THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR: A FRIGHTENING HISTORICAL ANALOGY

5/24/13

How about a scary historical analogy to put the Syrian Civil War in perspective?

 (See my many posts on that conflict, mostly written from the perspective of U.S. policy, the most recent of which is WHAT IF BASHAR ASSAD WINS IN SYRIA?, 5/21/13)

The Assad family is of the Alawite branch of Islam, which is closely related to the Shiite branch of Islam.   One might go so far as to say that the Alawites are a branch of the Shiites, but experts in these matters might consider that too simplistic.  The Assads are backed in this civil war by Shiite led Iran and it clients in Lebanon, including Hezbollah, and its clients in Iraq, a majority Shiite country once run by the Sunni Saddam Hussein until the American occupation, which at least temporarily resulted in the Shiites regaining shaky control of that country which itself is riven by what is not yet, but soon will be, called a civil war.

The opposition to Mr. Assad is composed of Sunnis, largely Al Qaeda related groups and Al Qaeda wannabes, and is backed by Sunni dominated regimes, primarily in the Persian Gulf, the most salient of which in the Syrian endeavor is Qatar.  

So what we have in Syria is a civil war, but also much more.   Syria appears to be a smaller theater in which the larger, cooler Sunni-Shiite conflict, which spans at least the greater Middle East, is manifesting itself in much hotter form.

Think back to the late 1930s and the Spanish Civil War.  In that conflict, the Nationalists, most of whom were genuine nationalists but many of whom, including their leader, Francisco Franco, also had Fascist tendencies, were backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.  The Republicans, many of whom were genuine republicans but many of whom had Communist tendencies, were backed by the Soviet Union.   The Nationalists eventually prevailed and Franco remained in power until his death in 1975.

The Spanish Civil War is largely seen by historians as something of a trial run, or a dress rehearsal, if you will, for the larger European conflict to follow, or perhaps even a first round in the fighting on the eastern front of the European theater in World War II.  The Fascists and the Communists, it is speculated, were just readying their weaponry for the big one to follow.

Could we be seeing the same thing in Syria?   Could we be seeing the Shiite powers, led by Iran, and the Sunni powers, led by the Gulf States, just testing their weaponry, their influence, and their wealth for the big one to follow?

To say we hope not is to understate the case.

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?

JOHN McCAIN, CHUCK HAGEL, AND DEFERRING TO HISTORY

2/1/13

As anyone, and certainly anyone who reads my blogs, could have predicted, the War Party and its majordomo John McCain, are giving former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel one heck of a hard time in Mr. Hagel’s hearings for his confirmation as Secretary of Defense.   It seems that Mr. Hagel has the preposterous notion that we ought to be circumspect in military affairs and think long and hard before we send young men and women into combat for questionable goals.  Mr. Hagel apparently believes that further enriching the “defense” contractors who subsidize the lifelong sinecures War Party members occupy in the city they vociferously claim to detest is not sufficient justification for sending kids to their deaths.  Such apostasy is clearly anathema to Mr. McCain and his colleagues.

Fortunately for Mr. Hagel and for those of us who favor a defense that defends, Mr. McCain is not the brightest bulb in the Congressional chandelier.   Note the following exchange between Mr. McCain and Mr. Hagel on the “surge” in Iraq, of which Mr. McCain was the most salient and ardent champion:

McCain:

“Were you correct or incorrect when you said that the surge would be the most dangerous foreign policy blunder…since Vietnam?”

Hagel:

“It’s far more complicated than that…My answer is ‘I’ll defer that judgment to history.’”

McCain:

“I think history has already made a judgment about the surge, sir, and you’re on the wrong side of it.”

John McCain is, as is his usual custom, clearly wrong on at least one issue here.  History does not make judgments in the space of 5, 10, 20, or even 30 years.  History, unlike current events, takes a long time go play out.   So history has yet to make a judgment on the surge.

Mr. McCain’s narrative is that the “surge” led to pacification in Iraq that gave the United States the opportunity to leave, more or less, Iraq without the guilt of leaving behind a failed state in which anarchy and violence ruled the day.   This former may or may not be true and the latter seems to be turning out to be wishful thinking.

We do know that the “surge” cost 1,200 American lives and, less importantly, billions of dollars.  We don’t know if the “surge” led to pacification, even temporarily, of Iraq.   At the same time we were “surging,” we were stepping up a program of payouts (bribes, really) to various warring factions in Iraq to come over to our side, or at least to behave themselves for awhile.   Whether the surge or the payoffs led to Iraq’s temporary pacification we don’t know.  And we also don’t know whether we would have left regardless of conditions in Iraq; the American people were, even long before we left, sick and tired of George Bush’s Excellent Adventure in Iraq, an Adventure that John McCain was critical of only in the sense that it was not pursued aggressively enough for his tastes.

We also know that the pacification, whether the result of the surge or the expenditures of plenty of spondulicks, was temporary.   Just about every day, we hear of car bombings, kidnappings, or other such goings-on in Iraq.   The minority Sunnis, who used to run the country, are disdainful, or worse, of the now ruling majority Shiites, who are very cozy with their Shiite brethren in Iran.  The Kurds in the north have more or less seceded from Iraq, and neither the Sunnis nor the Shiites are happy about what that means for their access to Iraq’s oil wealth, much of which is located in the Kurdish north, which is now openly called Kurdistan.

It looks like Iraq will wind up being a failed state and will descend into anarchy and civil war.  It may become, or at least parts of it will become, an Iranian satellite.   Thus we will have left either another breeding ground for terrorism or have handed the Iranians a client state at the expense of American blood and treasure.   And John McCain accuses Chuck Hagel of not being sufficiently tough on Iran!

Iraq’s either descending into a hellish dystopia, becoming an Iranian satellite, or both seems to have been inevitable from the moment George Bush decided, for reasons no one has yet been able to discern, that it would be a good idea to invade Iraq.    The only difference the “surge” has made it is to delay this outcome for perhaps a few years.   Was that delay worth 1,200 human lives?

One more thought…

If Iraq keeps heading in the direction it seems to be going, it, too, will become a breeding ground for terrorism, if it has not already become one, as seems likely given the hatred the Iraqi people have developed for Americans after George Bush, er, had his way, with their country.  Note that the justification for our going into Afghanistan was that it had become a breeding ground for terrorism.  So perhaps Mr. McCain and his henchmen are brighter than I think and are simply laying the groundwork for more military adventures in Iraq, which would make the “defense” contractors even richer…and more grateful to the likes of Mr. McCain, his mini-me from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, and the rest of those who find Mr. Hagel’s talk of prudent exercise of military power so reprehensible.

History, a subject that Mr. McCain clearly does not understand, will have to tell us.