New York Post: The National Council of Resistance of Iran That So Frightens the Mullahs

The following article titled: “Dividing the enemy alliance: inside the Trump strategy,” by F.H. Buckley appeared in ‘New York Post’, on April 12, 2017.

Though Trump won’t get much credit for it, the last few weeks were a triumph for American diplomacy. We put a tyrant on notice that he can’t use weapons of mass destruction on his own people, we put paid to the idiotic suggestion that President Trump is subservient to Vladimir Putin, we rallied the West and spooked our enemies — and we did all this without the loss of a single US serviceman.

Along the way we revealed that the Obama administration was less than truthful when claiming that the WMD had been removed from Syria.

Now what? When facing three opponents, as America is with Russia, Syria and Iran, the most obvious response is to try to break them up through a side deal with one of them. That’s the signal Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and UN Ambassador Nicki Haley sent to Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad on March 30 in saying we’d be prepared to live with him.

That amounted to the following offer: Be nice, Assad, distance yourself from Iran and we’ll accept a solution to the Syrian civil war that leaves you in power.

The offer made sense, even though the chance of its acceptance was slight. Syria is sometimes described as a puppet regime of Iran, but that doesn’t begin to describe Assad’s dependence on Iran. Syria is more like Iran’s 32nd province than a separate state.