Rather than fisking Arizona Sen. John McCain’s op-ed in the Washington Post on the U. S. stake in Syria, I’ll just ask two questions:
- Did arming Al Qaeda in Syria weaken it or strengthen it?
- Has U. S. involvement in the conflict shortened or prolonged it?
The weapons sent by the U. S. to allegedly moderate Syrian rebels fell into the hands of JaN (Jabhat an-Nusra now called Jabhat Fateh Al-Sham) and JaN is Al Qaeda (or at least was until five months ago—whether that holds remains to be seen). And if U. S. support didn’t help the Syrian rebels keep fighting what was its objective?
I think that U. S. support for the rebels, illegal as it was, can be supported if you have a mind to as a cynical exercise in Realpolitik intended to kill as many Syrians as possible without direct U. S. military intervention but not on humanitarian or security grounds. That’s just bizarre.
McCain is nuts. One of the smartest things Obama did was to back away from Syria. We lacked the will and the resources for some massive, transformative nation-building project – as we’d pretty clearly demonstrated in Iraq – and McCain’s high if he thinks anything short of that was going to fix anything.
Yes, Aleppo has been a horror show, but we never do run short of humanitarian disasters, and short of launching yet another invasion and yet another war with yet another set of failures accompanied by still more flag-draped coffins, we stepped back from the table – the best of various bad options. Blaming this on the US is bullshit. We certainly didn’t help, but the cause of these messes in the MENA goes far deeper than US involvement. This is someone else’s sectarian war and we have no more business getting involved than a raft-load of Aztecs would have had reason to get into the War of the Roses.