What Should We Do About Syria and Why?

In reaction to the internal State Department memo I wrote about yesterday, the editors of the reliably interventionist Wall Street Journal declaim:

A day after CIA Director John Brennan testified that ISIS now boasts far more fighters than al Qaeda had at its peak, there’s more disagreement in the Obama ranks. Fifty-one State Department diplomats have signed a letter that assails President Obama’s Syria policy—and calls for military strikes and the ouster of dictator Bashar Assad.

This is remarkable. These rebels aren’t the “neocons” of liberal myth. They are career diplomats whose mission is to pursue the peace through diplomacy that Mr. Obama invokes as his highest foreign-policy principle. Yet they are indicting Mr. Obama’s Syrian diplomacy as a strategic and moral failure.

The 51 signers recognize that American priorities for Syria—a genuine cease-fire, relief for its suffering citizens and regime change—have failed because U.S. diplomacy is a wish list with nothing to back it up. A “judicious” use of military force, they say, would “undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic effort.”

That’s a remarkable statement because of its assumptions. It assumes that it’s impossible for career diplomats to be neoconservatives, an assertion for which the editors provide no evidence. It also assumes that neoconservatives are the only interventionists. All neoconservatives may be interventionists but not all interventionists are neoconservatives—there are liberal interventionists, too.

Rather than taking sides along partisan or ideological lines, like kids in schoolyard games, let’s try to relate means and ends. Let’s identify some objectives, the efficient means for pursuing those objectives, and the likely outcomes.

If our objective is removing Assad from Syrian leadership and, indeed, removing the Assad regime from whatever control it still has in Syria, we should support groups that oppose the Assad regime, keeping in mind that it remains the internationally-recognized legitimate government of Syria. We should especially support the strongest of the opposition groups: DAESH (which some call ISIS and the president calls ISIL).

The results of that strategy would be to strengthen DAESH and prolong the carnage in Syria. In effect that’s what we would be doing.

If our objective is to destroy DAESH we should join the Russians in supporting the Syrian government, end our support of opposition groups, and discourage other countries, viz. Saudi Arabia, from supporting opposition groups.

The results of that strategy would be that the remnants of DAESH would flee to safe havens in Turkey and Iraq, the Assad regime would consolidate its control of the country, and Syrians would stop fleeing the country.

If our objective is to foment a nuclear war, we should follow the advice of the career diplomats and start striking the Syrian government, the Iranians, and Russians from the air. I have no idea why they would want to accomplish this but that’s an at least possible outcome of what they’re suggesting. Feel lucky, punk?

If we have the joint objectives of removing the Assad regime, destroying DAESH, and protecting Syrian civilians, we should invade Syria. You cannot protect people from the air. For the likely outcome of this strategy cf. Iraq.

If we have the single-minded objective of remaining in office, we should identify imaginary moderate rebels and support them. That would allow us to remain in office while retaining the ability to pretend that we’re doing something about the situation in Syria.

Here’s my proposal. Take all 51 of the signers of the letter, give them M-4s, strap parachutes to their backs, drop them over Syria, and wish them Godspeed.