http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ivan-eland/the-experts-are-wrong-in_b_10568192.html

The “Experts” Are Wrong in Advocating Escalation in Syria

06/20/2016 

Ivan Eland Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty, The Independent Institute

More than U.S. 50 mid-level diplomats have sent a memo through the State Department’s “dissent channel” to a likely sympathetic Secretary of State John Kerry, advocating an American bombing campaign to bring Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to the negotiating table in the bloody Syrian civil war. The memo concluded, “It is time that the United States, guided by our strategic interests and moral convictions, lead a global effort to put an end to this conflict once and for all.”

Because it is even remotely unclear what strategic interests the United States has in Syria—other than perhaps crippling Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters, who are in opposition to Assad—President Obama and his military commanders have been reluctant to get into it with Assad directly, despite much pressure to do so from inside the government and from congressional hawks. They correctly ask what would happen if Assad were actually deposed from power by U.S. military action. Amazingly, the experts’ memo and congressional hawks have never addressed this question.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ivan-eland/the-experts-are-wrong-in_b_10568192.html