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Which Syrians? Very few supporters of either Assad or the PYD would relish rule by the warlords now in control of much of northern Syria, which is what this policy amounts to. Comparisons between Syria & Libya are almost meaningless in any case: the faultlines are so differenthttps://twitter.com/shadihamid/status/1216779646173425664…
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well, that's fine. we don't need to agree :) but that's what I mean by Libya scenario
Who would you have replaced Assad with in this scenario? How would you have prevented the ethnic & sectarian divisions which Syria possesses but Libya does not spiralling into a post-intervention conflict which the US would now own?
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Syria already has ethnic and sectarian divisions. It's unclear to me why "preventing" them would have needed to be a goal of US policy
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If you reread the question, the goal would be preventing those pre-existing divisions spiralling into an ethnic/sectarian conflict after the US has assumed responsibility for the country
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Likely someone he hadn't yet killed?
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Very obviously, the question means "what government imposed by US force of arms would be sufficiently regarded as legitimate by opponents of the rebels (not solely supporters of the regime) to avoid continued conflict the US would be obliged to quell?"
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A number of us wrote quite a bit about this at the time. I don't mean to be dismissive, but there's just no way I can answer this in a tweet or two. But we did have answers (whether they would have satisfied everyone is a different issue)
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If you could point me towards those answers, I'd be very grateful
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The problem in Syria wasn't ethnic & sectarian divisions it was the fact that the Assad regime had the instruments of death & destruction and a free hand to use them. Barrel bombs, Sednaya, CW of course, starvation sieges, targeting hospitals and rescue workers, etc.
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Also let's not pretend that ethnic & sectarian divisions haven't occurred even with the regime in place. This idea of the regime holding the country together is a ludicrous fantasy. One of the first things the regime did was invite Hezbollat & Iran to come save it.
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It’s not about “replacing” Assad. The goal of intervention - by that, I mean regular retaliatory strikes against military assets as a deterrence to continued killing of civilians - would have been to stop the killing of civilians. After that, context of peace talks etc changes.
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