Rare News Desk
When President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he claimed he was ushering in a new age of democracy and minority protections.
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Ten years later, Iraq’s Christian population, one of that country’s most vulnerable minorities, is devastated.
Besieged by church bombings and killings, about 68 percent of Iraqi Christians have fled since the deposal of Saddam Hussein. The destination for many was Syria. Run by the ruthless Bashar al-Assad, Syria was hardly ideal, but it was regarded as one of the safest refuges for Christians in the Middle East.
Then came the civil war and Syria was flooded with, as Christopher Hitchens called them, “those least alluring of all types: strident but illiterate young men with religious headgear, high-velocity weapons, and modern jeeps.” Vast swaths of northern Syria fell under the control of barbaric jihadist groups like ISIL, which carried out horrific acts of cruelty, including reintroducing crucifixion to the Levant.
Over a quarter of local Christians have now left Syria, some of whom had likely already left Iraq only a few years earlier. This happened in part because the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, and then engendered chaos in Syria by throwing its weight behind Sunni rebels.
And we still haven’t learned our lesson.
After months of destruction and mayhem, the Obama administration has once again asked Congress for $500 million in military equipment to arm the rebels in Syria. But don’t worry. The president insists that aid recipients would be vetted to make sure they aren’t planning to blow up a shopping mall anytime soon.
Never mind that the extremists could easily kill the moderate rebels and steal the weapons. Never mind that American-made Stinger missiles have likely fallen into the hands of ISIL. Never mind that an Assad loss in Syria would further bolster ISIL’s position.
Bashar al-Assad is a tyrant and a few of the rebels are still democrats. Therefore we must stand with the rebels.
That’s still the thinking of many neoconservatives and administration officials, who seem reluctant to ever deviate from George W. Bush’s declaration that America must “rid the world of evil.” So we’ve tacitly supported the rebels, and now we have a destabilized and dangerous Syria wrought by a civil war that’s killed over 160,000 people, empowered terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Nusra, and sent Christians and Shias stampeding for the exits.
Meanwhile we’re annoyed with Russia because Vladimir Putin is threatening democracy in Ukraine, but our muddling in the Syrian civil war handed Putin his biggest public relations victory in years. While Obama dithered, trying to find some halfway house between intervention and non-intervention, Putin negotiated a deal that’s had some success destroying Assad’s chemical weapons and allowed him to posture as a peacemaker on the world stage. Russia looked decisive; America looked bewildered and drunk.
Seven months later, Putin invaded Crimea.
The problem is that the United States had no business getting involved in Syria. Bashar al-Assad wasn’t America’s enemy. Neither was Saddam Hussein or Hosni Mubarak, for that matter. Authoritarianism is often a nasty system of government, but it didn’t fly planes into the Twin Towers.
Our real foes have always been al-Qaeda and like-minded franchises of extremists who want to slaughter Westerners and establish a caliphate.
Yet because we interpreted 9/11 as a mandate to destroy dictators, we helped create vacuums in Iraq and Syria that were filled by the very extremists we should have been fighting.
Ironically, after almost thirteen years of the war on terror, Sunni jihadists are now closer to accomplishing their goals than they were in 2001. ISIL has declared a caliphate in the Middle East and is threatening Jews with another Holocaust and Westerners with death.
This is our nightmare scenario, not Bashar al-Assad winning his civil war.
Thanks to neoconservative delusions in 2003 and Obama’s fantasies today, our foreign policy has horrifically backfired.
Rather than trying to shoot every strongman who crosses our path, we should focus on destroying those who can and will harm America and its allies—even if that means, in certain conflicts, we just don’t get involved.
