The United States and Syria: Why the U.S. Should Keep Its Bloodstained Hands Out

“Through the vistas of time a voice still cries to every potential Peter, ‘Put up your sword!’ The shores of history are white with the bleached bones of nations and communities that failed to follow this command.”

                – Martin Luther King Jr., from ‘Nonviolence and Racial Justice’

Last week I found myself perusing ‘The Oregonian’ – a very dangerous task, indeed – when I came across an editorial piece written by Doyle McManus entitled “U.S. risks losing influence by not sending weapons”. In a nutshell, McManus suggests that the United States should firmly place itself behind the Syrian political opposition to Bashar Assad by supplying them with armaments and logistical aid. This, he smugly asserts, will ensure continued American “influence” in the region, something that we are expected to assume is good for the United States and the Middle East more generally.

 

While I was not at all surprised by the content of his self-assured and bombast-laden article, it grieved me deeply. The civil war in Syria is horrible – of this, there is no doubt. However, to suggest that the United States should, or even has the right to intervene with implements of violence, is not only irresponsible, but morally reprehensible.

But such remarks are only indicative of a much larger problem. The geopolitical schemes, wars, and interventions advocated by instant experts and armchair intellectuals who “work” in plush Washington think-tanks have more often than not (if not always) resulted in disastrous unintended consequences rather than any appreciable gains to either the United States or the countries who had the misfortune of being their life-sized playgrounds. To say it plain, the realpolitik that McManus and those like him advocate is not realistic at all but, in fact, quite the opposite.

More specifically, while reading McManus’ article I could not help but think about the United States’ Operation Cyclone, in which the CIA provided weapons as well as financial and logistical support to Afghan fighters during the U.S.S.R.’s invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Many interventionists continue to wax lyrical about the dividends that America supposedly reaped from this “cheap” and “efficient” operation.

That Cyclone continues to be lauded as the model of ingenuity and efficient foreign policy is staggeringly short-sighted, however. The Soviets left Afghanistan – that much is true. However, a serious student of the Soviet-Afghan War would know that Brezhnev had decided to leave Afghanistan years before the U.S. chose to intervene. By the time the American support was in full-swing Gorbachev was already in office and the illusions that the Soviet leaders had once entertained about stabilizing Afghanistan for communist-rule had already been torn to shreds along the winding roads of the Salang Pass and narrow corridors of the Panjshir Valley.

In short, American aid was gratuitous, merely serving to escalate an already gruesome conflict. CIA director William Casey would be the first to admit (and often did) that U.S. arms aid was chiefly meant to give the Soviets their “Vietnam,” punishing them for their support of the Viet Minh during America’s own short-sighted military adventure. And, of course, while neoconservatives and interventionists of all flavors claim that Cyclone had no human cost this neglects to take into consideration the 100,000s of Afghans who died during the conflict, as well as the several million who became refugees as a direct result of hostilities.

Unfortunately, the human “factor” is all too easily forgotten when one is planning these schemes from a well-furnished office several 1000 miles away.

‘So Operation Cyclone was not exactly all that it is cracked up to be, but at least it did not hurt our interests.’

And again, you would be wrong. Countless religious extremists and partisans whom the United States once called “freedom fighters” are now the selfsame people it designates “terrorists,” including a guy by the name of Osama Bin Ladin. Maybe you have heard of him? It is one of the great ironies of history that the very people the United States patronized in the 1980s in Afghanistan are now those whom the government anathematizes and has since engaged in several multi-trillion dollar wars to combat. So much for being “cheap” and “efficient”.

But let us get back to the issue at hand: Syria.

If the U.S. should not engage in cloak-and-dagger machinations or political jockeying in the region, what should it do? In reality, the best move that the U.S. can do is to stay out of the region and work through international channels such as the United Nations (that is what they are there for, after all) to promote a diplomatic solution to this otherwise insoluble conflict.

There are several salient reasons why the U.S. must stay out if it is to be a constructive force for both peace within Syria and America’s own security. Preeminent amongst these reasons is the fact that, at present, the U.S. has a soiled reputation in not only Syria but the entire Middle East because of its abortive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Affording Israel carte blanche to continue its ethnic cleansing policies in the Occupied Territories has not helped endear Middle Easterners to America either – especially when the weapons used to bludgeon Palestinians are conspicuously denoted as having been “made in the U.S.A.”.

Furthermore, Syrians are quite cognizant (unlike most Americans) that the U.S. was perfectly happy to collaborate with Bashar Assad during the initial invasion of Iraq and in outsourcing the torture of suspected terrorists to Syria’s mukhabarat (intelligence services) after the inauguration of the so-called “Global War on Terror”.

In sum, any attempt of the U.S. government to “assist” Syrians would be skeptically viewed – and justifiably so – by the average Syrian, especially when you have some genius like McManus writing that “It's not about them; it's about us — and the amount of influence we'll have in Syria once the insurgents win.”

‘Okay,’ you say, ‘so the U.S. should not intervene with arms, but what makes you think that diplomacy will work? Let’s be realistic.’

Yes, diplomacy would be difficult – as any solution to this intrinsically difficult situation would be. If the solutions were easy, we would not be having this discussion. However, it is far more utopian to believe that supplying weapons would help ameliorate this crisis. More often than not (if not always) war and coercive force are employed quite literally as a blunt force means to address a problem precisely because a workable solution has not been found or perceived. And as every toddler learns, you cannot fit a square peg into a triangle shaped hole.

One thing is certain, however. If a diplomatic strategy is ruled out then Assad will feel that his back has been placed against the wall; then the problem will truly become intractable. If he believes that there is no way out then he will logically infer that he has nothing to lose in amplifying the violence to even more dizzying heights. In fact, this will seem to him to be the only way out. Prolific social commentator Noam Chomsky has convincingly argued that it was precisely this sort of truculent posturing by Western powers that precluded a speedy resolution of violence during the Kosovo Crisis of the late 1990s – and actually emboldened Milosevic to increase ethnic cleansing operations in Kosovo.

Furthermore, as McManus himself notes, there are Islamist groups that are active in opposing Assad whose interests and tastes clearly do not mesh with the stated objectives of the U.S. government no matter how you attempt to portray them. And even if those whom the U.S. backs do ascend to power, there is no guarantee that they will continue to view American benevolence favorably once in office. In order to underline this point one need only think of Iraq’s current strong relationships with Hezbollah and Iran, the clandestine connections that many top Afghan officials continue to cultivate with the Taliban, or Israel’s disturbing war-posturing against Iran.

To conclude, instruments of violence cannot solve what is essentially a political problem. ( If you needs proof of this then just look at Syria’s civil war – seriously.) While war enthusiasts like McManus note that “nobody expects diplomatic appeals to work at this point,” one would at least expect that they would consider trying it first to see if it works or not. However unsatisfactory to the adolescent impulses of armchair strategists, it is simply the case that diplomacy is the brightest option right now. In light of America’s recent – and continuing – disastrous forays in the region, the expectation that using implements of violence will secure peace requires a truly Panglossian naiveté.

And though U.S. policymakers have shown themselves to be less than effusive about this option they should at least not work to impede it. Quite frankly, the U.S. has wreaked enough havoc in the Middle East in these past decades – a fact that the Syrians themselves know all too well. It should stay out, and conspicuously so.