At Foreign Policy Nikolas Van Dam performs what strikes me as a slightly premature post-mortem on Western participation in Syria’s civil war:
Western politicians generally had clear thoughts about what they did not want, but no realistic or clear ideas of what they wanted in Assad’s place. They wanted a kind of democracy in Syria, but a violent ousting of Assad could not realistically have been expected to result in such a desired peaceful democracy.
Politicians did not always keep up with the realities on the ground and continued to use “politically correct†slogans even though the country’s situation no longer fully justified them. The Syrian opposition continued to be described as peaceful and democratic, even long after more radical forces, including Islamists and jihadis, had hijacked its platform and the Syrian war was already well underway. Subsequently, the concept of peaceful opposition became more of a myth than the reality it was in the beginning. But the rhetoric of Western politicians did not change.
Nor did the West’s military support for the Syrian opposition ever match its rhetoric, thus dangerously inflating the opposition’s expectations. The opposition was never given sufficient military support to bring the regime to its knees, even when such military pressure would have been necessary to achieve the political solution the West claimed it wanted. With this combination, the Syrian revolution was doomed to failure — certainly as long as the regime received military support from its allies Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah.
The first two paragraphs mirror what I’ve been saying all along. The final sentence of the third paragraph is the key.
What should we have done? Obeyed the law. Followed the international agreements to which we are signatory. Paid more attention to practical outcomes and less to dreamy visions of unrealizable objectives. The world is full of evil people. We can’t make it better by becoming some of them.
