Why has the U.S. refrained from intervening in the Syrian civil war? It’s not out of fear of getting dragged into a Middle Eastern conflict, Lee Smith argues, but in order to placate Iran:
As President Obama wrote to the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, “the U.S.’s military operations inside Syria aren’t targeted at Mr. Assad or his security forces.” The president didn’t do anything to bring down Assad because he was afraid it might anger the Syrian president’s patrons in Iran, and getting a nuclear deal with Iran was Obama’s foreign-policy priority.
There is plenty that the president might have done to support Syrian rebels . . . without ever risking putting American forces on the ground in Syria. . . . Obama, however, kept his eyes on the prize: the Iran deal. . . .
According to the White House’s negotiating partners in Tehran, it’s not their fault if Assad has to keep killing people. No, says Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, it’s those demanding Assad’s ouster who “are responsible for the bloodshed in Syria.” [But] of course it’s Zarif and Iranian allies—from Assad and Hizballah to Iraqi and other foreign Shiite-majority militias—who . . . are still responsible for the vast majority of the deaths in the Syrian conflict. It’s Assad and his Iranian patrons who are responsible for turning what started as a peaceful protest movement against the regime into a civil war that has caused around a quarter-million deaths in four and a half years.
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