Too late for Syria

To borrow the climactic line from “Easy Rider,” “We blew it.” Or, to be fully accurate, President Obama blew an unprecedented chance to aid Syria’s then-moderate opposition back in 2011.

We could have helped end the monstrous Assad regime, gaining good will and practical advantage in a hopeful new state.

Now it’s too late. And Obama may be ready to act at last. The result could be disastrous.

Strategy isn’t only about doing the right thing, but about doing the right thing at the right time. Doing what appears to be the “right thing” too late often makes things worse.

How did the window for aiding the Syrian rebels close?

As our president looked away month after month, a hopeful, homespun revolution to overthrow a dictatorship hardened into a sectarian bloodbath. Unwilling to aid genuine freedom fighters seeking inclusive government, Obama handed off the mission to the Saudis and Gulf Arabs.

But the Gulf Arabs and Saudis don’t want a rule-of-law democracy in Syria that might give their own people ideas. They need Syria to be another Islamist state without women’s rights, press freedom or anything resembling tolerance.

So these repressive states we claim as allies armed hardline jihadi factions, while wealthy individuals sponsored involvement by terrorist outsiders (including al Qaeda), giving their governments deniability.

The result? A brave freedom struggle morphed into a vicious pan-Arab and Iranian struggle over Syria’s future. This is now a regional war fought by proxies.

On the insurgent side, moderates have been marginalized in the military sphere. If Assad falls, Sunni Islamist gunmen will rule. On the Baathist regime’s side, Iran is Assad’s key backer and Hezbollah supplies Shia thugs.

Nor is the insurgency unified. Abhorring the Muslim Brotherhood, the Saudis back Wahhabi extremists. For their part, the Qataris and others back the Muslim Brotherhood, with quiet support from the non-Arab Turks.

Now we’re reduced to choosing between devils: Do we aid an insurgency increasingly dominated by extremists and outright terrorists, or do we accept the continued rule of Baathist fascists buttressed by Shia fanatics?

Maybe it’s time to come to our senses and see that this isn’t our fight. The human suffering in Syria is appalling, but Arabs are doing this to each other. If the Saudis, with their impressive US-supplied arsenal, won’t intervene directly, why should we? If our NATO-partner Turks, with the region’s most-potent military, won’t stop the butchery, why is doing so our responsibility?

In the brutal light of Realpolitik, is it a bad thing to have the last Baathists, Hezbollah, and Salafist fanatics killing each other? Yes, the suffering’s deplorable. But consider what happened when we leapt into the endless Afghan civil war.

Do we have the sophistication to get this right? No.

As for Israel’s supporters — of which I am one — shouldn’t we recognize that, with Israel’s mortal enemies busy slaughtering each other, they’re not killing Israelis? Might it not be useful if Syria remained a Vietnam for fanatical Islamists, Hezbollah and Arab nationalists alike?

At this point, is the odious Assad regime faintly preferable to a radical jihadi state? As someone who long backed the rebels, I have to put this question to myself honestly.

What are our security interests? The key issue is the safety of the regime’s chemical weapons. Our military contingencies should focus solely on preventing the dissemination of weapons of mass destruction to fanatics.

Syria’s complexity is daunting: A major regional struggle for hegemony waged as a proxy war; a showdown between Sunni and Shia, with minorities trapped in the middle; a parallel contest between modernizers and fundamentalists; and the bloody dissolution of the artificial borders imposed by Europeans at the Versailles peace conference nine decades ago.

This is a titanic struggle. We have to make sure we’re not the ultimate losers.

Has Obama backed himself into a corner with his red-line braggadocio? He suddenly seems to see 50 shades of red; let’s hope that caution continues: We must be wary of letting chemical-weapons use lure us into abetting the rise of a terrorist state in Syria.

If Arabs will not help their brothers and sisters, why should we? The Syria crisis is an Arab failure. Let’s not make it America’s failure, too.

Ralph Peters is the author of the forthcoming Civil War novel “Hell or Richmond.”