NEW YORK — Foreign Affairs magazine may have just given Syrian dictator Bashar Assad his biggest opportunity to promote himself in recent months, but the outlet’s managing editor wants to make clear that he didn’t buy Assad’s rhetoric.
Jonathan Tepperman, who interviewed Assad in Damascus on Jan. 20, wrote a Washington Post op-ed on Friday that warned against any cooperation with the Syrian regime. The op-ed challenged what appears to be a growing consensus in Washington circles — including, as revealed by The Huffington Post, at the highest levels of the Obama administration — that Assad should be left in power because he could be useful in the U.S.-led fight against Islamic State militants.
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Assad knows how to play on that hierarchy of concerns — and to exploit the related worldview that leads many in Washington to see the threat of the Islamic State as a bigger concern than the tyranny of his regime.
Tepperman closed his commentary by underscoring how difficult it would be to both cooperate with Assad and work with the Syrian rebels. Assad, he wrote, “is ready to concede absolutely nothing to bring the sides together … all his enemies, in the region and in the West, must capitulate and concede the merits of his own twisted arguments.”
