Forward in Syria?
The simmering mess in the state of Syria continues to occupy the press and the nations leaders who are involved. In reality, Syria has several moving parts.
We have a leader in Assad who is disliked by much of the world leadership but who is backed by the Russian leader Putin who is sending him batteries of state of the art anti aircraft missiles which complicates the recent formula set up during the Libyan conflict when a no fly zone was set up which helped to bring the Libyan dictator down. This is not Libya that we are dealing with in Syria. This is a regime that is backed by a leader from the old cold war who has not forgotten that era of world history and who would like to continue some aspects of it. For us to do anything serious in Syria, we need to get Putin on board or we risk a rift that we really do not need to have going forward.
Putin is a reality cast from an illusion that we simply cannot avoid. There is no cold war but there is still a nuclear armed Russia with a man at the helm who feels left out of global politics and who yearns for a past in which he would have had some impact. A client state in the form of Syria is a vestige of that past that Vladimir Putin is simply not willing to give up. Who really knows what a modern Russia needs with a Mediterranean sea port but Putin thinks that they do so that is a fact of life that we cannot avoid. Beyond the cold war model, Putin and Russia remember and wish for the era of great power politics that has influenced the world for centuries.
We also have the fact that the Syrian conflict is becoming a sectarian affair in which the players are not only fighting Assad but are also forecasting what will happen if Assad goes away by sometimes fighting among themselves. If the United States gets involved in Syria we will need to be able to pick who we want to arm so that we can get a jump on what will happen after Assad is no longer on the stage. If we arm the wrong people we will be affecting a conflict that will rage on after Assad is gone.
To think that the fighting will not rage on in a civil war for control of the country in a post Assad era is not to think at all. Many people are comparing what Bill Clinton did in Bosnia in the 1990’s to what is going on is Syria but that is a comparison that is not valid at all. During the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the leader who engaged in that was isolated from the rest of the world and was fairly easy to deal with as he had no support from anywhere else. Assad has support from Iran and from the nearby Hezbollah faction who has recently entered the fray on the side of Assad.
What troubles the United States and its leadership so much are the statements made by president Obama early in this conflict when he stated that Assad needed to go. Then, the president made the further statement that if agents of mass destruction were used in the conflict, that would be a red line that would change the equation for United States involvement in the fray. Now we find out that, to a very limited degree, some agents of mass destruction have been used inside of Syria but it is questionable just who used these agents to start with. It would not be in Assad’s best interests to kill around 130 people in a struggle in which around 90,000 have already died as this would be sure to provoke the United States into some form of action. It appears on the surface that the agents of mass destruction (chemical warfare) were employed by somebody to try to provoke the United States into joining the fray. And, this brings up the further problem of just who is controlling these agents of mass destruction in the first place. This stuff is not going away when Assad does and the United States and others are already preparing troop deployments to secure the stuff in the eventuality that it becomes a marketable commodity that forces such as Al Qaeda might want to secure for use in places like Europe or the United States.
President Obama has been cautious towards Syrian and this has been interpreted by misguided figures like Maureen Down in the New York Times as a weakness in a president that she does not care for to start with. Dowd did a scathing op ed against Obama over the weekend that compared him to a ineffectual president between two forceful Clinton presidencies. Nothing could be further from the truth than that. Bill Clinton got praise for what he did in Bosnia but few if any American lives were lost in that conflict. If America gets involved in Syria there WILL be loss of life and it could, if grandees like John McCain have their way, be on a very grand scale indeed. It should also be remembered and noted that Bill Clinton did not go into Bosnia very quickly and had to be pushed into it by world public opinion. We do not see either U.S. or world public opinion pushing for a quick entry into this affair.
Barack Obama sees what has happened in Iraq and in Egypt and in Afghanistan and we think that he sees no way to come out a real winner in any of this. He also sees an America weary of two wars that have lasted over a decade and a nation tired of burying its dead over very questionable causes. If the nation had wanted to go into Syria it had the perfect opportunity to say so when it could have elected the neocons to office in the form of Mitt Romney and the war hawks from the Iraq war who surrounded his campaign. The nation did not do so and chose the wise council that Barack Obama has provided in his leadership of the nation thus far.
Syria is a mess but it only reflects the greater mess that it the whole Middle East. The area is a cauldron of conflict and tension that will require careful navigation over the coming years that may span more than one presidency. Religious tensions are at the base of much of what is going on and they have been around for thousands of years. Barack Obama has pledged some small amount of aid to some of the rebels as a response to the proof that weapons of mass destruction have been used. He is proceeding cautiously and we feel that this is certainly the best way to go and that thousands of American lives and much treasure may hang in the balance of his measured decisions.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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