France launched a new air strike overnight in Syria against an Islamic State training camp and further strikes will follow, Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Friday. “France hit Daesh (Islamic State) in Syria last night in Raqqa… It is not the first time, nor will it be the last time,” Le Drian said on Europe 1 radio.
The U.S. seems less committed than France, however. This morning, we learn from Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt at the New York Times that:
The Obama administration has ended the Pentagon’s $500 million program to train and equip Syrian rebels, administration officials said on Friday, in an acknowledgment that the beleaguered program had failed to produce any kind of ground combat forces capable of taking on the Islamic State in Syria
And, as Josh Rogin and Eli Lake write at Bloomberg:
A week into Russia’s military intervention in Syria, some top White House advisers and National Security Council staffers are trying to persuade President Barack Obama to scale back U.S. engagement there, to focus on lessening the violence and, for now, to give up on toppling the Syrian regime.
There was a time when getting rid of Assad was the United States’ objective in Syria. A time when we warned him about “red lines” and how he was on the wrong side of the magisterial force known as “History.” But, then, who needs History when you have Russia on your side. To paraphrase Stalin, “How many divisions – or fighter bombers – does History have?”
So:
Obama’s foreign-policy team no longer doubts that Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to prop up President Bashar al-Assad and primarily target opposition groups other than the Islamic State, including those trained by the Central Intelligence Agency.
So, maybe the French will get it done.
