RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.wsj.com/articles/our-man-in-damascus-1422232552

President Obama is cutting short his visit to India to stop in Saudi Arabia to pay his respects on the death of King Abdullah and no doubt try to repair what has been a fraying relationship. It’s a good move, but he’ll need an explanation for the latest stories that the U.S. is suddenly prepared to live with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.

For several years Mr. Obama has said Assad must leave power as part of ending Syria’s four-year civil war. But Administration sources are now leaking that the President thinks Assad and his Alawite regime may be part of the solution. The thinking seems to be that the priority now is defeating Islamic State, and Assad is an ally in that effort.

Where to begin? As the Saudis will point out, the first problem with these leaks is that they send a confusing signal about U.S. policy. When he unrolled his anti-Islamic State (ISIS) strategy in September, Mr. Obama promised to support anti-Assad rebels who aren’t aligned with ISIS or al Qaeda. This is hard enough given Mr. Obama’s failure to protect the rebels against Assad’s air force. But it will be impossible if the world thinks Assad is our man in Damascus after all.

Aligning with Assad will also undermine the anti-ISIS coalition that Mr. Obama said in his State of the Union address is broad and stalwart. Apart from the Iraqis and Kurds, the two most important nations in that coalition are Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Both are enemies of Assad and have been urging the U.S. to more actively assist in his ouster. The Turks in particular have offered only tepid support because Mr. Obama won’t assist the anti-Assad rebels with some kind of no-fly safe haven.

Assad and Iran also aren’t doing all that much to defeat Islamic State, which continues to hold major chunks of Syria. Instead they have focused on defeating the non-jihadist rebels that Mr. Obama has said the U.S. supports. This makes strategic sense for Assad, who wants to become the only alternative to ISIS so the West will have nowhere else to turn.

The longer-term worry is that propping up Assad will assist Iran’s strategy to become the dominant regional power to the detriment of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Israel. Those U.S. allies fear that this is precisely what Mr. Obama is moving toward—an entente with Iran that starts with a nuclear accord that leaves Tehran on the cusp of having the bomb whenever it chooses. Then the U.S. winks at Assad’s survival in Syria.

In return, Iran doesn’t interfere with the U.S.-Baghdad-Kurdish offensive this year to reclaim Iraqi territory from ISIS. Islamic State might be diminished, but the price would be an arc of Iranian influence from the Persian Gulf through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean.

How this helps America’s long-term interests is hard to see. The U.S. would have degraded one radical jihadist threat, ISIS, in return for empowering another one, Shiite radicals backed by the bomb. Congress should ask the Administration to clarify if Assad really is Mr. Obama’s man in Damascus.