It’s official: Everyone who wanted the U.S. to help the Syrian rebels was wrong

Last year Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes said the unthinkable: the United States should support Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war.

Pipes noted that the Sunni jihadists who had invaded Syria were a greater threat to the region and American security than a Syrian dictatorship. “A rebel victory would hugely boost the increasingly roguish Turkish government while empowering jihadis and replacing the Assad government with triumphant, inflamed Islamists,” he warned.

Pipes immediately took fire from both the left and the right. But fast-forward to today and not only has Pipes’ fear of triumphant Islamists been realized, but the Obama administration is considering a policy that would effectively boost Assad.

ISIS, the world’s wealthiest and most lethal terrorist group, is threatening Christians, Yazidis, and Shias with genocide—all thanks to the instability that resulted from a weakened Assad regime. ISIS jihadists are already wielding captured American artillery. For them to have even more American weapons, because they either murdered or converted the moderate rebels we armed, would have been disastrous.

The hawks were wrong about war in Syria. But don’t expect their credibility to take even the mildest hit.

They’ve long since bounced to the next target like a pinball between bumpers, thumping for war with ISIS and blaming the entire thing on weakness, fecklessness, lack of resolve, faint hearts. The pall of Munich 1938 once again hangs in the air and men with shovels have once again been spotted near Neville Chamberlain’s grave.

That they said the exact same thing about the exact opposite side in the exact same civil war just a year ago goes unmentioned.

We have a foreign policy establishment whose operating procedure is to wait until a crisis occurs, decry American retrenchment, and demand immediate action. This isn’t just sloppy thinking, it’s not really thinking at all—more of an instinctive reflex reminiscent of George W. Bush’s tendency to “trust his gut.”

His gut, not the facts or circumstances or any realistic sense of the limitations of American power.

Peter Hitchens thinks every foreign policy opinion column should be emblazoned with a red warning if its writer supported the war in Iraq. Given the current circumstances, the musings of those who clamored for war in Syria are just as deserving of such a mark. Or could we at least give credit where it’s due? Pipes has been wrong about plenty—and his overall “bleed both sides” approach to Syria is objectionable—but shouldn’t it be acknowledged that he was partially correct?

“Partially” because we aren’t ever going to enter into an overt alliance with Assad. Philip Hammond, the UK foreign secretary, already ruled that out last week. But any effort to defeat ISIS will mean unofficially recalibrating our position alongside Assad and Iran, both Shiite regimes that are working to destroy ISIS. It will also mean leveraging our foreign aid to pressure countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, citadels of Sunni Islam that have been funding ISIS. In 2010 we sold $60 billion in military aircraft to Saudi Arabia. This must stop.

We also need to shake off our conception of the Middle East’s geography. Under the thinking we inherited from the Bush administration, Iran was an enemy (axis of evil), as was Syria (ruthless dictatorship) and Hezbollah (attacking Israel), while Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states were our lukewarm allies. The current alignment in the Middle East will require us to flip that upside down, minus Hezbollah which no American government should ever tolerate, and plus a healthy skepticism of Turkey which becoming more problematic.

But while America condemns ISIS, it also shouldn’t be seen allying with the Middle East’s Shias over its Sunnis. This was the mistake we made in Iraq—by supporting Maliki’s autocratic Shiite government, we disenfranchised local Sunnis and drove them into the waiting arms of al Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor to ISIS. And Shiite militias in Iraq, though they are fighting ISIS, are hardly without blemish. On Friday, Shiite fighters riddled a Sunni mosque near Baghdad with bullets, killing 70 worshippers inside. The Sunni-Shia conflict in the Middle East goes back centuries, and we have no business taking sides.

Instead we should set aside the hawkish temptation to divide the Middle East between angels and devils, and acknowledging that angels are hard to come by. To some extent this is what we’re already doing. The United States and Iran have both been bombing ISIS while ignoring each other, exchanging notes only through Iraqi intermediaries. We should also seek a point where ISIS’s Middle Eastern enemies can destroy it and we can extract ourselves.

What we can’t do is resort to the infantile idealism that passed for foreign policy thinking last year.

That thinking helped produce ISIS. It won’t be able to destroy it.