Any nation thatcares about its credibility should keep from allying with anyone responsible for genocide, politicide, or other human rights violations, especially if the only purpose for allying with said criminals is to stop another set of criminals from doing the same thing.

Assuming, that none of you are like Putin, and you all think Stalin was deplorable, would you have allied with Stalin to fight Hitler? The answer is either yes, so get off your high horse, because Assad and the Ayatollahs are not as bad as IS. Or the answer is no, and you need to be slapped in the face with reality

^Tell that to the US

I meant @bo_sox48

+1 Socrates all around.

I frankly think more pressure must be applied to France and other EU nations to act and act with strict decisiveness.

I have been saying for months now the US and EU need to patch up their differences and present a strong, unified, and uncompromising front vs. Putin, and the bloody threat he has posed and continues to pose...

The same goes for ISIS.

Neither ISIS nor Putinist Russia are groups that listen or respond to sabre-rattling or sanctions alone...

The West will have to do more than that to curb either of them--and while they're entirely different threats, both should and must be curbed.

@ Soc Dis

When the very existence of your country is threatened it is reasonable to ally with the devil. When you are fighting a war of principle (which is what the fight against ISIL largely is) allying with someone who doesn't have any is self defeating idiocy.

Assad is better than any of the alternatives in Syria at this point. It's either A) Keep the war going on permanently, with the death toll mounting all the time, B) Support his downfall in favour of either the Al-Nusra Front or IS, and the gigantic death toll that would cause, or C) Support him with conditions, end the war, drive out the Islamists, give the Kurdish in the northeast a lot of autonomy as one of the conditions with the aim of eventually creating a united Kurdistan with the Iraqi parts and adding to the already much-weakened central authority of Damascus.

Assad winning would have the lowest overall death toll there. It's a case of the lesser of three evils.

As for Iran, the west worked with them in Afghanistan, I'm sure they can do it again.

Assad let ISIS take out the other rebel factions and is now regretting it.

You have to remember the US has a long history of propping up dictators when it hates their oppositions. Right now Assad is relatively better than ISIS since Obama didn't help the other rebel factions when they could have won.

It was Assad brutality that filled the ranks of ISIL in the first place. If ISIL are the crops of terror then Assad is the farmer. You cannot win by making the farmer stronger.

You cannot win regardless. Principle is all well and good until people are dying. Then you have to be a realist. The world isn't perfect.

The reality is that we can afford to do sweet fa and it won't hurt us much at all. Principle is the only reason to fight. The principles that Syrians and Iraqis deserve a chance at freedom and to live. Principle is the only reason to act.

What chance? Indefinite war? Islamist rule? Or Assad's rule? They're the only outcomes that will happen, and Assad is better than the other two. You're not seriously telling me the quality of life in Syria is better now than it was before the Arab Spring started, either in the war-torn areas like Homs or the IS controlled areas like Raqqa?

You'd choose to live in the parts of Damascus that were always loyal to Assad out of those 3, just as I would and anyone else sensible would.

I'm reminded of the Tony Abbott line about the Syrian war being "not goodies vs. baddies, it's baddies vs. baddies," and I'm glad I don't actually work in foreign policy for a living.

That said, wreaking havoc on the Islamic State without sending direct aid and comfort to Assad seems like the best tightrope to attempt. Yes, attacking the IS will have the effect of helping Assad, but it won't be because he has somehow become our new best pal in the Middle East.

Another "option," of course, is to let them sort themselves out and the go in with bombs blazing afterward, but that's not really politically (nor, I suspect most would say, morally) feasible.

@Octavious:

Given what ISIS is doing and how great a threat they pose to Syria and Iraq, I think it's fair to say they pose a threat to those countries.

"The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less."
--The 70 Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries

@obi

Indeed. What's your point?

The West created IS by funding and supporting the anti-Assad rebels. All the anti-Assad people here are responsible for monster that is IS.

Your policy is an absolute disaster.

Your policy was also a disaster in Libya, Mali, and west Africa, which we are still paying for.

People should really never listen to most of the webdip people again on foreign policy. Your neoconnery has created a gigantic mess in MENA that we will not recover from anytime soon.

"t was Assad brutality that filled the ranks of ISIL in the first place."

This is ahistorical nonsense. It was the Iraq war that created the vacuum that led to the ISIL, and western support that allowed them to grow stronger. The Islamists have been wanting to overthrow the Syrian government since long before Bashar al Assad.

"I have been saying for months now the US and EU need to patch up their differences and present a strong, unified, and uncompromising front vs. Putin, and the bloody threat he has posed and continues to pose...
"

Nobody wants to back your Kiev Nazis. The German business community wants to dump sanctions at the soonest opportunity. Most of Europe is not anti-Putin (only the Scandinavians and Brits are). They are being used as Washington's puppets and Washington is trying to weaken the EU, and using Ukraine to do it.

Complete tosh, Putin. Assad's brutality draw's new recruits to ISIL like moths to a flame. They will even tell you this quite freely. Also, what do you refer to when you say "your policy"? Nothing that even vaguely resembles my thoughts regarding how to handle Syria has ever taken place.

Of course they'd tell you that, because the ISIL is known for being honest and above board about their motives and aims, right?

Power vacuums lead to new recruits. Military victories lead to new recruits. These were only possible thanks to western support and western weapons. If ISIL had failed in their attacks nobody would flock to them. The reason why Al Nusra and ISIL became the primary rebel groups in Syria and not the Free Syrian Army is because the latter were better fighters. Why haven't people flocked to FSA, if your thesis is correct? Why do they flock to the most mostrous and barbarous of these rebel groups?

And you ignore the history of Syria, which is one of a near constant internal battle between Islamists and the rest of the Syria.

I say "your policy" because you've been putting Obama on blast for not being militant enough when it comes to Assad. You also criticized the disarmament agreement which has turned out to be a great success. Pretty much nothing you've said about Syria has been correct.

"Of course they'd tell you that, because the ISIL is known for being honest and above board about their motives and aims, right?"

Uh, yeah. They have. Their aim is to establish a state where their school of religious law governs. Their motive to do that is because they're Islamic supremacists. They're been quite clear.


As for allying with Assad, formally that's obviously impossible. But if we are to finally intervene in Syria to harm the Islamic State then, inevitably, we are going to be helping him. Weakening his biggest foe strengthens him. Civil wars are zero-sum like that.

No one will admit this, least of all our president, but by going in to Syria at this point we're more or less committing ourselves to a ground war. Maybe not for a while, but this opens the door. Mission creep is inevitable. A succession of radical Islamic "governments" may be tolerable in Somalia, but not there. Obama or his successor will at some point have to do more because they think it'll protect vital American interests.

And all this could have been avoided with aid to secular rebels in 2011 and the retention of a residual force in Iraq.

Not so much Obama. I was putting the Labour party on blast. Obama's meek folding when he realised allied support wouldn't happen is worthy of some scorn, but is more or less understandable.

My policy would have been to aid the more tolerable anti-government factions and to strike against the Syrian airforce and tanks etc. What we got instead was Labour's policy of doing essentially nothing but give a smidgeon of funding and encouraging words to those groups. It is a policy which has failed.

ISIL have indeed been honest. They do not hide their crimes, they keep the threats they make, and they are happily share their motives. They are a bunch of vile murdering scum, but despite that are probably the most honest group involved.

Brutality leads to new recruits. This is a simple lesson of history. Bloody Sunday sent waves of recruits to the IRA, Nazi executions fueled the French resistance, the more Tarkin tightened his grip the more star systems slipped through his fingers. Yes, ISIL being rather more competent when it comes to not being killed may syphon off more recruits to them than other groups, but the source is Assad.

Labour? Who's in government again?

A coalition. We also have a Prime Minister who believes in respecting the will of Parliament, as Prime Ministers should. It is unfortunate that Tony Blair failed to share that belief, but that is a different debate.

Is it a grand coalition?

A what?

A grand coalition is when the major right wing and major left wing parties are in government together.

What I'm getting at is this. Labour's not in government. Criticism of British foreign policy falls at Cameron's feet.

Parliament decides our wars, not Government or Prime Ministers. That is a principle our Prime Minister believes in, along with most MPs and the British people and myself. Labour led the argument against military action and they won the vote. You may criticize Cameron for failing to argue well enough, but not for allowing the debate in the first place. Labour I criticise for being on the wrong side of the debate.

I don't know. It seems like you're really reaching to blame Labour for Cameron's policy errors. Cameron could have been giving aid short of war for years.

“How far should western nations go in allying with IS' enemies, such as Assad in Syria and the Ayatollahs in Iran?”

No course of action yields a predictable result when it comes to Middle East foreign policy. This choice doesn’t matter.

The policy of supporting those who oppose Assad is what created IS in the first place. Was this the intent? Of course not. As such the West has no idea what it’s doing, and when it does something, the outcome is unpredictable.

The only question that matters is, “would anything else be better than this?” Because the only thing you know, if you do anything at all, is you’re going to get something else, rather than some predicted outcome.

Opposing Assad did not create the Islamic State. This group is al Qaeda in Iraq renamed and now independent of the parent organization. By only opposing Assad rhetorically and giving virtually no aid to the secular and moderate rebels in 2011-2012, the defeated remnants of al Qaeda found a new home in Syria. The atrocities of Assad drove people into the new group's arms, and since no American forces remained in Iraq they were able to make a run to the gates of Baghdad.

Slight policy changes in 2011-2012 would have prevented the current disaster. Maybe there would have been a different disaster. We can never know. And it's not as if everything would be sunshine and lollipops if different policies were pursued a few years ago. But the situation we are in now is a direct result of this president's woefully misguided foreign policy.

What do you think of this article?
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/11/iraq-misguided-military-action-created-isis-al-qaida

+1 to this comment:
"These guys are deluded central planners..."world-improvers"..."do-gooders".
Or just greedy power-mad hegemonic neocon warmongers.
But they really do believe that militarism can solve their economic and geopolitical problems."

I think the economic policies and geopolitical strategies that the US (with the complicity of other countries and entities) held, created monsters they couldn't see until they were too big, and they didn't (and still don't) realize every step they give feed these monsters even more.