There Are No Good Guys in Syria

I don’t know where to start in pointing out the wrong-headedness in Josh Rogin’s plea in his latest Washington Post column for the U. S. to step up its efforts to overthrow the Assad government. Why not start at the beginning of the column?

In February 2011, speaking at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, then-Vice President Joe Biden pledged to support people around the world who were being slaughtered by their own governments for demanding basic freedom and dignity. “When a state engages in atrocity, it forfeits its sovereignty,” Biden said. One month later, the people of Syria took to the streets to demand that their government treat them like human beings. In response, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad unleashed the worst systematic atrocities since the Nazis.

The United States has engaged in atrocities, not just in Syria but elsewhere, and so have the forces that the U. S. supports in Syria. Does that mean the U. S. has forfeited its sovereignty? Obviously not. That’s a nonsensical statement and I don’t care who made it. The only known strategy for promoting peace is a Westphalian order and under a Westphalian order the statement is simply untrue. Furthermore, we are signatories to a treaty which makes it illegal for the U. S. to engage in military action against another country without Security Council sanction which we do not have.

It’s hard to describe how misleading his statement

the people of Syria took to the streets to demand that their government treat them like human beings

is. In 2014 Bashir al-Assad was re-elected president of Syria in an election that international observers certified as free and fair. Since then we have been supporting the losers of that election in their rejection of the results. Why are we endorsing that behavior?

The forces in Syria we have been supporting neither represent the people of Syria nor are they liberal democrats. They are overwhelmingly violent radical Sunni Islamists and they, too, have perpetrated atrocities. You know, like Al Qaeda and DAESH.

The Syrian government presently controls most of Syria except for relatively tiny areas in the north which are held by forces which no one doubts would be defeated if not for the direct involvement of the Turks and an area in the south held by forces that no one doubts would be defeated if not for the direct involvement of the U. S. Our efforts are not ending a civil war. They are prolonging it. Is that itself not an atrocity?

What would happen if the Sunni Islamists we support overthrow the Assad government? Would they not perpetrate atrocities against the Alawite minority that comprises the Assad government?

The condundrum we face in Syria is that there are no good guys there. Neither Assad nor his regime nor the Kurds nor the forces the Turks support nor the forces we’re supporting are good guys. We are intervening illegally in a civil war in which we have the only legitimate interest we have is humanitarian to assist people who don’t have humanitarian interests at heart and to our own detriment.

I hold no truck for the Assad government or Syria or Russia or any country other than the U. S.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow but, rather than stepping up our efforts to oust Assad, we should just butt out and let the Assad government and their Russian allies mop up the remaining rebels. That will bring the Syrian civil war to an end.