Forty so-called Syria “experts” and former government officials who ran policy on Syria in previous administrations, are demanding that the Biden administration do more than just pay lip service to preventing the normalization of relations with Syria by many Arab countries. “Unconditional regime normalization is not inevitable,” they wrote in a letter Monday to President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “Opposing regime normalization in word only is not enough, as tacitly allowing it is short-sighted and damaging to any hope for regional security and stability.”
Signatories to the letter, obtained by Al Monitor, include former US special envoys to Syria Frederic Hof, James Jeffrey and Joel Rayburn and former assistant secretaries of state for Near Eastern affairs Jeffrey Feltman and Anne Patterson. Also signing on were former CENTCOM chief Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, former CIA acting director John McLaughlin, and William Roebuck, former US deputy special envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS.
Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, who coordinated the letter, accused the administration of publicly opposing normalization while privately giving Arab states a tacit yellow light. “[The US] message is, we will never normalize and we discourage normalization,” Lister complained. “None of that is, ‘Don’t you dare normalize with the regime.’”