Just Say No to Syria

For John, BLUF:  Let's stay out fo the Syria imbroglio.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

The question of what to do about Syria keeps coming up.  The President set a "Red Line" with regard to the use of Chemical Weapons and Syria seems to have crossed it.  There are 70,000 dead Syrians from an ongoing Civil War.  This raises the question of the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P). 

A recent entry into the ongoing discussion is an OpEd by Magazine Editor and Talking Head Katrina vanden Heuvel, in The Washington Post.  The title is "'No' to US Military Action in Syria".  The lede:

The reported use of chemical weapons by Syria’s embattled Assad regime has not made much difference in that devastated country.  Tens of thousands have been killed in brutal fighting already, and the heart-rending violence continues with no end in sight.  The chemical weapons reports have had a dramatic effect in the United States, if not in Syria.  The president had warned that their use would be a “gamechanger,” with “enormous consequences,” a proverbial “red line” that cannot be crossed.  Immediately, the neoconservative hawks who helped drive us into Iraq — William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Dan Senor and more — started pounding the war drums once more.

Alarmingly, liberal humanitarian interventionists also have begun talking up military intervention.  Anne-Marie Slaughter, former head of policy planning in the State Department under President Obama, led the charge in a bellicose op-ed in The Post, comparing the reports of chemical weapons use to genocide in Rwanda.  There, she said, America had been shamed by the Clinton administration’s demand for “more conclusive evidence” of genocide.  Now, she argued, Obama was repeating the dodge by seeking proof about what actually took place in Syria.

Aside from the gratuitous slam at conservatives that assumes that only Progressives have the proper view of war and foreign policy, what Ms vanden Heuvel has to say makes sense.  Well, except for the penultimate paragraph, quoted below, where she seems to think that the US engaging all the diplomatic levers will actually change anything.  The fact is that Syria, and Syrians, is a pawn in bigger issues, such as the survival of Israel and the place of Russia in the firmament and Iran's achieving respect through its nuclear power program and promotion of terrorism as a legitimate form of warfare.

The horrors in Syria can’t simply be ignored, however.  Rather than escalating our military involvement, Obama should redouble our humanitarian efforts both for the growing numbers of displaced refugees, and for those starving inside of Syria.  He can seek to reengage the Russian and Chinese — and through them the Iranians — to restrain Assad.  He can reengage the U.N. Security Council and press it to take multilateral action, and use our influence with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to check escalating support for the divided rebels.  And he can seek to restrain Israel from provoking a regional war with Hezbollah.  The president should be seeking to reduce the violence, not arm and escalate it.

The last thing the president should do is commit the United States militarily to the overthrow of the regime.  As in Iraq, we can win that war, but we will surely lose in its violent aftermath — and we will bear responsibility for deepening the humanitarian disaster with our “humanitarian” intervention.

One of the issues that we need to think about as we debate intervention is whether we believe our concepts on people and government are universal or just unique to our Anglo-Saxon background.  There are those Syrians (and "volunteer" fighters) who oppose Syrian President Bashar al Assad because he is oppressing freedom and being a tyrant.  There are those who are opposed to President Assad because he is a Western oriented politician who does not follow the Koran and does not implement Sharia.  Which groups will we be supporting?  Which group will win out and impose its own view of right on the People of Syria, or will democracy really triumph?

We should stay home as long as this isn't going to spill over and destabilize the rest of the Near East or threaten our ally, Israel.

Regards  —  Cliff