The editors of the Wall Street Journal seem to be disappointed that they haven’t been able to foment a world war in Syria:
Russia’s intervention won’t end the Syrian civil war, and Islamic State still controls much of the country. But countering terrorism never was Mr. Putin’s goal. He wanted to show the world that Russia stands by its allies and to acquire new leverage in the Middle East and Europe. Any more such quagmires and he’ll be back sipping cocktails at the next G-8 summit.
Let’s consider a number of questions about Syria and Russia’s involvement there:
- Why is Russia helping Assad in Syria?
- What have the Russians accomplished in Syria?
- Why hasn’t Syria become the quagmire for Russia that many Western analysts, somewhat gleefully, predicted?
Why is Russia helping Assad in Syria?
It’s not out of the goodness of their hearts and geopolitics is a relatively minor factor. The distance between Aleppo and Sevastopol is about 600 miles as the crow flies and about 1,200 miles overland. Syria is in their neighborhood—their “near abroad” as they put it. The Russians don’t want a terrorist state to which the Turkish government gives a wink and a nod in their near abroad.
Assad’s regime is heinous but it’s the only game in town if you want neither chaos nor a terrorist state in Syria.
There are geopolitical considerations, of course. Among them is that Putin is trying to set himself up as the Defender of Orthodoxy and the old multi-confessional Syria had quite a number of orthodox. Putin is actually doing himself quite a bit of good by riding to their rescue.
Then there’s the port that the Russians maintain in Syria and which they show no signs of abandoning.
What have the Russians accomplished in Syria?
The Russians have accomplished more against terrorists in their six month campaign than we have in two years of pinpoint bombing of pickup trucks and mortar emplacements. They’ve cut DAESH off from re-supply through Turkey. And they’re right in their refusal to engage in byzantine mental gymnastics trying to distinguish good violent radical Islamists from bad violent radical Islamists.
There are lots of reasons for why they’ve been so effective. They’ve got their heads screwed on straight. They take LBJ’s advice that when you’ve got somebody by the balls their hearts and minds generally follow. They have limited objectives. They’ve got much better intelligence on the ground than we’ve ever had. They’re using very conventional military dogma—Kesselschlacht—and the Syria Army, Hezbollah, and Iran give them the boots on the ground to carry it off.
They also don’t have the problem of one or more of their allies actually being on the other side as we do.
Why hasn’t Syria become the quagmire for Russia that many Western analysts, somewhat gleefully, predicted?
Again, lots of reasons. They aren’t fighting Afghans there. They have limited objectives. They aren’t interested in turning the country into a modern liberal democratic state. They don’t much care how many civilians flee the country. Assad has more support than the West gives him credit for. Just to name a few.
It’s unclear about what’s going on. Assad’s opposition seems to be welcoming the idea of the withdrawal, and the Syrian government does not sound happy about it.
They did what we thought we were going to do: they applied air power and support to motivated local forces. It’s how we knocked off the Taliban at the start of the Afghan war.
The crippling factor for the US – about which I’ve whined incessantly – is the soft-heartedness (and head, too) of the American people. Air power + special forces + motivated local forces = success. Air power + special forces + indifferent local forces + don’t hurt anyone + it had better look like Vermont when we’re done = a waste of time and lives.
The American people won’t tolerate large numbers of innocent dead, won’t back openly heinous regimes, won’t accept a resolution that results in a repressive police state. The American people take this position despite the fact that in the “Good War,” the one fought by, “The Greatest Generation,” we slaughtered civilians in droves (including allied civilians), profited greatly from the wet work of the communist monster Stalin and the much more charming imperialist and colonialist, Winston Churchill, and in the end waved bye bye to half a dozen countries that were swallowed up by the USSR to spend the next 40 years as police states.
We have the power, we have the skill, what we lack to succeed at the game of war is a supportive population.
Nobody has clean hands. Including us.
The American people won’t tolerate large numbers of innocent dead, won’t back openly heinous regimes, won’t accept a resolution that results in a repressive police state
Since when? It’s the military, which rightly fears what would happen if American soldiers turned into death squads, that is the obstacle to victory here.
If I recall correctly, it was either Michael, Steve or both who predicted a Russian quagmire in this very comment section. Whether it was with glee or not I don’t know, and is irrelevant. But it certainly was asserted with a sense of certitude and cluck-clucking to let it be their messy problem.
I do appreciate Michael’s observation that we simply don’t have the stomach to prosecute a devastatingly overwhelming war effort. Whether that is the people per se, or a population fogged by a din of media bias I’ll leave to individual commenters. I expect you know where I stand.
MM:
I’m linking to a very unpleasant picture. It’s of some of the dead following Dresden. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-P4DABgERilQ/U6UEdOdXSLI/AAAAAAAAJew/QL4IVPxz6FE/s1600/A+pile+of+bodies+awaits+cremation+after+the+bombing+of+Dresden,+1945+(1).JPG
Those are civilians killed by Allied terror bombing. Do you honestly think the American people in 2016 would tolerate seeing that on their TV’s? I don’t. In fact, at the time, all the way back in the 40’s, Americans objected to night bombing and rarely participated. Even then we had to cover up stories of atrocities committed by US troops – the killing of prisoners, the mutilation of bodies, the reckless massacre of allied civilians. Between 15 and 20,000 Frenchmen died in the aftermath of D-Day, killed by us and our allies. Even then the American people were thought to be too squeamish to be able to tolerate facts like that. Nowadays we get upset when some stressed, pissed-off infantryman shoots few civilians.
Modern media does not allow us to cover up the necessary but horrible consequences of war.
The military follows orders. If the president said do it, it’d be done. The president doesn’t say ‘do it’ because he’s a politician who can read the public mood. Until the American people are willing to countenance the kind of brutal efficiency the Russians brought to Syria, we are going to have a hard time winning wars.
Michael–
Curtis LeMay said if the Allies lost the war he would have been tried as a war criminal. Fast forward to after 9/11, and there were a million people who sounded like you. Everybody talked about American resolve and the need to remake the Middle East. Cheney sneered at the Church Committee. Andrew Sullivan talked about the clash of civilizations and the cost of it all and how the NY and SF were filled with traitors. Fast forward a few more years and all of the bloodthirsty Americans were denouncing Lancet body counts and claiming the human pyramids of Abu Ghraib did not represent our freedom-loving values.
So it’s the people who screamed for vengeance who hated hearing about the costs of their vengeance. America is a pathologically screwed up country with an MO of the left hand never ever being responsible for the right hand.
Air power with committed ground troops and good intel is a winning combo. That said, I would wait to make pronouncements about Russian success. I am not so sure that the Russians aren’t at about the same place we were after our initial few months/first year in Iraq. Absent a political solution, things could regress quite a bit again.
michael-In the Good War we had an easily identified enemy and we knew why we were fighting. We were fighting Germany. Even if we killed civilians, we were still killing Germans. I think people are bright enough to realize that fighting in Syria doesn’t have much to do with making things safer here. Killing a bunch of civilians does mean killing civilian ISIS. It means killing people who likely also hate ISIS, but have ben conquered by them. Also, we have the hangover effect of fighting a war in Iraq that was a mess and had nothing to do with making us safer. We may or may not be soft hearted (were certainly willing to kill a bunch in Iraq), but at the least we need real justification.
Steve