Soona Salem

In Monday night’s debate, both President Obama and Gov. Romney pledged to continue helping arm Syrian opposition militantism a careful way, excluding the foreign and domestic Islamist groups that now have an undeniable role in the conflict. Until now, this strategy has been prudent. After all, the complexity of the situation in Syria rivals that of the conflicts in Iraq and Afganistan, and direct intervention would only tangle the threads. Prudence is a good quality in Middle Eastern relations, but whatever our efforts at arming the Free Syrian Army and their offshoots actually were, they have failed to bring a timely end to the conflict that has now claimed more than 30,000 lives.

The U.S. should loosen the restrictions they have placed on heavy arms importation to rebel groups in Syria. A new Human Rights Watch report suggests that the embattled Assad is turning heavily to the use of cluster bombs, focusing on rebel-held neighborhoods in Aleppo, Damascus, Idlib, and Deir Ezzor – all areas in which he has no hope of regaining control. Assad’s untouchability in the air might be his main advantage as he threatens to drag all of Syria down with him. The use of heat-seeking, ground-to-air missiles is a minimum requirement for opposition victory according to Hanin Ghadar, editor of Now Lebanon. Middle East scholar and Syria expert Joshua Landis has also recently endorsed this position, arguing that anti-aircraft missiles would at least end the massive, one-sided destruction that the regime is able to inflict with its planes and helicopters.

We also need to be concerned about the destabilization of the region, an idea that has finally been given form by the Friday assassination of Lebanese security official Wissam Al-Hasan. The assassination, carried out by car bomb in an active residential neighborhood, is widely viewed as a Syrian revenge attack (possibly carried out by their political allies, Hezbollah) for the arrest of one of their main agents in Lebanon, Michel Samaha. Hasan, a Sunni associated with the anti-Syrian March 14 bloc, was the one who carried out the arrest. There is a strong precedent for this kind of political assassination in Lebanon: 12 anti-Syrian politicians and journalists have been killed since Syria’s 2005 withdrawal from Lebanon. The fragile political ties between Lebanon and Syria, as well as the strategic reasons for weakening Hezbollah, make Lebanon’s stability an important concern for the U.S. and its allies.

The introduction of anti-aircraft missiles would not necessarily end the conflict, but it would allow rebel militias to maintain the safety of areas they have won on the ground or where they have popular support. It would also severely limit Assad’s ability to cause widespread destruction in Syria and the region. It has long been speculated that Assad will eventually fall back to the coastal Alawite heartland. Whether this happens or not, it is unlikely he could manage control of even that region for long, as the major population centers of Tartous and Latakia have sizable Sunni populations. However, if the status quo remains, the U.S. will be giving tacit approval to Assad’s last-gasp scorched-earth campaign.