Ready for Hillary?
No, I am not. In fact, I’m pretty concerned about her recent advocacy regarding intervention in Syria. Our interventionists, however well-meaning, just don’t appear to understand what intervention can and cannot accomplish.
Military intervention can accomplish small things and big things. On the small side, our military can knock out military assets: bridges, anti-aircraft batteries, weapons plants, and the like.
For big things, Clausewitz’ famous line gets it right: war is politics by other means. Military intervention can replace one political power with another political power.
And, in places like Kosovo and Bosnia, and maybe Grenada, the U.S. has been eminently successful in replacing one political power with another.
At negative goals, though, military intervention fails. Take Vietnam. The goal was to prevent Ho Chi Minh from winning an election in 1956. There was no alternative government or political party we wanted to install in what was to be a temporary partition of the country. And so we ended up killing a huge number of civilians propping up regimes essentially of our invention. (See The Mere Gook Rule for a taste of our “humanitarian” effort in Vietnam.)
Take Iraq. The Bush Administration did not really have a replacement for Saddam Hussein — unless you count Chalabi. As a result, we ended up slaughtering a lot of Iraqi Sunnis. Recent journalistic investigations seem to show that the U.S. was arming Shi’ite militias in the early stages, and had imported Salvadoran style “interrogation”. We’ve left them with a highly unstable parliamentary system that risks flying apart at any moment. This came at great cost — and even greater cost to Iraqi civilians. (See the Guardian for a taste of our “humanitarian” effort in Iraq.)
Take Afghanistan. The goal again was negative: remove the Taliban. There was no positive goal. With whom to replace them? How? So now we end up propping up a deeply corrupt state, a state that will be about as popular as the Sotuth Vietnamese government and that last as long after we leave.
Now look at Syria. Sure we want to stop the government’s massacre of civilians, but there aren’t a small number of military targets we can take out that will put a stop to that. So the alternative would seem to be a larger military intervention — either directly or by proxy.
But who is the Syrian opposition. McCain — and apparently Clinton — think that somewhere deep within the opposition beats a democratic heart. Perhaps it is the ghost of Chalabi. For the strongest member of the Syrian opposition is the al-Nusra Front. You know, our friends from Al Qaeda out to re-establish the caliphate and slaughter anyone that that proves an obstacle to them. The Free Syrian Army likewise consists of those advocates of democracy that would appeal to Oliver North. They’re very efficient! They love summary execution!
We’ve been down this road before. Do we really need to hang Syrians upside down and attach electrodes to their genitals too?
What are the policy differences between Hillary and Obama?
None progressivemax, it will be one of the mysteries of history what would have happened if the more experienced Clinton got to enact Obama’s campaign positions. Instead the opposite happened and it’s been a bit of a mixed bag.
I’m truly torn on Hillary 2016. On the one hand I’d love a woman in the White House with the balls of LBJ. That would be fantastic on the domestic front. With Syria the LBJ similarities persist and are troubling.
Sec. Clinton has been pushing for “doing something” in Syria for a while. The White House has thus far been quite reluctant.
So, yeah, I think Obama has been better.
Syria is a lose/lose.
There are some additional components here.
1. The Christian population, about 10%, is allied with the government. They could suffer serious consequences in a rebel takeover.
2. The risk of spill-over is great. Using the Vietnam example we know what happened to Laos and Cambodia. We’re already using Jordan as a forward base.
Ii can’t believe we want to be anywhere near this conflict.
I abhor the slaughter of innocents that has been taking place in Syria for years. At the same time, the rebels show every indication of being just as bad. We should not forget that we supported and trained the Taliban while the Soviet Union was mired in Afghanistan — they were “freedom fighters” then. The groups that we propose to support in Syria are themselves Muslim extremists — as far as I can tell, there are no secular “moderates” to choose from.
I truly don’t know what the right answer is. My gut says that this would be a very good time to put the monkey on the back of the Russians and/or Chinese — of course, there are obvious problems with that as well.
This spiral is more evidence of the suicidal stupidity of our decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power. He was, in fact, a secular moderate by the standards of the region. Hussein’s Iraq was our strongest regional bulwark against expanded Iranian influence.
We, the world, and millions of innocents will be paying the price for the immoral behavior of the past administration for years to come.
“Hussein’s Iraq was our strongest regional bulwark against expanded Iranian influence.”
That’s probably not true. The strongest regional bulwark is probably Saudi Arabia, and all the influence it has garnered in other regional state actors (via Sunni empowerment) and in other cultural populations (through it’s export of Wahabi clerics – see Afghanistan).
Hussein was the guy willing to put boots (even if they included children) on the ground in harms way against Iran. But I’d argue that this is only because other regional powers haven’t felt the need.
When Gomez, in the first debate, kept calling for us to identify the right group and give it full support, I kept calling to the TV: YOU identify the right group, because I don’t have a clue if any of these groups would be good to have running Syria.
One radical Islamist and one more to our liking. Assad needs to go, but I actually don’t think it’s our job to have someone waiting to take over. In fact, there is a good chance of that blowing up in our face. The US was founded on the principle that just powers derive from the consent of the governed. Our position should be to insist on free and fair elections even if we are not big fans of the result, and to consistently embrace and insist upon human rights. My personal thought on intervention is limited to air strikes, but in general I am very much hoping to support Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Which is exactly why it is up to the Syrian people to win this fight for themselves. Maybe, just maybe, early on we could’ve used air power to wipe out the Assad air force and destroy his long range capabilities and let the rebels duke it out.
But now we are looking at getting into a civil war two years into it, while the loose opposition is losing, while Iran and Russia are actively supplying one side,and with the entire region destabilized. Sitting back and doing nothing sucks, but every time America has intervened it’s been a disaster. I can think of few examples where our intervention saved lives or made a bad situation better.
Kosovo? We bombed a lot of civilians, the Chinese embassy, and have littered the region with depleted uranium. In some instances we may have assisted in the ethnic cleansing of Serbians by their opponents. We can decry Rwanda all we want, but while we stopped a potential genocide in Libya we have spread warfare to Chad, Mali, Algeria and elsewhere that may lead to more warfare and suffering, The brotherhood is worse than Muburak, Pinochet was worse than Allende, Sze Sotho was worse than Lumumba, Diem was as bad if not worse than Minh. Let’s allow people their right to self determination without American interference, the best way to make the world safe for American democracy is to decrease rather than increase American militarism.
Where we were not directly attacked or facing a global threat.So Goodwins Law can be enforced
Well, I suppose we could insist really, really hard. Like we could bang on tables, furrow our eyebrows very low, and glare at Assad so much he know we thought he was a doodyhead. I doubt even those fierce methods will bring about free and fair elections
The point I’m making, Christopher, is that unless there is a political force to support in Syria, any intervention will lead inextricably to the same melange of corrupt installed government, “collateral” damage (i.e., killing human beings who didn’t have to die), and human rights abuses by our sponsored government (see Vietnam, Tiger Cages).
The Bush Administration was convinced that, in Chalabi, they had their fantasy democratic, secular, American-loving government. But that’s because the Bush Administration was full of murderous fools (See Fallujah, Destruction of) . Now that we’re going through this for the fourth or fifth time, we should bring enormous skepticism to any claims that there are “democratic forces” for us to support. We want so bad for them to exist that we believe they exist.
They don’t.
If you can find them, I’m happy to be wrong, but you haven’t even named any one specific yet. None of them are as large or disciplined as the al-Nusra Front.
Right now the dominant forces in the Syrian opposition are Islamists. The non-Islamists are unbeloved by human rights organizations: Take the Free Syrian Army. Wikipedia:
So right now people claiming that these “democratic forces exist” really have a huge burden of proof to meet.
We’ve already been fooled by Chalabi once.
I said I believed to have heard that and I could have heard wrong, but standing back and watching is a very uncomfortable option for me. I tend to be a Wilsonian make-the-world-safe-for-democracy type, but I’ll take any option – economic, diplomatic, military, etc. – to accomplish that end. I’m not looking for the next Chalabi since he was a fraud and as I said backing a particular faction will blow up in our faces and probably that faction’s as well.
This sounds like an argument against intervening in Rwanda when that resulted in genocide. We’re well on the way to that here, and Rwanda wasn’t using chemical weapons. There isn’t a Western-style opposition in Syria, I agree…but there sure is a anti-civilization opposition in Syria.
I’m not saying that I want to intervene in Syria. There’s really nobody on whose behalf to intervene, and this place is too explosive. However, I have no problem with people looking to do a little more than we have been doing. I don’t want to invade Syria, but a no-fly zone wouldn’t be a bad idea.
I don’t think this one has an easy solution. Saying “yes” to Hillary isn’t the right answer, but “no” isn’t the right answer either.
What would a successful Rwandan intervention looked like? Would it have been an overwhelming police presence? How would it have been organized?
I agree that it’s a moral failure that no one stopped the massacre.
It would have looked like millions not killed. I think it would have basically been the model that we all know and don’t want — that used in postwar Germany and Japan. Large numbers of people come in and essentially perform policing functions for ten years or so.
I’m not saying it’s a great option, but it’s not the impossibility often claimed to be either.
We went in and rebuilt and provided aide via the Marshall Plan on the European side and treated Japan similarly. In the process we turned them into strong trading partners and allies with democracy and capitalism. That’s a model to emulate IMO.
Marshall and Morgenthau planned that transition for five years, you honestly think Clinton and the post-Gulf War post-Cold War allies of the US were going to make that decision to send over 500k American troops to police in the middle of an ethnic slaughterfest and do it in the three week timeframe that they had? It never would’ve happened, and anything else would’ve saved few lives and cost American ones. As soon as the first marine was macheted and dragged through the streets that would’ve been the end of it, and after Black Hawk Down it might’ve crippled Clinton’s presidency. Sorry, but like most interventionists ‘doing something’ ends up being a plan that isn’t well thought out and leads to dead Americans. I am nearly 100% certain you opposed the Iraq War, where we had far more time to plan with far more intention for a long scale occupation and screwed that up badly.
The question you have to ask yourself is how many Americans do you want to die to save Syrian lives? The second question you have to ask is what would be the fallout of intervention? What if a no-fly zone fails? It did in Libya and Qadaffi had no air force, we then expanded it to a direct interdiction against ground forces. Syria has sophisticated air defense systems, we will lose pilots, we might see them captured. It has a sophisticated army, it also has Russian and Iranian troops on the ground, what if one of our bombs lands on one of them and are you willing to expand the war to Iran or to Russia if thats what it takes to defeat Assad? Would you leave Tartus alone? That’s the port where Assad gets all his resupplies from Russia, but attacking it is attacking Russian real estate. Mission creep is real, Wes Clark was on the verge of invading Kosovo and it took British troops refusing his direct order to attack Russian troops to keep that war minimal.
In Rwanda what would the US have done? You had an army of 800,000 civilians armed with machetes wipe out another 800,000 with machetes? We would have needed to send in probably 500k troops, and they would be shooting on essentially civilians and getting right in the middle of an ethnic civil war. Many would’ve died, and we might’ve failed. Why aren’t we in Congo? That war has had six times the number of casualties of Rwanda let alone Syria. What about Mali, we did cause it after all why are we letting the French clean up our mess? What about Burma which has had ethnic cleansing against the Katyn people for decades? What about our allies in Indonesia and their genocide in East Timor and Achen? What about North Korea shouldn’t we invade there? Nearly ten times the number of Syrian dead are dying and getting tortured in hard labor camps as we speak? What about the women in Iran? Or the best examples, what about the Kurds Saddam used gas and chemical weapons against? Way more casualties than Assad, but no one would argue that war was a good idea.
I am saying at this point any intervention, short of a massive commitment to ground troops, will fail. Read your Waltz, read your Mearsheimer, read your Pape-air power alone has never won wars. It just increases civilian casualties, minimizes domestic losses, but also minimizes the totality of victory.
I may be ok with giving anti tank and anti aircraft weapons to even the odds, but even then, Al Nusrah could traffic those overseas and we might see them used against civilian airliners. I am very leery of this one.
The Vietnam conflict was full of ambushes and booby traps. The response by military units tended to be to assume that the nearby civilians were complicit or worse, and to inflict large civilian casualties. In Vietnam, it was not unusual at all to burn down everyone’s house. Or to call in air power to incinerate and obliterate everything in the village. There have been a number of similar anti-civilian incidents documented in Iraq. These kinds of responses may make things safer for our troops — at least in the short term, but they definitely make winning a low intensity conflict hard to win.
Oh, and I almost forgot, they also kill a lot of civilians, children who will never grow up, parents who won’t get to raise their children, loved ones who will lose lives or limbs.
So the understandable focus on American casualties in these sorts of conflicts really has murderous consequences.
…though there are times when things get so bad that we must remember that the only thing necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing. We don’t even necessarily have to lead every effort, but the UN should be committed to intervening where and when these atrocities occur. At very least any regime that commits these acts should not be our ally. I would be interested in your elaborating on some history though. You say we caused a mess in Mali, but I wasn’t aware the US ever had much to do with that country.
All the more reason not to get involved in Syria then, you aren’t even aware of the consequences of our foray into Libya.
I thought I was following Libya pretty well and your link is to Reuters, a mainstream source which is often cited by others. If we can learn from that great, but I’m still glad Gaddafi is gone and Assad needs to be next.
The question is, at this stage of the game, what can the US realistically do that will help the Syrian people overthrow Assad without incurring casualties, giving the wrong people weapons or power, or embroiling ourselves in a wider conflict with Assad allies like Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia? So far I have not seen any interventionists give a coherent, concise, and reasonable answer to this question. And I am really tired that the burden of proof, according to the media and far too many Democrats and progressives, is on those of us that are skeptical of armed conflict. Sorry Tim Keller, sorry Tom Friedman, sorry Dick Cheney, and sorry Hillary. You fucked up royally in Iraq and I am unwilling to endure a fourth Middle Eastern war on a hunch.
If we stay in the air we might keep our own pretty down, but then there would be potential collateral damage for people to complain about. Given that this is a reality based blog I think it’s time we acknowledge that the reality is that war or other use of force is by definition not pretty. Sure in a perfect world it wouldn’t take force to make things work, but alas such is not the case. Plus France, and others to a lesser extent, intervened on our behalf when we were fighting for our independence so why should we be above it. I do think what we do should be by coalition rather than unilaterally, however.
During these kinds of interventions, the U.S. public has very limited tolerance for American causalities. If the casualties occur in some sort of lurid manner, that tends to bring about a withdrawal as in Somalia or destroying a city as it did in Fallujah. I’d add to that the problem of our deepening political polarization. The Right’s distrust of Obama is visceral. They are certain that he lies to them even if they are unclear on how.
Consequently, any military intervention conducted by the Obama Administration really does have to have close to zero casualties otherwise the House of Representatives will try to derail it and the Republican Noise Machine will get cranked up full blast.
Iraq was isolated and by itself, much easier to wipe out it’s military than Syria’s will be.
Syria actually has weapons of mass destruction and they will be used on rebels, on neighbors, on Israel, and on any American troops we station in Jordan. There will be Iranian shock troops mixed in with Syrian regulars, and there may be Russian observers that could get killed in our targetting. The only way to stop resupply is to take out Tartus and we are not doing that with the Russkies there.
Continuing to contain the regime, putting solid diplomatic pressure on China and Russia, working with the newly elected Iranian leadership to cut some kind of deal*, all of that will help. I support sending more anti-aircraft batteries to Jordan and Tukey to discourage Syrian air strifing and we can examine what kind of anti-tank and anti-air assets might work within Syria. But a ‘no fly zone’ is a euphemism for bombing all air defenses, all air bases, and all air assets of the Syrian air force to ensure total US superiority and we can’t do that at this point without intolerable risks with uncertain gains. It won’t be enough, and now that we set trip wire troops in Jordan we are begging the Syrians to attack so we can have a casus belli.Not to mention we would totally own whatever post-Assad situation arises-which could another Balkanization and even more ethnic cleansing and bloodshed, the decimation of Christian Syrians, and the rise of a Sunni Islamist government at war with it’s Shia neighbors. No thank you.
*I think we can get them to give up offensive nukes, stop arming Syria in exchange for lifting of all sanctions. They need the money desperately.