regime finished?

According to Helene Cooper, of the New York Times, the Obama administration believes that the Assad regime will not survive the crisis, and they have begun to plan for a post-Assad Syria.

One of the scenarios that the US government would like to avoid is that of post-Saddam Iraq, where the nation decayed into sectarian civil war. An EA correspondent notes that it is the job of the US intelligence community to plan for the worst, and we have seen ample evidence that the opposition, both the leadership and the people in the streets, have worked to avoid such conflict. Even yesterday, protesters seemed to be working hard to deliver an opposing message.

Below is an excerpt from Helene Cooper's article:

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“The Sunnis are increasingly arming, and the situation is polarizing,” said Vali Nasr, a former Obama administration official in the State Department and the author of “The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future.”

“Iran and Hezbollah are backing the regime,” Mr. Nasr said. “There’s a lot of awareness across the regime that this is going to be pretty ugly.”

That awareness is fueling the desire to plan for a post-Assad era, Obama administration officials say. “Nobody wants another Iraq,” one administration official said on Saturday, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

At the same time, the administration does not want to look as if the United States is trying to orchestrate the outcome in Syria, for fear that the image of American intervention might do the Syrian opposition more harm than good. In particular, administration officials say that they do not want to give the Iranian government — which has huge interests in the Syrian government and is Mr. Assad’s biggest supporter — an excuse to intervene.

But one administration official pointed to the remarkable call earlier this month by Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for Mr. Assad to ease up on his crackdown as a sign that even Iran’s leaders are worried about the Syrian president’s prospects.

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