As I write this column, the United States Congress is deep in discussion about whether or not we should strike Syria. Judging from the way the discussions appear to be going, with House leadership in support, it looks like the president will be granted the authority to strike. It is entirely appropriate that Obama brings this decision to the Congress, and perhaps it is a reasonable step back from the imperial presidency, which got us into Iraq and Afghanistan without much national discussion.
The problem is that it’s not clear what the considered action is all about. It’s no secret that we have worked hard to avoid getting sucked into Syria. All of the combatants, whether Assad and his crony government on one side or the rebels and their Al Qaeda and many radical Islamist allies on the other side, promise little potentiality for stability, democracy or anything that would serve the U.S.’s interests, no matter who wins. I think it would be fair to say we really don’t have any skin in this game, so why are we contemplating attacking Assad and plunging ourselves into this battle where we see no upside?
Apparently it’s because the president said he was drawing a red line in the sand when it comes to the use of chemical weapons, which are illegal under international law. At this point it appears there was a chemical strike; 1,429 people died, including women and children, and we don’t seem to yet know if Assad ordered the strike, or if it was one of his commanding generals or a sergeant in the field. But that doesn’t seem to matter much.
Apparently, if Assad had personally ordered the attack with conventional rockets, bombs and napalm, that would have met the generally accepted standards of current warfare, even while they were blowing off arms and legs and concussing brains and internal organs. People might be saddened at the waste of innocent life, or collateral damage as the military likes to put, but no one would have gotten terribly upset. Apparently it’s not killing innocents that raised our government’s outrage, it’s that it was not done in the appropriate and acceptable manner. Foolish me, not realizing there was a rulebook about causing this kind of mayhem.
The argument further goes that once the president publicly drew a line in the sand, whether drawing that line was smart, stupid or inadvertent, our adversaries will misunderstand if we back down, think us weak and vacillating, and think that other redline about not developing nukes in Iran is equally weak, and they will then proceed in the development process, thwarting the USA and forcing us to go to war over it.
We are making a lot of assumptions in all this because we believe we understand how the Arab world works. I believe we are simply wrong and have little idea how we are perceived. A case in point. A few years back we got into the Iraq War because we thought Sadam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). It wasn’t just the Bush administration. The Democrats also believed it, the defense agencies believed it, the NSA/CIA believed it. Every time the international weapons inspectors came to Iraq, Hussein played games, blocked their access, said things, pretended that he actually had nukes. We began to prepare for war, which was all on TV and being broadcast worldwide. Rather then Saddam saying, “just kidding, come on in and look around. There are no nukes here,” which was apparently the truth and he knew it, he continued to play this strange cat-and-mouse game. So we went in. It made no sense that he would lie to us and provoke us because he had nothing to gain, so we believed he must have had nukes. He couldn’t have believed that we weren’t coming because Bush 41 had come in before when he went into Kuwait and crushed his army. Maybe he thought he could always make a deal, and continued to believe it until he dropped through the trap. Maybe he just didn’t realize that Americans have an action culture—we’ll only play around for so long and then we act.
It’s bad policy to go into Syria. If some of the Arab nations feel we should act, then let’s see them putting in troops and equipment too. The Arab League is not even remotely suggesting that, so are we taking the lead where others are reluctant to follow? If there is some major American interest in Syria, it’s certainly not apparent. Both Iraq and Afghanistan cost American lives and vast amounts of money. What did we gain? Are either of them stable democracies? Barely. Are either solid American allies? I don’t think anyone believes that. Have those wars decreased Islamic militancy? They probably have had an opposite effect. Bottom line is that both wars were a total waste.
For the next couple of decades or perhaps longer, the Arab world is going to be in turmoil. Every time the hawks are going to want us to jump in and fix it. We already spent several trillion dollars and countless American lives trying to fix Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s time we accepted a reality that there are some things we can’t fix and we shouldn’t even try. Syria, in my mind, is one of them.