Tag: Syria

by Dish Staff

As the UN refugee agency launches its largest aid effort in more than a decade to help the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in northern Iraq, Swati Sharma remarks on how rapidly the humanitarian disaster has unfolded:

The rate at which the situation in Iraq has deteriorated is the largest reason why it is being called one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent years. Let’s compare it with Syria.

While the climate there is extremely volatile, it has been deteriorating for more than three years. In comparison, conflicts in Iraq mostly started this year, and the worst of it commenced in June, when the Islamic State (then ISIS) took Mosul. Today, the number of displaced Iraqis is at 1.5 million — small in comparison to Syria’s 6.5 million — but almost 600,000 of them fled their homes in the past two months. Still, many were able to find homes and shelters in communities around northern Iraq.

In early August, Islamic State moved farther north. When the militant group took the northern region in and around the town of Sinjar, where many Yazidis live, more than 200,000 had to flee. Many were stranded on Mount Sinjar with dwindling resources, causing the Obama administration to launch airstrikes against the Islamic State.

by Jonah Shepp

Lionel Beehner quibbles with Marc Lynch’s assessment that if the US had given arms to the Syrian rebels early on in the civil war, it would not have shortened the conflict or prevented the collapse of the state and the rise of ISIS. After highlighting some political science research to show that the question of whether outside interventions can help end civil wars is not settled, he throws this bomb:

Perhaps, then, the question we should be asking is not whether third-party interventions are, on average, helpful or harmful to civil war termination. The answer invariably is: Well, it depends. Rather, we should be asking: Is the world back in a 19th century multipolar paradigm, whereby civil wars were primarily fought between pro-democracy versus conservative/monarchist forces, and the latter typically won because their interventions were more robust and one-sided? …

In the current context, the anti-democratic axis as it were – that is, the Russia’s and Iran’s of this world – appear more willing to go “all in” to support their “proxies” than their pro-democracy counterparts in the West. That means we may be getting into bidding wars not that we can’t win – we have the bank and arms to outspend and out-supply just about anyone – but which we lack the will to win, whether due to flagging public support, setting too high a bar of excellence for our rebel or regime proxies (or fear of Mujahidin-like blowback), or – and this is where the 19th century comparison may be apt – because the stakes for us are perceived to be lower than they are for the Putins of this world.

Beehner can’t seriously believe that civil wars today are “primarily fought between pro-democracy versus conservative/monarchist forces”. On what side of this Manichaean divide would he place the Ukrainian separatists? Is the Muslim Brotherhood “pro-democracy” or “conservative”? What about Hamas? Which side is “pro-democracy” in Libya? Or Afghanistan? Or Sudan, or the Central African Republic, or Mali, or DR Congo? And for that matter, are all opponents of the Syrian regime “pro-democracy”? We know the answer to that one. Beehner’s broad characterization of contemporary civil wars seems breathtakingly reductive to me. Responding to it, Daniel Larison rightly warns against “projecting Westerners’ preferences onto anti-regime Syrians”:

It is a mistake to think of contemporary civil wars in terms of some sort of international contest between democracy and authoritarianism, not least because it creates the false impression that the U.S. and its democratic allies have something at stake in these conflicts when we don’t. There are illiberal authoritarians aplenty on both sides in Syria, but there are hardly any democrats of any kind to be found, and that wouldn’t have been changed by a larger commitment of U.S. resources at any point. The ability to provide arms and funding to anti-regime forces has never been in doubt, but skeptics have been absolutely right to doubt the wisdom and desirability providing this aid.

Look, I’d love to live in a world where every conflict has a “democratic” side. I’ll admit that when the Syrian civil war began as a series of largely peaceful demonstrations in early 2011, I had high hopes for change (and I think Larison may be overstating the absence of democratic elements in the Syrian opposition, at least looking back at that time). Such was the zeitgeist in the Arab world at the moment, when the fall of Ben Ali and Mubarak made anything seem possible, and I was as caught up in it as anyone else. When Bashar al-Assad made clear that demands for reform would be met with deadly force and the protest movement transformed into an armed uprising, I thought some kind of American intervention on the FSA’s behalf was a pretty reasonable proposition (though reading Lynch on the subject gave me pause).

But there was more going on in Syria than met the eye: the civil war turned out to be more of a messy sectarian power struggle than a battle between democracy and totalitarianism, and as it has dragged on over the past three years, the moral calculus has only become cloudier. The main target of my anger for how things turned out remains Assad himself, who could have prevented all of this death and destruction had he been willing to engage with the protesters of 2011 rather than gun them down. Instead he chose to run with the narrative that Islamist terrorists were out to bring down his regime and proceeded to torture and murder his opponents by the tens of thousands, radicalizing the rebels and leading to… well, have you read the news lately?

But in a state where no such thing as civil society has ever really existed, where democrats and Muslim Brothers alike have been tortured and massacred, and where Assad’s Alawite coreligionists believed (and still do) that they would be held collectively responsible for the regime’s misdeeds in the event that Assad ever went away, I highly doubt there was a way for the US to intervene on behalf of “freedom” and “democracy”, rather than merely empower some other faction. Regional leadership, such as the Arab League has continually failed to demonstrate, might have been able to pull it off, but as we ought to have learned from Iraq, there are very hard limits to what American guns can accomplish in service of the causes of liberty and peace.

(Photo: A Syrian man reacts while standing on the rubble of his house while others look for survivors and bodies in the Tariq al-Bab district of the northern city of Aleppo on February 23, 2013. By Pablo Tosco/AFP/Getty Images)

by Dish Staff

Cameron Hudson finds the Obama Doctrine of genocide prevention sensible, if not particularly satisfying to those who would have liked a more robust American response to the crisis in Syria:

In an interview Friday with Tom Friedman of The New York Times, Obama remarked, “When you have a unique circumstance in which genocide is threatened, and a country is willing to have us in there, you have a strong international consensus that these people need to be protected and we have a capacity to do so, then we have an obligation to do so.” Some would argue that this explanation walks back from the high-minded justification for the forceful response to the potential massacre in Benghazi, Libya, in late 2011 when Obama asserted that a failure to act “would have stained the conscience of the world.” More importantly, it sets a new and seemingly higher bar for taking action to prevent genocide—one that is unlikely to be replicated very often.

If that’s the intent, it is not necessarily a bad thing.

Genocide prevention, as a community of practice, is in need of bookending. In a world full of nails—or potential nails—the U.S. military is the literal hammer. Absent a clear understanding of the circumstances when force could be used to save lives, advocates and communities at risk hold out false hope that the cavalry is coming, when it so rarely is. Understanding when a military response is on the table and when it is not will focus our attention on the cheaper, more politically palatable non-military options that should always constitute the heart of genocide prevention.

Aaron David Miller argues that despite the decision to strike ISIS, Obama remains as risk-averse as ever:

The Friedman interview revealed another important reason why Obama’s risk aversion is likely to endure. The president raised the issue about the lack of follow-up to help Libya after Qaddafi’s overthrow. “Then it’s the day after Qaddafi is gone, when everybody is feeling good and everybody is holding up posters saying, ‘Thank you, America.’ At that moment, there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies that didn’t have any civic traditions…. So that’s a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question, ‘Should we intervene, militarily? Do we have an answer [for] the day after?'”

Even though he doesn’t come out and say it, you get the sense that if there was a chance to do it over again he’d be much more engaged. But there’s another way to read the president’s comment, too. And that’s this: Military action is only one step in a complex process that requires a huge investment to create a relatively stable and functional transition from authoritarian to democratic rule. And Obama understands that hitting the Islamic State (IS), as necessary as it may be, is hardly a panacea for rebuilding the new Iraq. More to the point, that’s not America’s job. And Obama isn’t going to correct his Libya mistake by getting bogged down in nation-building in Iraq.

But Micah Zenko expects the mission in Iraq to expand beyond Obama’s stated limits, because they all do:

The expansion of humanitarian interventions — beyond what presidents initially claim will be the intended scope and time of military and diplomatic missions — is completely normal. What is remarkable is how congressional members, media commentators, and citizens are newly surprised each time that this happens. In the near term, humanitarian interventions often save more lives than they cost: The University of Pittsburgh’s Taylor Seybolt’s 2008 review of 17 U.S.-led interventions found that nine had succeeded in saving lives. But they also potentially contain tremendous downsides — as recent history demonstrates.

On April 7, 1991, the United States began airdropping food, water, and blankets on the largest refugee camps along the Turkish-Iraqi border that were sheltering Kurds displaced by Iraqi Republican Guard divisions brutally putting down an uprising in northern Iraq. That same day, when asked how long the U.S. military would play a role within Iraq, President George H.W. Bush declared, “We’re talking about days, not weeks or months.” In support of the humanitarian mission in northern Iraq, the United States concurrently began enforcing a no-fly zone above that country’s 36th parallel. In August 1992, a U.S.-led no-fly zone south of the 32nd parallel of Iraq was formed by unilateral declaration to compel Saddam Hussein’s cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors and to protect the Shiite population caught in a counterinsurgency campaign in the southern marshlands. Bush was right about the U.S. military involvement not being weeks or months: The northern and southern no-fly zones lasted another 10 and a half years.

by Dish Staff

Frederic Hof slams Obama for not arming the Syrian rebels back in 2012:

No doubt the president is sensitive to the charge that his rejection of the 2012 recommendation by his national security team to arm and equip nationalist Syrian rebels robustly has contributed significantly, if inadvertently, to ISIL’s growth in both Syria and Iraq. His comments to Friedman implicitly dismiss the 2012 recommendation itself as a fantasy, but as Secretary Clinton’s Syria adviser I was a member of the administration at that time. The recommendation, in one form or another, was offered not only by Clinton, but by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, CIA Director David Petraeus and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey. Yet the president, ignoring decades of universal conscription and mandatory military service in Syria, persists in characterizing the Assad regime’s armed opponents as a hopeless collection of former butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.

What is truly curious, however, is the request to Congress for $500 million to finance what the president deems a fantasy. Indeed, if press reports are true that the United States is already involved in some low-level arming, equipping and training of Syrian rebels, one wonders how many taxpayer dollars have already been spent on something the commander-in-chief deems illusory.

In a post we noted earlier, Marc Lynch explains why arming was a dodgy idea, and remains so today. Larison piles on, starting with a reminder that the exact same outcome that anti-interventionists feared in Syria (jihadists taking control of American weapons intended for “moderate” allies) has come to pass in Iraq. And another thing:

It should also be obvious that groups such as ISIS benefit from collapsing state authority, so it is not clear why an even more activist Syria policy aimed at collapsing the Syrian government would have been bad for that group or one like it.

The bigger problem with the hawkish revisionism on this question points to the inherent absurdity of what they were demanding from the U.S. (and what the administration has more recently agreed to do). Syria hawks wanted the U.S. to arm anti-regime forces for the purpose of overthrowing the government, but they emphasized their desire to arm only the “right” kind of insurgents to distract from the small problem that their overall goal of regime change would inevitably empower jihadist groups. Syria hawks wanted to arm the opposition in the hopes that it would start a process that would bring the Syrian government down, and if that had happened that would have created an even worse chaotic landscape in which jihadist groups would have thrived even more than they already do. Instead of jihadists controlling just part of Syria, it is entirely possible that even more of Syria would have ended up under their control had the administration done exactly what Syria hawks wanted and if things had worked according to plan.

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub list some other reasons why Obama’s choice not to intervene in Syria doesn’t contradict his choice to intervene (reluctantly) in Iraq. Among these reasons is that there’s a difference between intervening to preserve the status quo and intervening to change it:

Obama ordered air strikes against ISIS in Iraq focused on the narrow goal of defending Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region. Kurdistan had been mostly secure until ISIS began pushing into the territory about a week ago; it’s got a stable, pro-American, oil-producing government. Obama’s strikes are meant to help Kurdistan defend itself, and to preserve the status quo of a secure Kurdistan. The strikes are very clearly not about trying to change the larger ISIS war in Iraq, or to help Iraq retake the vast ISIS-held swathes of territory. In Syria, there is no “good” status quo to defend. Any strikes against ISIS there would be about pushing the group back from Syrian territory it already controls, so that more moderate Syrian rebels could seize it. In other words, the air strikes would be about changing the facts on the ground in Syria, rather than preserving them.

Obama seems willing to use force when he can protect something good — a stable, secure Iraqi Kurdistan — but not to try to fix something bad. He doesn’t want to “own” the outcome, get dragged into a potentially long engagement that could easily escalate, or risk sending the conflict spinning in an unpredictable new direction. So the US approach to Syria and Iraq is consistent in this respect.

Even Allahpundit sees how these criticisms of Obama’s reticence to intervene ignore reality:

It’s easy to say in hindsight “we should have hit ISIS harder before they had time to establish themselves”; in reality, had Obama made that case at the time, he would have been scoffed at by war-weary lefties and righties. And with good reason: There’s simply never been compelling evidence, the way there is with an America-friendly battle-tested force like the peshmerga in Kurdistan, that an FSA armed by Uncle Sam would have been equal to the task of stopping the jihadis, let alone Assad.

Previous Dish on intervention in Iraq vs. Syria here and here.