What to do? Ugh.
The
NY Times' columnists had at it today. For the sake of those who don't subscribe, I'll provide below what I think are the best bits. This is a pretty long post, and you're entirely justified in not reading it; after all, what
we think about this will have absolutely no effect on what happens. None at all. But the political scientist in me still tries to understand the issues and search for something called wisdom. Unfortunately, as Tom Friedman writes, a perfect solution to Syria "is not on the menu."
First
Frank Bruni:
Our country is about to make the most excruciating kind of decision, the
most dire: whether to commence a military campaign whose real costs and
ultimate consequences are unknowable.
But let’s by all means discuss the implications for Marco Rubio, Rand
Paul, Iowa, New Hampshire and 2016. Yea or nay on the bombing: which is
the safer roll of the dice for a Republican presidential contender?
Reflexively, sadly, we journalists prattle and write about that. We miss
the horse race of 2012, not to mention the readership and ratings it
brought. The next election can’t come soon enough.
So we pivot to Hillary Clinton. We’re always pivoting to Hillary
Clinton. Should she be weighing in on Syria more decisively and
expansively? Or does the fact that she authorized the war in Iraq compel
restraint and a gentler tone this time around? What’s too
gentle, and what’s just right? So goes one strand of commentary, and to
follow it is to behold a perverse conflation of foreign policy and the
Goldilocks fable.
The media has a wearying tendency — a corrosive tic — to put everything
that happens in Washington through the same cynical political grinder,
subjecting it to the same cynical checklist of who’s up, who’s down,
who’s threading a needle, who’s tangled up in knots, what it all means
for control of Congress after the midterms, what it all means for
control of the White House two years later.
And we’re doing a bit too much of this with Syria, when we owe this
crossroads something more than standard operating procedure, something
better than knee-jerk ruminations on the imminent vote in Congress as a
test for Nancy Pelosi, as a referendum on John Boehner, as a conundrum
for Mitch McConnell, as a defining moment for Barack Obama.
You know whom it’s an even more defining moment for? The Syrians whose
country is unraveling beyond all hope; the Israelis, Lebanese and
Jordanians next door; the American servicemen and servicewomen whose
futures could be forever altered or even snuffed out by the course that
the lawmakers and the president chart.
The stakes are huge. Bomb Syria and there’s no telling how many innocent
civilians will be killed; if it will be the first chapter in an epic
longer and bloodier than we bargained for; what price America will pay,
not just on the battlefield but in terms of reprisals elsewhere; and
whether we’ll be pouring accelerant on a country and a region already
ablaze.
Don’t bomb Syria and there’s no guessing the lesson that the tyrants of
the world will glean from our decision not to punish Bashar al-Assad for
slaughtering his people on whatever scale he wishes and in whatever
manner he sees fit. Will they conclude that a diminished America is
retreating from the role it once played? Will they interpret that,
dangerously, as a green light? And what will our inaction say about us?
About our morality, and about our mettle? [My emphasis.]
These are the agonizing considerations before our elected leaders and
before the rest of us, and in light of them we journalists ought to
resist turning the Syria debate into the sort of reality television show
that we turn so much of American political life into, a soap opera
often dominated by the mouthiest characters rather than the most
thoughtful ones.
Last week, in many places, I read what Sarah Palin was saying about
Syria, because of course her geopolitical chops are so thoroughly
established. A few months back, I read about Donald Trump’s thoughts on
possible military intervention, because any debate over strategy in the
Middle East naturally calls for his counsel.
Ross Douthat (a lost soul):
It is to President Obama’s great discredit that he has staked this
credibility on a vote whose outcome he failed to game out in advance.
But if he loses that vote, the national interest as well as his
political interests will take a tangible hit: for the next three years,
American foreign policy will be in the hands of a president whose
promises will ring consistently hollow, and whose ability to make good
on his strategic commitments will be very much in doubt.
This is not an argument that justifies voting for a wicked or a reckless
war, and members of Congress who see the Syria intervention in that
light must necessarily oppose it.
But if they do, they should be prepared for the consequences: a damaged
president, a potentially crippled foreign policy and a long, hard,
dangerous road to January 2017.
Tom Friedman (actually from Wednesday's paper):
... [T[he most likely option for Syria is some kind
of de facto partition, with the pro-Assad, predominantly Alawite Syrians
controlling one region and the Sunni and Kurdish Syrians controlling
the rest. But the Sunnis are themselves divided between the pro-Western,
secular Free Syrian Army, which we’d like to see win, and the
pro-Islamist and pro-Al Qaeda jihadist groups, like the Nusra Front,
which we’d like to see lose.
That’s why I think the best response to the use of poison gas by
President Bashar al-Assad is not a cruise missile attack on Assad’s
forces, but an increase in the training and arming of the Free Syrian
Army — including the antitank and antiaircraft weapons it’s long sought.
This has three virtues: 1) Better arming responsible rebels units, and
they do exist, can really hurt the Assad regime in a sustained way —
that is the whole point of deterrence — without exposing America to
global opprobrium for bombing Syria; 2) Better arming the rebels
actually enables them to protect themselves more effectively from this
regime; 3) Better arming the rebels might increase the influence on the
ground of the more moderate opposition groups over the jihadist ones —
and eventually may put more pressure on Assad, or his allies, to
negotiate a political solution.
By contrast, just limited bombing of Syria from the air makes us look
weak at best, even if we hit targets. And if we kill lots of Syrians, it
enables Assad to divert attention from the 1,400 he has gassed to death
to those we harmed. Also, who knows what else our bombing of Syria
could set in motion. (Would Iran decide it must now rush through a
nuclear bomb?)
But our response must not stop there.
We need to use every diplomatic tool we have to shame Assad, his wife,
Asma, his murderous brother Maher and every member of his cabinet or
military whom we can identify as being involved in this gas attack. We
need to bring their names before the United Nations Security Council for
condemnation. We need to haul them before the International Criminal
Court. We need to make them famous. We need to metaphorically
put their pictures up in every post office in the world as people wanted
for crimes against humanity.
Yes, there’s little chance of them being brought to justice now, but do
not underestimate how much of a deterrent it can be for the world
community to put the mark of Cain on their foreheads so they know that
they and their families can never again travel anywhere except to North
Korea, Iran and Vladimir Putin’s dacha. It might even lead some of
Assad’s supporters to want to get rid of him and seek a political deal.
When we alone just bomb Syria to defend “our” red line, we turn the rest
of the world into spectators — many of whom will root against us. When
we shame the people who perpetrated this poison gas attack, we can
summon the rest of the world, maybe even inspire them, to join us in
redrawing this red line, as a moral line and, therefore, a global line.
It is easy for Putin, China and Iran to denounce American bombing, but
much harder for them to defend Syrian use of weapons of mass
destruction, so let’s force them to choose. Best of all, a moral
response — a shaming — can be an unlimited response, not a limited one.
A limited, transactional cruise missile attack meets Obama’s need to
preserve his credibility. But it also risks changing the subject from
Assad’s behavior to ours and — rather than empowering the rebels to act
and enlisting the world to act — could make us owners of this story in
ways that we do not want. “Arm and shame” is how we best help the decent
forces in Syria, deter further use of poison gas, isolate Assad and put
real pressure on him or others around him to cut a deal. Is it perfect?
No, but perfect is not on the menu in Syria.
Finally, there's
Nicholas Kristof. Kristof is the most humanitarian reporter I know of. I really respect him. Where there's war and misery, Kristof is there, finding out what he can about it, and how to stop it, and letting us know. And here's what he has to say:
As one woman tweeted to me: “We simply cannot stop every injustice in the world by using military weapons.”
Fair enough. But let’s be clear that this is not “every injustice”: On top of the 100,000-plus already killed in Syria,
another 5,000 are being slaughtered monthly,
according to the United Nations. Remember the Boston Massacre of 1770
from our history books, in which five people were killed? Syria loses
that many people every 45 minutes on average, around the clock.
In other words, while there are many injustices around the world, from
Darfur to eastern Congo, take it from one who has covered most of them:
Syria is today the world capital of human suffering.
Skeptics are right about the drawbacks of getting involved, including
the risk of retaliation. Yet let’s acknowledge that the alternative is,
in effect, to acquiesce as the slaughter in Syria reaches perhaps the
hundreds of thousands or more.
But what about the United Nations? How about a multilateral solution
involving the Arab League? How about peace talks? What about an
International Criminal Court prosecution?
All this sounds fine in theory, but Russia blocks progress in the United
Nations. We’ve tried multilateral approaches, and Syrian leaders won’t
negotiate a peace deal as long as they feel they’re winning on the
ground. One risk of bringing in the International Criminal Court is that
President Bashar al-Assad would be more wary of stepping down. The
United Nations can’t stop the killing in Syria any more than in Darfur
or Kosovo. As President Assad
himself noted in 2009, “There is no substitute for the United States.”
So while neither intervention nor paralysis is appealing, that’s pretty
much the menu. That’s why I favor a limited cruise missile strike
against Syrian military targets (as well as the arming of moderate
rebels). As I see it, there are several benefits: Such a strike may well
deter Syria’s army from using chemical weapons again, probably can
degrade the ability of the army to use chemical munitions and bomb
civilian areas, can reinforce the global norm against chemical weapons,
and — a more remote prospect — may slightly increase the pressure on the
Assad regime to work out a peace deal.
If you’re thinking, “Those are incremental, speculative and highly
uncertain gains,” well, you’re right. Syria will be bloody whatever we
do.
Mine is a minority view. After the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the West
is bone weary and has little interest in atrocities unfolding in Syria
or anywhere else. Opposition to missile strikes is one of the few issues
that ordinary Democrats and Republicans agree on.
[Snip]
Some military interventions, as in Sierra Leone, Bosnia and Kosovo, have
worked well. Others, such as Iraq in 2003, worked very badly. Still
others, such as Libya, had mixed results. Afghanistan and Somalia were
promising at first but then evolved badly.
So, having said that analogies aren’t necessarily helpful, let me leave you with a final provocation.
If we were fighting against an incomparably harsher dictator using
chemical weapons on our own neighborhoods, and dropping napalm-like
substances on our children’s schools, would we regard other countries as
“pro-peace” if they sat on the fence as our dead piled up?
So, what would you do if you were in charge?
An aside: I sometimes wonder if my NY Times online subscription is worth the $35/month I pay for it. The answer is always: I would be lost without it.
