The lessons of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have not been learned by those who call for bringing down Bashar al-Assad and forcing the Russian military to leave the Syrian theatre of war, UK-based American columnist and author Craig Sams stresses.
"The US, Saudi, Turkish and Qatari passion for regime change in Syria had its roots in a strategy to weaken Iranian influence in the Middle East. It has gone badly wrong," Sams writes in his letter published by The Financial Times.
Sams argues that if Assad is ousted the most extreme al-Qaeda and Daesh (ISIS/ISIL) elements would take over the reins of the country transforming it into a "fundamentalist terror state."
He also calls attention to the fact that the much-discussed "bloodbath" has not materialized. Sams recalls that Syria has a five-year history of settlements which allowed "rebels" to escape urban territories, like it happened in Homs, Talkalakh, some Damascus suburbs and other towns and villages.
"We should be careful what we wish for before calling for sanctions with no strategy in place for when the Russians go home and the Assad government collapses," he warns.
According to Hunter, the Obama administration officials and some US military experts have so far failed to offer a realistic plan "for what would happen in Syria after the ousting of President Bashar al-Assad."
The former US ambassador stresses that there "must be a means" to protect Syrian ethnic and religious minorities, but such a means "does not exist in anything the United States and others who want peace propose to do."
By calling for Assad's ousting US policymakers are merely playing into regional Sunni states' hands and risk becoming "a cat's-paw for others' ambitions."
"Assad is secondary, to me, to ISIS [Daesh]," Trump said, as cited by the Los Angeles Times, "What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria."
Similarly, during the final presidential debate with his opponent Hillary Clinton, Trump emphasized that if the Syrian opposition is successful in ousting Assad the country could end up in worse hands.
"We are backing rebels — we don't know who the rebels are. If they ever did overthrow Assad… you may very well end up with worse than Assad," Trump explained.
Speaking to Sputnik, US Congressman Dana Rohrabacher highlighted that the attempts to increase military support to rebels in an effort topple Syrian President Assad will only boost extremist forces and threaten global security.
"This has been a fiasco, an Obama-Clinton fiasco in terms of helping groups against Assad who in the end will be actually strengthening the forces of radical Islamic terrorism that threaten all of us," Rohrabacher told Sputnik.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev underscored that the collapse of the Syrian state should not be allowed.
"The main thing is to make sure that Syria has a predictable future and can exist as a self-sufficient, independent state rather than disintegrate into a number of terrorist enclaves, something that, regrettably, has happened to Libya and some other countries in the Middle East," Medvedev said Friday, during his interview with the China Central Television (CCTV).
