Rand Paul’s Bold Stand Against Arming Islamist Syrian Rebels

“The time to act and turn the tide against Assad is now,” Senator Menendez said at a hearing on his bill. “The United States must play a role in tipping the scales toward opposition groups and working to build a free and democratic Syria.”

Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), along with Democratic Senators Chris Murphy (Connecticut) and Tom Udall (New Mexico) voted against the bill. Senator Paul’s proposed amendments striking the bill’s weapons provision and ruling out the authorization of the use of military force in Syria were rejected.

Senator Paul tried to introduce a dose of reality into the deliberations on the bill, but the bill went ahead anyway. “This is an important moment,” Senator Paul warned. “You will be funding, today, the allies of al-Qaida. It’s an irony you cannot overcome.”

The bill’s supporters took refuge in the bill’s stipulation that weapons and military training would go only to those members of the opposition forces who “have been properly and fully vetted and share common values and interests with the United States.”

This is sheer fantasy. The Syrian opposition is hopelessly fragmented, but it is al-Qaida affiliates and other Islamist jihadist groups in Syria who dominate the opposition’s armed forces. …

During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in April, [Joint Chiefs Chairman] General [Martin] Dempsey testified: “My military judgment is that now that we have seen the emergence of al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham notably, and now that we have seen photographs of some of the weapons that have been flowing into Syria in the hands of those groups, now I am more concerned than I was before.”

Libya provides good reason for General Dempsey’s concern. After the Obama administration had secretly given its blessing in 2011 for Qatar, a U.S. ally in the Gulf region, to ship arms to Libyan rebels, the administration belatedly woke up to the fact that these arms were ending up in the hands of jihadists who hate Americans.

They were “more antidemocratic, more hard-line, closer to an extreme version of Islam” than the main rebel alliance in Libya, said a former Defense Department official according to a December 5, 2012 New York Times article.

The same thing appears to be happening with arms transferred by Qatar and Saudi Arabia to the Syrian rebels, with U.S. intelligence and logistical support.

“The opposition groups that are receiving the most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we don’t want to have it,” an American official familiar with the arms transfers was quoted by The New York Times as saying in October 2012.

Supporters of direct U.S. arms transfers to Syria seem to believe the risk of arms getting into al-Qaida and its affiliates’ hands can be greatly reduced if the U.S. itself retains control over who gets its weapons by first carefully vetting the proposed recipients. This argument is fatally flawed.

The Syrian opposition has no effective centralized political or military leadership. Ahmed Mouaz al-Khatib, a Sunni Islamist opposition activist, who had served as president of the U.S.-supported political opposition umbrella group, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces (National Coalition), resigned in April. His willingness to negotiate with Syrian government figures had drawn criticism from the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which has a seat in the umbrella National Coalition. At the same time, Khatib took issue with the Obama administration’s decision to designate the al-Qaida-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra Front as a terrorist organization.

The National Coalition incorporated the existing Syrian National Council (SNC) in which the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood has substantial influence. The Muslim Brotherhood’s deputy leader Mohammed Farouq Tayfour serves as the SNC’s deputy president. Tayfour said that the al-Nusra Front is well-liked by the Syrian people. “They are seen as [a group that] can be relied on to defend the country and the civilians against the regular army and Assad’s gangs,” Tayfour said.

In other words, within the umbrella
opposition group supported by the Obama administration is a national council with a Muslim Brotherhood leader as its deputy president who sees nothing wrong with the al-Qaida-affiliated al-Nusra Front.

If this were not confusing enough, there is a separate opposition Supreme Military Command Council, in which there are varying views of the legitimacy of the political umbrella National Coalition and the degree to which the opposition military forces should submit to the National Coalition’s oversight. In any case, Islamist militia groups who do not recognize the legitimacy of the National Coalition at all remain the most capable opposition armed groups on the ground.

Even assuming that U.S. military and intelligence officials can pinpoint the friendly “moderate” elements within the Syrian opposition to receive our arms, there is no effective control the U.S. can exercise once the arms are out of our hands. The recipients can decide to voluntarily turn over the weapons to Islamist jihadist forces on the grounds, stated by the Arab proverb, that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Even more likely is that the jihadists will turn on the weaker “moderate” fighters and seize the U.S.-provided weapons for their own use against Americans and other “infidels” as well as Assad.

Finally, until the entire Libyan mess gets sorted out, it will be a grave mistake to court more trouble by getting any deeper into the Syrian civil war.

At the very least, the Obama administration’s entire Libyan operation needs to be fully and publicly vetted before we even consider for one moment embarking on any vetting of Syrian opposition forces to receive U.S. arms.

This article appeared in print on page 10 of the May 27th, 2013 edition of Hamodia.