President Obama's decision to provide military aid to Syrian rebel forces does not mean the United States' goal must now be the defeat of dictator Bashar Assad, foreign policy experts said Thursday.
It can also hasten a peaceful end to a brutal civil war that has killed more than 90,000 people, they say.
Most conflicts end "with some sort of diplomatic solution, a fig leaf for the losing side," said Marina Ottaway, a Middle East scholar at the Wilson Center, a think tank in Washington.
The White House said Thursday that Assad's use of chemical weapons in the conflict crossed a red line set by Obama more than a year ago and persuaded him to end his objection to arming the rebels. He did not say when he would announce what kind of specific assistance the USA would provide.
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Rebels fighters need anti-tank and shoulder-fired anti-aircraft to prevail in their fight against forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad, she said. They have also asked for a no-fly zone to ground Assad's warplanes.
Assad's planes and helicopters have attacked the rebels with near immunity, and "depriving the air force of this total immunity could be a game changer," Ottaway said.
After months of battles, Assad's forces this month took a strategic region near the border of Lebanon that had been held by rebels for more than a year. Fighters from the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah have flooded the country to help Assad, and his forces have retaken parts of the rebel stronghold of Aleppo.
Ottaway says the rebels have also been getting help from foreign fighters, but lack the right kind of weaponry to hold off the tanks and fighter jets of Assad's military.
Michael Singh, managing director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said military assistance to the rebels will actually help the diplomatic efforts to end the war by putting more pressure on Assad to seek a compromise or risk defeat. Secretary of State John Kerry is trying to organize a peace conference in Geneva.
"The United States must make clear that its assistance is conditional upon engaging productively in diplomacy and entertaining reasonable compromise," Singh wrote on his think tank's website.
Washington needs to send the same message to allies, such as Turkey, Qatar, and other regional actors, that are currently helping the rebels independently of Washington and one another, he said. "A more active and decisive U.S. policy will give these allies something to rally behind, and the United States will need to push them to unify their efforts and diplomatic positions."
Western military assistance to the rebels may also convince Russia that military victory is not an alternative to diplomatic bargaining, Singh said.
"To do so, the United States must credibly put on the table the option of military intervention — both direct (through airstrikes, for example) and indirect, through arming elements of the Syrian opposition whose interests are aligned with those of the United States," he said.
However, Ottaway said there is a risk of the weapons getting into the hands of anti-American terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al Nusrah.
"I am not sure our intelligence is good enough to know who can be trusted," she said. But most rebels "will have their hands filled fighting Assad" and Western powers can limit the risk by controlling the flow of weapons, Ottaway said.
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