THE NIGHTMARE OPTIONS

Suddenly Syria is getting deadly serious. The trouble is every strategy facing Washington is terrifying ly dangerous. Your move, Mr President ...

THe shocking images of Syrian children gassed to death have rightly provoked outrage, disgust and heartbreak throughout the civilised world.

Now there is a groundswell of opinion that something — anything — should be done by the West to ensure that such an atrocity can never happen again. U.S. President Donald Trump quickly reassessed his former praise of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, effectively declaring him an enemy of the American people — and threatening unspecified retaliation in the near future.

The stark reality is that the atrocity, if indeed deliberately carried out by the Syrian regime, is especially embarrassing for Trump. For the monstrous act came just days after his Ambassador to the UN declared Assad to be a potential ally in the fight against ISIS, and dropped calls for him to stand down.

Many, however, remain sceptical of the claim the Syrian regime would deliberately target its own civilians. What would Assad have to gain by provoking the West’s wrath just days after being given a green light by the White House to stay in power?

At this stage, chemical weapons experts are divided on the credibility of claims from Assad’s Russian allies that the killings were a tragic accident, the result of Syrian fighter jets bombing a chemical weapons stockpile controlled by Syrian opposition rebels.

Still, as the war drums thump again in Washington, Trump insists that in considering America’s response, nothing is off the table. So what are his options, and what would the repercussions be?

STRATEGIC AIR STRIKES

ONE option presented to President Trump by top military brass at the Pentagon and NATO as they guide him through Syria ‘wargame’ scenarios is strategic air strikes.

The goal would be to punish and weaken the Syrian government and military, with the threat of more to follow if Damascus commits what Washington considers to be further crimes against humanity. However, Russia and Syria have a long-standing mutual defence treaty, dating back to the Seventies.

This means Moscow would also immediately consider such aggression against Syria as a declaration of war, leading to direct confrontation between the U.S. and Russia.

The problem for Trump is that in Syria, Russia is well-prepared to face down such a threat. Last year there were thought to be around 4,000 Russian troops in the country, though some have been withdrawn.

Since it joined the civil war in support of Assad two years ago, Russia has also built an advanced military base in Latakia, and expanded its heavily fortified naval base on the Mediterranean at Tartus — both located in the regime’s coastal heartland.

And both are equipped with Russia’s most advanced S-400 air defence missile system, capable of destroying airborne targets as far as 250 miles away with deadly accuracy.

If the Russians chose to retaliate, U.S. aircraft flying over Syrian skies would soon be falling like flies, while few American long-range missiles — fired from aircraft carriers offshore, or military bases in the region — would reach their targets on the ground.

American generals will also warn their excitable President that not all such precision-guided missiles actually reach their intended targets. The inevitable accidental bombing by America of schools and hospitals would outrage Syrians. They would rally round their president. It would also, of course, undermine the moral authority — based on the murder of Syrian children — for launching airstrikes in the first place.

GROUND INVASION

A U.S.-LeD military ground invasion — though an extremely remote possibility — is still being touted by some hawkish politicians and military experts in the U.S. as a last resort, should the Assad regime descend into uncontrolled tyrannical bloodshed.

But Trump surely understands that such an undertaking would be an extremely high risk politically, given that it would result in massive casualties, and be fraught with logistical difficulties on the ground.

The Syrian army is more than 100,000 strong, which means the U.S. and its allies would have to deploy perhaps half a million troops to fight them, as well as their allies, and then occupy the country. That aside, there isn’t an obvious friendly country from which to launch such an invasion.

The occupying American army would quickly become a target for ISIS fighters, of whom there are thousands in Syria. Those U.S. troops would also offer the terror group a powerful new recruitment propaganda tool. The

prospect of U.S. soldiers being taken prisoner, paraded on TV and beheaded should be enough to chill the blood of any hotheads in Washington.

In order to secure Syria, as well as fighting ISIS, U.S.-led troops would simultaneously find themselves battling Syrian and Russian troops, in addition to thousands of battle-hardened, Assad-supporting militia men from his ally, Iran.

In short, the drawn out consequences of a full-scale U.S.-led invasion would be so catastrophic as to make the chaotic and bloody aftermath of the Iraq invasion seem like a high school prom.

Even if U.S. troops leading a new ‘Coalition of the Willing’ did miraculously manage to occupy Syria after ousting Assad, they would then find themselves occupying the coastal region along the Med.

There, the majority is from the Alawite sect — a branch of Shia Islam — which means they are overwhelmingly supportive of their fellow-Alawite, President Assad. American troops would not be welcomed by the locals.

AID PRO-WEST REBELS

THE main criticism of the Western response to the uprising in Syria against Assad when it began six years ago was that not enough was done to give financial and military support to the moderate, pro-West rebels who took up arms in the name of freedom and democracy.

This line of thinking argues that the obama administration dithered because of an unwillingness to get bogged down in yet another intractable Middle East conflict following the disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

So could renewed support, authorised by Trump, for these moderate rebels be the most pragmatic way of piling pressure on the Syrian regime? That would be a tall order, to put it mildly.

For a start, the number of non-Islamist rebels is minuscule. And almost all of those who did exist have since either defected to jihadist groups or formed alliances with them (for fear of being slaughtered if they did not).

Then there is the practical problem of ensuring that money and weapons sent to their aid actually reached them.

In the almost unimaginable chaos of the Syrian civil war, weapons and equipment supplied by the West (and other supportive countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia) flow freely between the so-called moderate rebels and terror groups.

A few years ago, the almost comical result of a hare-brained scheme by the CIA to train a whole new army of moderates to fight both ISIS and the Syrian regime hardly inspired confidence. The programme took months and cost tens of millions of dollars.

But at the first sign of conflict with ISIS, all of them abandoned their weapons and ran away — or, astonishingly, actually defected to join the ISIS ranks.

BACK NON-ISIS JIHADIS

MOST non-Islamic State jihadist groups fighting in Syria have been keen from the outset of the civil war to show they have no intention of spreading jihad into the West.

The main Al-Qaeda-affiliated branch, Al-Nusra Front, even changed its name in a vain bid to avoid Western arms embargos.

It is true that when not fighting Syrian regime forces they are battling ISIS — while denouncing the latter through their propaganda organs as Islamic miscreants.

Given this mutual loathing of ISIS and the Syrian regime, at first glance it is understandable that many Western politicians (most vocally U.S. Senator John McCain), as well as intelligence experts, have been eager to trumpet them as natural allies of the West.

however, for Trump there will be two main problems when it comes to considering the wisdom of such advice. The first is that these groups are on the retreat on the battlefield, having been pounded by Russian airstrikes (in support of Assad) and repeatedly overrun by the better-trained, more heavily armed and fanatical ISIS fighters.

Then there are the lessons of the not-so-distant past: while such radical Islamist groups often swear, hand on heart, that they have no beef with the West, history suggests such declarations should be taken with a huge pinch of salt.

The most obvious example is the Mujahideen — or ‘freedom fighters’ — who, like the Islamist terrorists in Syria today, were funded and trained by the CIA in the Eighties to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan. They achieved that — and then quickly morphed into the Taliban.

ASSASSINATE ASSAD

EVERY so often, a pundit or low-ranging Washington official will float the idea that the quickest and easiest way of ending the Syrian civil war would be for the U.S. President to order the assassination of Assad — or pay local operatives to carry out the deed.

It is highly unlikely military advisers will even contemplate raising the possibility with Trump, because in 1976 — following repeated botched attempts by the CIA to kill former Cuban president Fidel Castro — an executive order was introduced in America that explicitly prohibited such assassinations.

This ban — which states that ‘No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination’ — has been respected by every subsequent U.S. President.

Given that Trump’s many enemies in Washington are eager to pounce on any opportunity to impeach him, his authorising of an illegal assassination would also be an act of political suicide.

PRESSURE ON PUTIN

IF UNILATERAL military action against Syria is full of potentially nightmarish outcomes, Trump’s options when it comes to confronting Vladimir Putin on the diplomatic stage are even less likely to succeed in making the Russian leader reassess his uncritical alliance with Assad.

Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, Russia has without exception used its veto on the UN Security Council to snuff out all international attempts to criticise the regime in Damascus. There are no indications this will change now.

Moreover, unrelated sanctions which have been brought to bear against Russia after its land-grab of the Crimea appear only to have deepened Putin’s resolve to dig in his heels.

For that reason, Trump should not expect to win any kind of diplomatic or military concessions on Syria simply by threatening more sanctions.

The reality is that Moscow has run diplomatic rings around Washington since Putin’s troops entered the civil war two years ago. And it has done so with the biggest deployment of the Russian armed forces since the fall of the Soviet Union.

To save his Syrian ally, Putin’s strategy remains as ruthless as it is entrenched: to challenge Washington to accept his regional power grab, or risk all-out war.

DO NOTHING AT ALL

DESPITE the fiery rhetoric from Western politicians, the reality is they will almost certainly come to the realisation that doing precisely nothing at all is, sadly, the only viable policy open to them.

During the six years of the gut-wrenchingly brutal civil war, Western leaders have done nothing but offer threats that have proved ill-thought out and ultimately empty.

The regime in Damascus will be confident that, as in the past, outrage in the West at the latest massacre will quickly dissipate. They also know a major conflict with the West in Syria would create hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of whom would head for Europe: a horrifying prospect for the EU.

The stark reality is that Assad has outlasted his chief adversaries Barack obama and David Cameron, who repeated like a mantra that he must step down, but failed to do anything to engineer such an outcome.

Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Assad is still at the helm when Trump leaves the White house.

John R. BRADLEY is the author of four books on the Middle east.