You’d think the commentariat would stop talking about Syria. It’s a sun-dappled holiday weekend, after all, and there are too many beers to drink to spend time defending a disgraceful foreign policy debacle. But there they go again, saying that America could have stopped ISIS earlier by arming Syria’s pro-democracy rebels.
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I’m on a staycation, so let’s go for round two.
The claim that America could have prevented the rise of ISIS by supporting the purportedly moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA) is false for a number of reasons. First, even early last year when interventionists began demanding war, our intelligence agencies believed that al Nusra, the al Qaeda franchise in Syria, was the strongest rebel faction fighting Assad. Contrary to neoconservative claims, there was no window of time when President Obama could have acted to buttress the FSA. The jihadists were in control from the beginning of the conversation.
When the civil war began, Syria almost immediately became a bug light for Sunni fanatics looking to score a victory against the Alawite Assad regime. President Obama’s claim that the FSA consisted of “former farmers or teachers or pharmacists” was a bit unfair. But the FSA was easily outmanned and outgunned by the jihadists who swarmed their country, many of whom already had bulging terrorism portfolios from Iraq.
Syria has 1,408 miles of land border, including 378 miles that it shares with Iraq. Even with boots on the ground, plugging the deluge of Islamists would have been impossible.
The Obama administration promised that the CIA would check the backgrounds of any rebels who received American weapons, as though they were reviewing candidates for an exciting new position at a PR firm. But there was too much fluidity between the rebel groups for even this to work. As early as May 2013, the FSA was losing entire units to the jihadists, some over frustration with the moderate rebels’ lack of equipment, others to the siren song of extremist ideology.
Just because an FSA soldier checked the CIA’s boxes didn’t mean that he wouldn’t later defect to al Nusra or ISIS, bringing armfuls of American guns with him.
And even then, despite all the asterisks and roadblocks, the fact remains that we did arm the Syrian rebels. The United States participated in a covert program to send arms, ammunition, and money across the Syrian border. And bear in mind that, American involvement or no, Saudi Arabia and Qatar were both raining weapons into Syria in an attempt to destroy Assad. Qatar, the wealthiest nation in the world and an ambitious little petro-state, was particularly reckless, ignoring warnings from the West and sending the rebels heat-seeking, shoulder-mounted missiles.
The problem was that American thinkers saw Syria as a struggle between ideals: freedom and tyranny. The region’s major powers saw it for what it really was: yet another iteration of the Sunni-Shia inter-Islamic conflict, with the Sunni Gulf States hoping they could punch a hole in the Shia Crescent of Iraq, Iran, and Syria. War was going to rage. America couldn’t stop it; it could only add to the pot of resources being haphazardly dumped on the rebels.
So arming the Free Syrian Army would have been foolhardy. But now some voices are warning that, regardless of ISIS, nothing must be done that would in any way avail the Syrian regime. Writing at the New Republic, Fred Hof warns that Assad has been baiting the United States from the beginning. By emptying his prisons of Islamist fighters and focusing his warfare on the FSA, Assad has been positioning his war as one against terrorism in order to lure in America.
That may very well be true. But so what?
Regardless of intentions, right now there are three possible outcomes in Syria: Assad wins and is restored to power, ISIS wins and expands its genocidal caliphate, or the two sides continue to bleed each other in a civil war that has already killed nearly 200,000 and wiped away entire minority communities.
Would anyone disagree that an Assad victory is, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the worst option except for all the others?
Earlier this week, Rand Paul wrote an op-ed making a similar point. In response, Allahpundit, one of my favorite bloggers, noted that “it’s clearly the non-interventionist approach that’s prevailed” so “what is Paul grumbling about?”
We’re grumbling because this entire episode has been so aggravating. Whatever strategy prevailed in Syria, a large number of commentators spent last year demanding that we arm a gaggle of rebels now dominated by the most barbaric enemy we’ve seen in the Middle East.
This was a remarkable failure of foreign policy thinking. Doesn’t it deserve some attention?
And not to be boisterous, but many of us called this ball and pocket last year, not because we have any unique expertise on Syria, but because we applied the lessons of the Iraq war.
Like Iraq, this should be, to use a term I believe was coined by a professional golfer, a “teachable moment.” Let’s hope this time we actually bother to learn.