National Review Online
Thursday, December 15, 2016
The fall of Aleppo demonstrates the grave costs of
American inaction. At nearly every turn of the conflict in Syria, the Obama
administration yielded the military and strategic initiative to America’s
enemies.
The results are now plain to see. The death toll in Syria
approaches a half-million men, women, and children. Millions more have been
displaced, and the largest wave of refugees to reach Europe since World War II
has created a crisis on the Continent. Chaos and power vacuums gave the world’s
worst jihadist army — ISIS — room to launch an offensive into Iraq that nearly
brought that nation to its knees. And terrorists have infiltrated the great
cities of the West.
Indeed, the Syrian civil war is an international calamity
on account of ISIS alone. That group has created a pseudo-caliphate that has
inspired tens of thousands of jihadists to take up arms in the Middle East; it
has perpetrated horrifying atrocities on civilians (especially Christians and
other minority religious groups); and it has inspired attacks that have brought
Islamic terror back to American shores.
But the situation is even more grim. In this bloodbath,
the primary “winners” are America’s enemies and strategic rivals. Iran and
Hezbollah have buttressed Bashar al-Assad’s forces on the ground, while Russia
has employed decisive (and often indiscriminate) force from the air.
Predictably, the Kremlin has been busy battering rebel groups nominally allied
with America, leaving the fight against ISIS mainly to the United States and
its Kurdish allies.
There was never an easy answer to the Syrian conflict,
but it’s indisputably clear that the Obama administration made a series of
mistakes. It failed to aggressively support potential allies early in the war,
when Assad was most vulnerable. It destroyed its own credibility by drawing,
then ignoring, its “red line” when there was overwhelming evidence that the
Assad regime was using chemical weapons. It underestimated ISIS — the president
himself called it the “JV team” — until the junior varsity was threatening
Kurdistan and Baghdad. Then, when it finally decided to act, the administration
launched a slow-motion war that gave ISIS more than two years to entrench
itself in key cities, create franchises across the Middle East, execute and
inspire terror attacks, and evangelize its ideology among Muslim communities in
the West.
While the administration has managed to learn a few
lessons — it reversed course enough to save Iraq and put ISIS into retreat
there — the reality is that some errors are irreversible. Russia and its allies
have won victories in Syria that would be nearly impossible to roll back
without courting a showdown among great powers.
President Trump will come into office facing an
unfavorable strategic situation with few good options. Assad and Putin — for
all their sanctimonious rhetoric about fighting ISIS — will almost certainly
busy themselves stamping out the last American-allied militias in Syria while
leaving the fight against ISIS (including the battle for Raqqa) to America, the
Kurds, and our few remaining Arab allies. Assad will possess the nation’s
population centers, Russia will be there to guarantee Assad’s gains, and our
allies will be pushed farther toward the periphery.
In many ways, Syria represents the ultimate failure of
Obama’s “reset” with Russia. While Putin’s actions in Russia’s own neighborhood
— his annexing part of Georgia, his seizure of Crimea, his invasion of Ukraine,
and his saber-rattling against the Baltics — were alarming, Russia’s military
success in Syria is staggering: Just a quarter of a century after the Soviet
Union was rebuffed from the Middle East, Putin’s sphere of influence stretches
from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.
Ironically, Obama acted timidly in part to maintain
influence over Putin. State Department officials reportedly didn’t want Obama
to condemn or sanction Russia for hacking the Democratic National Committee
because they worried that it would impede efforts to “make a deal” with Russia
on Syria. Putin exploited this weakness for his own ends.
As the death toll continues to mount and reports of
Syrian and Russian atrocities roll in, the consequences of Barack Obama’s
do-nothing foreign policy are manifest. The Syrian civil war presented a
considerable challenge, but from a palette of undesirable options, the Obama
administration consistently chose the worst. The death, suffering, and
instability that have followed are part of his legacy.
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