Finding the Right Rebels to Arm in Syria May Be Tricky

Although Rand Paul has
abandoned the skepticism he recently expressed about the threat
posed by ISIS, the libertarian-leaning Kentucky senator continues
to argue that President Obama must obtain congressional approval
for his war against the terrorist group, and he continues to
question the wisdom of arming and training Syrian rebels. Yet

it looks like the closest thing we will see to a congressional
declaration of war in this conflict is a vote to arm and train
Syrian rebels.

Here is what Paul had to say about that strategy at a
Q&A session in Dallas on August 29:

What have we been doing in Syria for the last year? We’ve been
arming the Islamic rebels. Who do the Islamic rebels want to kill?
Christians, other minorities. And have they been doing it in Syria?
Yes, they’ve captured priests and bishops and killed them in Syria.
And who are some of these Islamic rebels? We say we only gave
[weapons] to the nice ones, the ones that say, “Please, sir, can I
have another shoulder-to-air missile or another anti-tank weapon?”
The ones that were nice, we called them moderates, but there was at
least one Republican senator [John McCain] who was over there
having his picture taken with the “moderate” rebels, [and it] turns
out some of them may have been part of ISIS….It’s difficult to
tell friend from foe….

When it came to my committee, I was one of only like two people
who voted no. Everybody, every Republican, every Democrat voted to
arm these rebels. But I told them…that some of these arms may
well be used against us at some point in time….They tell you,
“Oh, I love America. Just give me my Stinger missiles.”…It’s a
little hard to determine who is your friend and who’s not, and they
will lie, frankly, to get our weapons.

Even after declaring his support for Obama’s new war, Paul
continued to be wary of using Syrian rebels as proxies for American
troops. “Syria…has become a jihadist wonderland,” he wrote
in Time last week. “In Syria, Obama’s plan just
one year ago—and apparently Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s
desire—was to aid rebels against Assad, despite the fact that many
of these groups are al-Qaeda- and ISIS-affiliated. Until we
acknowledge that arming the Islamic rebels in Syria allowed ISIS a
safe haven, no amount of military might will extricate us from a
flawed foreign policy.”

As Robby Soave
noted on Tuesday, some of those supposedlly moderate Syrian
rebels supported by the U.S. may have sold American journalist
Steven Sotloff to ISIS, which later beheaded him in a horrifying
video that probably did more than any other single factor to boost
support for the new war—the war in which we are relying on moderate
Syrian rebels to help defeat ISIS. A
story in today’s New York Times provides further
reason to worry about Obama’s strategy of shoring up the right
rebels:

After more than three years of civil war, there are hundreds of
militias fighting President Bashar al-Assad—and one another. Among
them, even the more secular forces have turned to Islamists for
support and weapons over the years, and the remaining moderate
rebels often fight alongside extremists like the Nusra Front, Al
Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria.

“You are not going to find this neat, clean, secular rebel group
that respects human rights and that is waiting and ready because
they don’t exist,” said Aron Lund, a Syria analyst who edits the
Syria in Crisis blog for the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace….

Analysts who track the rebel movement say that the concept of
the Free Syrian Army as a unified force with an effective command
structure is a myth….

“There’s a lot of skepticism about this piece of the president’s
strategy,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of
California, a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “The
so-called moderate rebels have often been very immoderate and
ineffective.”

Despite that supposed skepticism, Congress is about to bless
this dubious strategy, even as it shies away from authorizing the
war itself. “In a rare show of unity with President Obama,” the
Times reports,
“House Republican leaders will summon their fractious members back
to the Capitol a day early next week to push through legislation to
authorize the military to train Syrian rebels for the fight against
Islamist militants.”