WHAT IF BASHAR ASSAD WINS IN SYRIA?

5/21/13

News of Syrian government forces’ making major strides in the civil war in that troubled “nation” afforded Senator John McCain the opportunity to (what else?) call for deeper military involvement in the latest quagmire that has drawn his attention.

“This is a significant and dramatic indicator of the Obama administration’s passivity.  For this administration to sit idly by and watch these events unfold, (sic) is writing a shameful chapter in American history.”

After further ripping the Obama Administration for not racing headlong over this cliff without taking a nanosecond to consider the consequences “optimistic to the point of fantasy,” Mr. McCain then fell back on his standard Cold War rhetoric, pointing out that Russia sees and raises us each time we increase our assistance to the rebels.   What Mr. McCain’s point is in this instance is difficult to fathom, perhaps as much for him as for his listeners, but I digress.

We know what Mr. McCain’s motivation is in urging that American blood and treasure be fulsomely expended in this latest Middle Eastern rabbit hole; he has to look for every opportunity he can to pay back, with your money, the “defense” contractors who have so generously bankrolled the lifelong ego trip he calls a career.   We, as citizens, however, have no debt to repay to the contractors.  Unlike Mr. McCain and his colleagues whose “jobs” consist of having their hindquarters smooched by obsequiants who want a piece of your wallet, we work for our livings, and a good portion of what we make goes to support the likes of Mr. McCain and his fellow barnacles on the ship of state. Before we follow Mr. McCain’s advice to repeat what he considers the stunning successes of Iraq and Afghanistan, we are duty bound to examine the three major assumptions behind the argument that we should get more involved in Syria.

The first assumption is that we can influence the outcome in Syria.  Take a look at Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam before you accept the idea that we can guide outcomes of civil wars born of centuries of antagonism halfway around the world.  (See my 5/17/13 piece AMERICAN ASSURANCES IN SYRIA:  A RUSSIAN GUANTANAMO IN AL QAEDA’S COURT?)  At least in the case of Vietnam, the civil war was brewing before we got there.   We rekindled a largely dormant civil war in Afghanistan and started the now rampaging civil war in Iraq.  In none of those cases was the outcome good for America.  Well, ultimately things may have worked out for us in Vietnam, but only because our side lost.

The second assumption behind Mr. McCain’s and his bipartisan War Party’s enthusiasm for intervention in Syria is that it would be a good thing if the Assad dynasty was overthrown. 

There is not doubt that Bashar Assad is a thug, as was his father before him.  Neither shows, or showed, any compunction about slaughtering his own people to keep himself in power.   But what is the alternative?  Thugs were overthrown in Libya and, to a lesser extent, in Egypt.  They were replaced with a brutal stew of chaos and dueling thugs striving for power, only the new thugs like us even less, or hate us even more, than the old thugs. 

Furthermore, in Libya and Egypt, Mr. McCain (and Mr. Obama and the entire Western media and foreign policy establishments) seemed to have been surprised that the revolutionaries they backed did not turn out to be the Jeffersonian democrats they had supposed them to be.   In Syria, the War Party can’t even pretend that it is on the side of the angels; there is no doubt (except perhaps in Mr. McCain’s febrile brain) that the Syrian opposition is dominated by Al Qaeda and others who us ill.  As I said in my 4/28/13 piece OBAMA AND SYRIA:  “…AND A MAN IN MY POSITION CANNOT AFFORD TO LOOK RIDICULOUS!”

We have little to no influence on the parties fighting in Syria and, despite elements of our foreign policy apparatus again having fallen for the usual song and dance about “moderate, pro-Western elements,” we have no friends on either side of the Syrian conflict.   We have plenty of people who will flit around Washington professing friendship with America in order to line their own pockets, but we have no genuine friends in Syria.

The third assumption behind Mr. McCain’s war whoop-whoop is that Al Qaeda and its allies in Syria will win, that Mr. Assad will give up and leave the country.   But given the advances Mr. Assad and his Hezbollah allies have made of late, his defeat is far from a foregone conclusion.  As I said to a friend of mine in the Fall of 2011 (in a White Castle on Cicero Avenue in Alsip), when this conflict was just getting started, Assad could very well win this thing because he is at least as brutal as his father, who killed 30,000, many with chemical weapons, of his own people to maintain power.  

So suppose that Mr. Assad does wipe out the rebellion and emerges victorious, a very realistic possibility.  Not only will that expose us to the charges of flaccidity that Mr. McCain, Lindsey Graham, and other bi-partisan War Party members are always hyper-ventilating about, but we would then have to deal with a Syria that owes us nothing but owes the Russians, the Iranians, and, most dangerous of all, Hezbollah big time.   How receptive will a newly entrenched Mr. Assad feel about peace overtures then?  How will he regard Israel, one of our greatest allies whom he regards as little more than a surrogate for Western domination of an area he feels is rightly his?   Yes, Mr. Assad and his father have always despised Israel, but the Assads have kept an uneasy peace, albeit largely out of necessity, with their far more powerful neighbor for the last forty years.   Would that change if Mr. Assad were to defeat the rebels, and their Western backers, with help from Hezbollah and Iran?   Would you like to take the chance that it wouldn’t?

Of course, Mr. McCain and his fellow messenger boys for the “defense” industry will use the growing chance that Assad can win to argue for further U.S. military involvement in Syria; they will use anything to argue for more U.S. military involvement in Syria.  But wouldn’t a saner, and more enlightened, self-interested policy be to stay completely out of this latest Middle Eastern civil war and try to maintain the uneasy peace with the winner?

But who gets rich, or gets his campaign fund generously stocked, with a policy of enlightened non-intervention?

SYRIA: GROUNDHOG DAY FOR AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

4/11/13

The Obama Administration, after doing a passingly decent job of keeping us out of yet another war in which we don’t belong, is succumbing to domestic and international pressure by moving toward authorizing our further involvement in the Syrian civil war by providing body armor and night vision goggles for the rebel groups in that troubled “nation.”

Why in the world should we be doing anything to help the “opposition” in Syria?   We know that the core of the opposition, certainly on the ground, is composed of people who are al-Qaeda affiliates or wannabes.   They wish us no good whatsoever.   Maybe even more importantly, toppling of the Assad dynasty, out of a misplaced, unquestioning enthusiasm for what the knee jerkers call “democracy” (perhaps not realizing that what we have in this country is, thank God, not democracy but representative government in the form of a democratic republic.   There is more than semantics involved here.   And there is also the question, given the American tendency to squander our time, and prominent slots in the news, on celebrity gossip and other such cotton candy for the mind, of whether even we here in America are ready for representative government, but I digress.  At least I do so parenthetically.) will not lead to some Valhalla of self-determination but, rather, to chaos.  

Look at Egypt and Libya, where western do-gooders decided that we no longer wanted those very bad men Mubarak and Qadafi.  Egypt is on the verge of, and Libya is thoroughly immersed in, complete chaos, with Colonel Qadafi’s former caches of arms feeding the growing flames to Libya’s south and roving, free lance gangs of armed men having their way with the populace and with, lest we forget, foreign consulates.   Even Tunisia, where the numb-skulled panters for “democracy” first had their way by cheering, and then engineering, the overthrow of Zine Ben Ali, things are spinning out of control, with assassination replacing the ballot as a means of transferring power.   Perhaps a less obvious example (And you heard it here first, folks.), is Myanmar, where the military regime is loosening things up in response to western pressure for “democracy”…and where, suddenly, after years of admittedly uneasy yet peaceful coexistence, the Muslims and Buddhists are fighting pitched battles in the streets and burning each other’s schools and places of worship.   Progress indeed.

No one is arguing that the Assads, Mubarak, Qadafi, Ben Ali, or the Myanmarese (?) generals are/were nice people.  They are/were brutal and repressive.   But now we are seeing why, to some extent, they have/had to be.   They are/were in charge of countries whose borders were drawn to suit Western imperial designs, not to account for the ethnic and religious divergences among their populations.  These countries were designed to fail, albeit perhaps inadvertently, by placing ethnic and religious groups whose most salient trait was their hatred for their neighbors, in the same country.   One can’t keep order in such a boiling, dyspeptic stew of toxins by being a nice guy who adheres to democratic principles and respects the Jeffersonian rights of everyone regardless of literacy, education, etc.   And so these countries were ruled by authoritarians who exercised their despotism in varying degrees according to their predispositions and the conditions over which they had charge.   Nice people?   No.  Necessary people?   Probably.

When these types of leaders are overthrown, the result is not the kind of democracy exercised in the debate clubs of the Ivy League and the discussion desks at CNN; the result is a dystopic hell.   The consequences are horrific for the region, the world, and especially for our ally Israel, which now finds itself, courtesy of the “democratic” impulses of its western friends, on the border of two failed states in which “democracy” translates into hatred of Israel and its very existence.

Yet the European powers charge ahead, seeking the overthrow of the Assad dynasty and pressuring us to join them in creating the conditions for dystopia.   And Mr. Obama goes along with the Europeans and with the members of the War Party in this country, led by Senator John “I’ve Never Seen a War I Didn’t Want Us (Meaning you) to Participate In” McCain and his mini-me from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, who would have us, at a minimum, bombing Syrian airfield and positioning more Patriot missiles in Turkey’s south to enforce a no-fly zone in northern Syria.

At best this is a case of Americans’ and other Westerners’ never learning from their mistakes and their hubris due to their being overly enamored with a concept, democracy, with which they are at best passingly familiar and which they assume requires no preconditions.

At worst, and I used to think that this was too cynical a view, something more sinister is at work here.   Perhaps the bipartisan War Party’s entire aim is to foment chaos throughout the Middle East and beyond.   This would create more opportunities for deploying U.S. troops in pointless conflicts…and rewarding the arms merchants who finance the endless exercises is self-aggrandizement these patheticos call careers.

EGYPT: MEET THE NEW BOSS, SAME AS THE OLD BOSS?

1/29/13

Egypt is rapidly, and eminently predictably, descending into a dystopia of either utter chaos or the reimposition of tyrannical rule, this time with Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood replacing Hosni Mubarak as the bad guy du jour.   Either would be bad for Western strategic and humanitarian interests.  The latter, though, seems preferable to a failed state sitting astride the Suez Canal and the oil fields of North Africa, abutting Israel, and in reasonably close proximity to the what looks to the latest theater of the “worldwide war on terrorism,” the fragile states of the southern Sahara and the Horn of Africa.  But we are talking about picking our poisons when confronting possible outcomes in Egypt.   None of this is a surprise to my readers; see my 1/15/12 piece in the Insightful Pontificator DON’T BOTHER TO WAKE ME WHEN THE REVOLUTION’S OVER and the posts to which it will refer you.

In this latest manifestation of the inevitable chaos into which Egypt is falling, riots broke out over the weekend as a general response to the increasingly authoritarian rule of President Morsi.  When Mr. Morsi imposed a state of emergency in the cities of Port Said, Suez, and Ismailia, the rioting intensified.  The protesters’ main point of contention is that Mr. Morsi is simply a redux of Hosni Mubarak in Islamic guise.  They may be right.   If they are, though, one might argue that authoritarian, even dictatorial, rule is inevitable when starry-eyed academics and media dreamers push over-educated, underemployed “youths” to push for “democracy” in countries that are completely unprepared for self-rule.

Further, if the protesters are indeed right and the whole struggle for “democracy” has been an exercise in replacing one dictator for another, the response of those of us reasonably conversant with history should be something akin to “So what else is new?”  Since the dawn of civilization, and especially in modern times, the story of genuine revolution, in which governments are overthrown and replaced (The American Revolution was not such a revolution; the government of George III was not overthrown; a group of colonies shook off British rule but had no quarrel with the way the folks back in England chose to govern themselves.  Hmm…once again, we could learn a lot from our Founding Fathers, but I digress.) has been one in which one tyranny is replaced by another, often more brutal and evil than its predecessor.  And the new boss is often worse than the old one.   Some examples:

--In Iran, the Shah was replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs.

--In Afghanistan, the Soviets were thrown out and eventually replaced by the Taliban.  (The sound of throat clearing here would probably be appropriate.)

--In Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe, white minority rule was replaced by the maniacal Robert Mugabe.

--In Cuba, Fulgencio Batista was replaced by Fidel Castro.

--In Spain, the monarchy was replaced first by a fledgling Republic but ultimately by Franco after becoming a practice field for World War II.

--In Russia, Tsar Nicholas II was replaced first by the Mensheviks and then by the Bolsheviks.

--In France, the monarchy was replaced ultimately by Napoleon.

--In Rome, dictator Julius Caesar was assassinated.  The result was not a return to the Republic, but, rather, the Empire.   The Empire had its positive attributes, but also brought us, rather soon after Julius’s death, the likes of Caligula and Nero.

Those more conversant with medieval and ancient history could doubtless come up with more examples.   But the point is that, despite the fervent hopes of Western academics, media, and politicians, self-rule is not for everyone.   And not everyone wants self-rule.  Think Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  Until a society stabilizes to the point at which people can eat, support their families, and achieve a modicum of prosperity, the average person cares far more about where his or her next meal will come from than s/he cares about voting and, unlike the starry-eyed spawn of the ‘60s and ‘70s at CNN and its ilk, cannot simply leave the country when the latest western crusade for “democracy” has its near inevitable consequences.

Egypt is a mess; though there is always hope that President Morsi will usher in a moderate Islamic rule akin to that of Turkey, the greater likelihood is that Egypt will either descend into chaos or be ruled by an Islamic dictatorship.   The West bears a measure of responsibility for whatever outcome transpires; Western self-styled intelligentsia, after all, were naively cheering on the “youth” demonstrating for “democracy” in Tahrir Square and letting perhaps good intentions trump strategic and humanitarian interests and good sense.   We should keep this in mind the next time John McCain, or Barack Obama, urges us to intervene in the interests of “democracy” or “self-rule.”  In Syria, for instance.  Or in any of the other places where the offspring of the elite decide they know what is best for the average working stiff who is just trying to make it to work alive so that s/he can feed his or her family.