France Should Stop Listening to Saudi Arabia on Syria | The Nation
▻http://www.thenation.com/article/france-should-stop-listening-to-saudi-arabia-on-syria
The Daesh line that the Paris attacks were to punish France for intervening in Syria is pure propaganda. The government of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi had intelligence on this planned Daesh assault on the French capital some 18 months ago, at a time when France was not even participating in the Syria campaign. It seems rather that the reverse is true—France intervened in Syria beginning this September because it finally accepted these intelligence warnings and was attempting to disrupt the training camps from which an attack on Paris might be launched. As it turned out, the plot was already too advanced for the fall Syrian campaign to forestall it.
In his response to the Paris attacks Friday night, French President François Hollande said that his country is now at war. He would have been better off saying that his country was the victim of a criminal gang. Paris must also stop listening to Riyadh about how to proceed, and seek out effective allies on the ground to which to give aid. Those are Iraqi Shiites, Syrian Kurds, moderate Sunnis, and Iran. If Daesh can be brought down, Syria’s Al Qaeda should be the next to be neutralized. Assad, who produced the polarization and radicalism that now plagues Syria and the greater Mediterranean, must eventually acquiesce in free elections, as must his Sunni fundamentalist foes. But first things first. The mad bombers and beheaders of Raqqa and Mosul have to be dealt with. Despite its lip service, Saudi Arabia has shown it is unlikely to help much with that battle.
