Count Me Out on Syria
Posted By Victor
Davis Hanson On May
13, 2013 @ 9:44 am
Some excerpts from Hanson’s excellent analysis
of the current violent Syrian quagmire. For the entire article, here’s the link
There are good reasons to go into Syria, but far better ones to stay out.
Let us review a few of them. Syria is a humanitarian crisis with
over one million refugees and 70,000 dead.
But there are similar outrages in
Mali, Somalia, and the Sudan. Why no calls to go there as well? Would U.S.
troops, planes, or massive shipments of weapons stop the killing, or simply
ensure endless cycles of death following the Assad departure?
Will Syria’s
Christians and other minorities become worse off with or without Assad?
More importantly, we do not at this late stage know which
terrorist is a pro-Western Google-type, and which is a hard-core jihadist.
The
history of the Middle East in particular (see Iran in 1980) and world history
in general (cf. France, 1794 or Russia, 1917) suggests that the more extreme,
better organized revolutionary zealots, even when in the minority, usually win
out over the moderate and sensible reformers in the post-war sorting out and
sizing up.
There are not many Washingtons, Jeffersons, or Madisons in the
annals of revolutionary history.
When Assad goes, the postbellum mess will
either go straight to the sham election of a Mohammed Morsi type, who will try
to suspend the very constitution that brought him to power, or we will witness
round two of Libyan-type violence.
Of course, there are also strategic reasons for toppling Assad.
How wonderful to see Hezbollah lose their Iranian-arms conduit, or to remove
Syria from the Iran-Hezbollah axis. But is that not happening now anyway?
Well apart from Benghazi, Susan Rice and Samantha Power’s Libya is
a blueprint for nothing.
This time around we will not get UN approval after
assuring Russia and China last time that our “humanitarian aid” and “no-fly
zones” did not entail ground support, which of course it immediately did.
If in 2002 Iraq was to be a “cakewalk,” by 2004 it was “Bush’s
war.” To name just a few across the political spectrum in random order, I’m
sure that a Francis Fukuyama, Fareed Zakaria, Andrew Sullivan, George Will, the
late William F. Buckley, Jr., Thomas Friedman, John Kerry, and thousands of
others all had legitimate reasons in abandoning the cause of Iraq.
Lord knows
it was unwise to let thousands of scattered Ba’athist soldiers roam the streets
of Iraq unemployed. How stupid was it to focus only on WMD when the Congress
gave lots of reasons to remove Saddam?
The list of screw-ups goes on and on. But
the fact remains that victory in war goes not
to those who make no mistakes, but to those who learn the most quickly from
them in order to ensure the fewest in the future.
Please, Spare Us Now “You
Owe Us Help”
If Arab reformers ever wanted a shot at democracy, Iraq was still
their golden opportunity. Instead, almost all damned the effort and caricatured
Americans. I once in 2006 sat in a clinic in Tripoli listening to Arab
intellectuals (or rather Gaddafi minders) explain to me the Jewish roots of the
Iraqi war, and how Americans were siphoning oil off in the desert and flying it
in tankers home.
Finally, I could not even follow all the conspiracy theories
concocted to explain how wicked the Maliki government was.
Please, spare us now “you owe us your help.”
We have been there, done that, and we have learned some great
lessons about the 21st century, pre-modern Middle East, and any interventions
into it: a) Arab reformers damn the U.S. for doing nothing, but they will damn
it far more for doing something; b) interventionists believe that all success
is their offspring, and failure is outsourced to someone else, usually the
military or those who sent the military in; c) the Middle East lesson of
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya is that only a huge U.S. ground presence, in the
fashion of postwar Italy, Germany, or Japan, coupled with abject defeat of the
enemy, can lead to any chance of consensual government.
Without bloody fighting and without massive U.S. aid either the
enemy wins and takes over, or what replaces the enemy reverts to the mindset of
the enemy.
There is irony in seeing the opportunistic war critic Barack Obama
out-drone Bush or be attacked on his Left by liberals, who rail at his callousness
in not intervening in Syria.
But there is not enough irony for schadenfreude — given that American
soldiers might be sent into a theater by those who would support them only to
the degree that they were deemed successful and blame their setbacks on
everyone but themselves.
A nearly bankrupt and divided America after Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Libya is not up for Syria — and an Arab Spring that on its own chose Winter
does not deserve any more American blood.
Sorry, that’s just the way it is.
Article printed from Works and Days: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/count-me-out-on-syria/
