The problem I have with the editors of the Wall Street Journal’s remarks about Syria:
The upper house of the Russian Parliament this week approved a 49-year extension on its naval base in the Syrian port of Tartus, another sign of Vladimir Putin’s strategic gains from his intervention in Syria’s civil war. As the last Islamic State strongholds are defeated in Syria, the big question is whether the U.S. will cede the advantage to Russia and Iran and their client Bashar Assad.
The State Department confirmed recently that Islamic State has lost 95% of the territory it once controlled in Iraq and Syria, and the flow of foreign fighters into Syria is slowing. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that Mr. Assad remains in power, despite nearly seven years of civil war and two U.S. Presidents and successive Secretaries of State who have called for his ouster. The Syrian dictator’s predations have killed more than 400,000 civilians and displaced millions, and he’s still torturing, starving and murdering his enemies. The regime has spent most of this month shelling Eastern Ghouta, a rebel-held Damascus suburb, despite a proclaimed Russia-brokered cease-fire.
and
A key U.S. goal in Syria should be to deny Assad, Russia and Iran the strategic victory of controlling all of Syria. Only when Russia and Iran conclude that they can’t win militarily, or that the price of winning is too high, will they negotiate a genuine peace deal that allows for self-governing ethnic enclaves in Syria. The means to that end is supporting Syrian and Kurdish forces that oppose Assad and Islamic radicals. The alternative is a U.S. retreat that would allow an Islamic State comeback and perhaps a larger war in the Middle East.
is that there has never been a viable course of U. S. action with respect to Syria that would have resulted in a “strategic victory” for the United States. The alternatives we had were keeping our noses out of the whole sorry affair, supporting the Assad regime, or supporting Islamist rebels. We chose the last alternative.
The Assad regime never had any alternative but to quite literally fight to the death, not just for Assad but for Alawites more generally. That’s another thing that Americans have difficulty in coming to terms with. There are no mechanisms for accommodating to minority populations not merely in Syria but in the Middle East as a whole. Its history of the treatment of minorities is one of ignoring them in blissful isolation punctuated by periodic pogroms. Both Syria and Iraq had systems of minority rule for a half century. The political solution sought by the Obama White House and urged by the editors would result in genocide.
Somehow the notion that supporting Islamist rebels was the least bad alternative seems to have infected the Obama White House. Not only were they mistaken but they failed to take into account that Russia and Iran had and have higher stakes in the outcome in Syria than we do and, as events have shown, are simply unwilling to allow Islamists to take control of Syria. I’ve always disagreed with that view. I don’t think there are any conditions under which we should support Islamists. No good can come of it. It will always be ultimately antithetical to U. S. interests. The Obama White House was engaging in wishful thinking.
That left supporting the Assad regime, a course of action so cynical as to be politically untenable in the United States, or butting out. I thought we should butt out. That wouldn’t have given us a strategic victory but at least we wouldn’t have been supporting the bad guys.
We half-assed it.
Leaving aside moral questions, it comes down to priorities:
– If the priority is to oppose Russia and Iran, then the policy is to turn Syria into another 1980’s Afghanistan where you bleed Russian and Iranian forces dry.
– If the priority is to stem violent Islamist groups like ISIS, then you side with Russia and Syria to destroy them.
– If the priority is supporting minorities then you support the independence of specific groups (like the Kurds) against all comers.
The downsides of any of these are obvious. We choose to try all three in which case the downsides are compounded.
It should be mentioned that the retired spooks over at Pat Lang’s place seem to have agreed that the use of chemical weapons was a false flag operation intended to galvanize international opposition to Assad and his regime. I honestly have no idea but they seem convinced.
I don’t think there are any good guys, even relatively good guys, to support. The prospect of a Sunni Islamist regime in Syria is at least as bad as leaving Assad in place.
I think it’s pretty clear they are wrong about the false flag bit – the evidence of Syrian chem weapon use is actually very good and the alternative theories have no actual evidence to support them.
There is, unfortunately, a lot of conspiratorial thinking at Pat Lang’s site these days, though not from Lang himself.
He is very, very anti-Israel. I think that sometimes overwhelms other considerations for him.
I don’t think he’s anti-Israel, he’s more against the US constantly carrying Israel’s water and the double-standard when it comes to Israel. And I think he’s a bit bitter because his views mean he’s a persona non grata in Washington similar to Chas Freeman.
BTW, he is a bit paranoid though. About 10 years ago when I started commenting on his blog he concluded I was actually a committee of pro-Israeli provocateurs. I forget the details, but we talked offline and he apologized. He explained there really were people out to discredit him because of his views on Israel.
I have the enormous advantage that I don’t care about Israel one way or another. I think it’s a different country as is Ireland or Switzerland. Maybe if I claimed Jewish ancestry I’d feel more strongly about it but I doubt it.
I wanted us to have as little as possible intervention in Syria as was politically possible. I think we started out OK, but got more involved than we should. At this point we should just leave Syria to the Russians and Iran. I don’t there is much we can legitimately do about it. I am betting that we end up leaving 5k-10k in Iraq, maybe 2k-3k somewhere in Syria. The Russians want their port so doubt they make a big deal out of it right now.
Steve