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, who spoke along with several other regional experts at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the United States should focus on shoring up Syria’s neighbors, providing more assistance to refugees and displaced Syrians and seeking to influence Syria’s ruling Alawite minority to, over time, eventually jettison Assad.

This post-Assad but not post-Alawite strategy could more easily win buy-in from the Syrian government’s main external backers — Russia and Iran — though Crocker suggested that outside powers alone could not end the fighting and that the conflict would go on for many more years until the combatants are exhausted.