It Looks Like Obama Fell for ‘The Biggest Myth Out There’ in Syria

President Barack Obama's stance of calling on Syrian President Bashar Assad to transition out of power while maintaining basic government functions after he's ousted is a “fantasy” in the context of how the country works, according to Tony Badran, a researcher at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

“The biggest myth out there is the existence of 'state institutions' separate from Assad,” Badran said in an interview.

“The reality is, once you concede the regime, you inevitably concede Assad.”

Operating under the impression that Moscow and Tehran would work with the Syrian regime to implement this agreement, in which the regime would remain mostly intact while Assad was transitioned out, Obama softened his stance on the Syrian president.

This idealistic quid pro quo, however, “betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how Syria works,” Badran said.

As Badran has said in the past, there is no “deep state” independent of the Assads that could keep the country running. Therefore, Badran said, any notion to the contrary “betrays a poor understanding of how that family has engineered the regime over the past 40 years.”

“It also shows a lack of understanding of the sources and structure of power within the Alawite community itself,” Badran added, referring to the Alawite religious clan that makes up about 12% of Syria's population. “They don't call it 'Souriya al-Assad,'” or Assad's Syria, “for nothing.”

“There is no regime without Assad, so if the Obama administration ever believed the Russians and the Iranians when they said they would try to transition Assad out, they were living in a fantasy,” Badran said. “If you take Assad out, the whole system collapses.”

But Obama evidently believed that, as Bloomberg's Josh Rogin reported last week: “Obama administration officials have been telling the Russians and the Iranians for over a year that the US would not object to an expanded security role for them inside Syria … in exchange for Russian and Iranian helping to move Assad out of power.”

In reality, Badran said, “Russia and Iran got the concessions that they wanted by telling the US what it wanted to hear.”

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