Crocker on Syria

I don't know who Crocker is, but what he says here makes sense to me. From a story by Barbara Slavin on Al Monitor.

    Ryan Crocker, a distinguished former US ambassador to Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, told a Washington audience May 1 that US military intervention would likely not produce a better outcome in Syria and that the Barack Obama administration should focus on a “post-Assad” but not a “post-Alawite” future for that war-torn country.
    “We would be making a grave mistake if our policy were aimed at flipping the tables and bringing a Sunni ascendancy in Damascus,” said Crocker, who experienced the pitfalls of US military involvement in Lebanon in the 1980s and in Iraq in the past decade. The United States would have no assurance, he said, that a Sunni government would be an improvement on that of Bashar al-Assad and the probability would be that such a government would be “dominated by the worst of the worst” religious extremists.
    . . .
    Crocker said those advocating military intervention underestimate the extent to which this is an existential struggle for Syria’s Alawite community and other minorities within the country. He pointed to the massacre in Hama in 1982, when Bashar’s father, Hafez, bombarded the city to exterminate the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and in the process killed 15,000 civilians.
    “This regime has been preparing for what is unfolding now for the last three decades,” Crocker said. After Hama, “they knew a day of reckoning would come. … Americans barely remember Hama but no Sunni or Alawite will ever forget it.”

140,000 Syrians have been killed in the ongoing civil war, roughly ten times as many as were killed in the Hama massacre. Note we are talking about the 1982 massacre, not the 1981 Hama massacre or the 2011 Hama massacre. Ain't religion wonderful?