By Robert Tracinski
Thursday, April 06, 2017
It’s really nice that everybody is all worried about
Syria now, at least for the next five minutes, because Bashar Assad decided to
take a break from killing his people in other ghastly ways to gas them. It’s
all very shocking—if you haven’t been paying any attention to Syria for the
past six years.
Yes, United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley was terrific
as she stared down the Russian ambassador at the UN and laid
out the facts about how Russia and Iran are supporting this horrible
slaughter.
It was even better than the speech Haley’s predecessor
gave last year under the previous administration. But as Barack Obama
demonstrated for his entire presidency, an impassioned speech by a diplomat
doesn’t mean much if the commander in chief doesn’t really want to do anything.
This recent moment of concern is perverse on a number of
different levels: because we suddenly care about humanitarianism now after
watching Syria burn for six years, and because we’re probably going to continue
to watch it burn while we continue to talk about how much we care. But the most
dangerously perverse part is that we shouldn’t need humanitarian prompting to
care about what’s happening in Syria. We should care because we’re terrified of
the implications for our own interests and security.
If Syria seems too far away, too brutal, too primitive,
too wrapped up in its own internal strife between equally unappealing
factions—well, that’s exactly what I thought about another conflict a few years
back. It was the mid-1990s, and the conflict was in Afghanistan. And that part
about how this was irrelevant to American interests? That didn’t end well.
It turned out that the chaos in Afghanistan was not so
remote as to be none of our business, because it provided a breeding ground,
safe haven, and international recruiting program for terrorists who wanted to
attack the United States. We found that out on September 11. Well, actually, we
found it out before then, when al-Qaeda staged big attacks on U.S. citizens and
assets in East Africa and Yemen. But it took September 11 to make the threat
undeniable.
We were supposed to learn a lesson from that. But then
the war in Iraq was longer and more difficult than people were prepared for,
and America regressed into a new Vietnam Syndrome. So here we are, 16 years
later, sitting back and watching the Islamists recreate exactly the same
conditions. There is a zone of constant warfare and chaos that allows
terrorists to establish themselves. There is a new safe haven where a brutal
terrorist group seizes state power, or quasi-state power, and puts themselves
forward as a champion of Islam and a model of successful jihad. They call on
supporters from around the world to rally to their banner, and then they
support or incite terrorist attacks back home in the West—in Paris, in
Brussels, in Sydney, in San Bernardino, and Orlando.
The Islamic State in Syria is a pretty obvious replay of
the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. I don’t see how we can expect a
fundamentally different result.
Under the previous administration, and so far under the
current one, we’ve followed the theory that we can offload Syria to the
Russians. It will be their problem, and they will fight the Islamic State for
us. Yet the Assad regime hasn’t been all that effective at fighting the Islamic
State. It’s a lot more interested in gassing kids.
My Federalist
colleague Sean Davis puts forward a list of questions for advocates of
intervention in Syria. But the only really important question is his first one:
What national security interest is at stake in Syria? The answer is pretty
obvious. The national security interest is in preventing the Paris attacks from
happening in New York City. Is that not clear enough?
When you put it that way, this first question becomes the
only really important question. The rest are necessary and very thorny and
difficult. But once we decide that that we have a substantial national security
interest in the destruction of ISIS, and that this requires putting an end to
Syria’s civil war, then we’re going to iron out the rest of the details because
we really don’t have much choice.
We can offer a lot of theories for how these various
issues are going to work out. For example, when it comes to pushing the
Russians out of Syria now that they’re ensconced there, there’s a
straightforward model for that: Afghanistan. Of course we shouldn’t challenge the Russkis directly, because that
would risk escalation into a great power war. But we can give very substantial
covert support to select groups of rebels—far more than the half-hearted,
going-through-the-motions efforts so far—and make Syria a quagmire the Russians
can’t sustain. Russia is a shrunken shadow of the Soviet Union and in far less
of a position to maintain a serious effort in Syria over the long term.
As for our overall strategic goal, we have to keep in
mind that this is a two-front war, that we’re fighting Assad and pushing out
the Russians and Iranians in order to clear the way for also getting rid of the
Islamic State. The model for that, as I’ve pointed out before, is the question
of whether we should fight the Nazis or the Soviets. It’s not really a question
of which one we have to fight, but of which one we’re going to fight first.
How long will it take and how much will it cost? We can
make guesses, but it would be foolish to assume that anyone can give definitive
answers, because that’s not how war works. Of
course we don’t know for sure how long it’s going to take, or what it’s
going to cost, or who our allies are going to be, or how we’ll put together a
new government. Those are objections that can be made with equal force to just
about any military intervention, and making such objections the centerpiece of
foreign policy would result in a non-interventionism so thorough as to be
pacifist.
Do advocates of intervention have to answer all of these
question before “it makes sense to discuss the idea further”? You know, I’d be
happy if we were discussing it at all, because that would be an upgrade from
ignoring it completely.
The fact is that we interventionists have been discussing this. These are all precisely the issues a lot
of us have been writing about for years as the disaster in Syria was unfolding.
I’ve written dozens of articles over the past 15 years offering advice on what
to do about Syria and Iraq—literally, an article I wrote in 2014 was titled
“What to Do About Syria and Iraq.” Other writers, specialists with more
knowledge than I, have spilled even more ink on these topics. So you’ll have to
pardon our impatience when we hear someone say that there’s no point in even
talking about this until we lay out yet another detailed plan so everyone can
ignore it.
My experience has been that the part about not wanting to
discuss Syria further is the one constant in all of these discussions, and
calls for more details are generally an exercise in rummaging around for
excuses to do nothing. I recognize the pattern very well. It’s what we spent a
lot of the late 1990s doing. Like I said, that didn’t turn out well.
The threat in Syria exists whether we recognize it or
not, whether we have a strategy for it or not, whether we answer a list of
questions or not. We don’t get to take a pass on this because it’s hard and
there are no good answers. There are rarely good options, usually because we
delay acting early on when the options were better, and instead we always seem
to wait until everything has become an intractable disaster.
The first step, as they say, is recognizing that you have
a problem. Recognizing the threat the Syrian civil war poses to us and the need
for the United States to do something about it is the starting point for
everything else. I’d be happy if we could just get through that first step.
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