Syria is Awfully Complicated

It's hard to take seriously those who don't understand even recent history. Even worse are those who consciously ignore it, or worse still, lie about it. All three groups of ahistorical shitheads are overly represented in today's Republican Party.

The neoconservative ideology was tested in Iraq and was found lacking by any sane and fair observer. If you want to decide whether to take a given Republican seriously about current foreign policy challenges, I'd advise you to take a look at what they say about Iraq.

First, the U.S invasion did not bring democracy to Mesopotamia, but it did bring more than it's fair share of chaos. Democracy was always a foolish goal in an unnatural country comprised of competing ethnic and religious groups. As soon as you lift out of tyranny those who very much want to kill one another, you shouldn't be at all surprised when they actually start killing one another.

Second, like everything else about the Iraq War, the 2007 "surge" did not accomplish it's stated aims. If you look back on the statements of the surge's supporters, you learn that the aim was to provide enough security in the country (and especially the famously murderous "Sunni Triangle") to allow for political reconciliation. That did not occur. Suicide bombings that kill hundreds of civilians are routine in Iraq.

What the surge did create was what the Nixon Administration called a "decent interval" in Vietnam that allowed the United States to withdraw without being humiliated.

Third, President Obama didn't withdraw from Iraq, President Bush did. In the summer of 2008, Bush signed a status of forces agreement that called for the last American troops to depart by 2011. There was to be no residual force left behind because the Iraqis would not exempt U.S forces and contractors from Iraqi law. Obama merely implemented that agreement, although you'd never know it from listening to Fox News or reading Republican blogs.

Then there's the Arab Spring. During the entirety of the Bush years, Republicans contended that the liberation of Iraq would speed the growth of democracy through the Middle East. In the earliest days of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, they actually sought to take credit for it.

But democracy didn't work out exactly the way they had planned, and Islamist-leaning governments were elected, just as Hamas had been in 2005 elections in the Palestinian Authority that Bush insisted on, despite the protests of Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas.

Anyone who thought that a Thomas Jefferson was going to rise up in the region is a fool. The true Democrats had long ago been murdered or exiled by the (often American-supported) tyrannies that the revolutions displaced. Just as nature does, politics abhors a vacuum, and the most organized forces were destined to win the democratic elections, and that the most organized forces were affiliated with the Islamist movement was the most predictable thing in the world to anyone that was paying attention.

So the neocons did exactly what they did in the wake of their failure in Iraq; they blamed Obama.

Now moron Republicans like John McCain want to make Syria an issue.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta acknowledged that he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, had supported a plan last year to arm carefully vetted Syrian rebels. But it was ultimately vetoed by the White House, Mr. Panetta said, although it was developed by David H. Petraeus, the C.I.A. director at the time, and backed by Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the secretary of state.

“How many more have to die before you recommend military action?” Mr. McCain asked Mr. Panetta on Thursday, noting that an estimated 60,000 Syrians had been killed in the fighting.

And did the Pentagon, Mr. McCain continued, support the recommendation by Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Petraeus “that we provide weapons to the resistance in Syria? Did you support that?”

“We did,” Mr. Panetta said.

“You did support that,” Mr. McCain said.

“We did,” General Dempsey added.

Of course, the implication is that Obama isn't listening to his national security team, which in this case, he thankfully isn't. And Obama isn't alone among presidents in this regard. Had President Truman listened to his national security advisers, the United States would not have recognized the State of Israel.

There are a couple of points that most Republicans won't make about Syria that you should hear;

• There is no shortage of weapons in Syria.
• The civil war there is already a regional proxy war that American allies in Turkey and Saudi Arabia are already hip deep in.

Too many people who don't know what they're talking about say that when the House of Assad falls, it will precipitate the same kind of chaos that overwhelmed Iraq a decade ago. That's actually not true. The fall of Assad will more exactly precipitate the kind of chaos that overwhelmed Afghanistan twenty years ago.

When the Soviet-sponsored regime of Mohammad Najibullah disintegrated in 1992, the various rebel groups that toppled it immediately went to war with one another. Most of the factions were sponsored by foreign intelligence services, most notably Pakistan's ISI and the CIA.

Those in the cult of St. Ronald of Reagan prefer to ignore this inconvenient truth today, but the Reagan Administration's poster boy of the Afghan "freedom fighters" was one Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The fact that Hekmatyar rallied his troops into battle with Soviet forces chanting "Death to America" was somehow overlooked at the time. Hekmatyar is now wanted by the United States as a war criminal and a close associate of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

In wanting to arm Syrian factions, people like McCain risk doing the same thing all over again. And please don't tell me that the United States will rally around a figure like Ahmad Massoud because there likely isn't one, and the U.S  pointedly ignored Massoud until the closing days of the Clinton Administration, nearly a decade later.

Just as happened in Afghanistan, American aims in Syria are at odds with the other regional players. . In the 1980s, the Carter and Reagan Administration, along with the Chinese, sought to humiliate the Soviets, whereas the Pakistanis wanted Afghanistan to use as "strategic depth" in a possible future war with India.

The U.S wants stability and a possible Syrian accommodation with Israel. What the Turks, Saudis and Iranians want is for their preferred ethnic allies to prevail. The Turks and Saudis want a Sunni power base in Damascus, whether or not its jihadi is a secondary concern. The Iranians want to maintain their Alawite ally, and their Syrian bridge to both Lebanon and the Israeli-Occupied Territories.

In any event, none of the Syrian rebels share American national security aims and, to one degree or another, all of them will probably seek thwart them at some point in the not too distant future. While it's a fable of the left that the United States created the Taliban or al-Qaeda in the 80's, it did directly arm and train more than a few of their allied groups.

Toppling Assad is not going to stop the killing. Indeed, his overthrow is almost certain accelerate it as the competing rebel groups go to war with one another in a battle to control the country. Just as they did in Afghanistan, the neocons and liberal supporters of intervention steadfastly refuse to recognize that horrible reality.

Having said that, Syria threatens to destroy the very delicate situations in both Lebanon and Iraq. That's something that the United States should do everything in its power to avoid, either with air forces or, in a worst case scenario, ground troops. Neither country can seal their borders on their own.

If McCain wants to be somehow useful, he can introduce a resolution in the Senate holding Turkey and Saudi Arabia responsible for the actions of their proxies if they take the fight outside of Syria. Their American aid can be held hostage, along with Turkey's NATO membership.

The U.S has tried playing Great Game politics in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and failed miserably both times, to the great benefit of the Pakistanis and Iranians.

Republicans universally mocked the 2006 Biden-Gelb Plan, which would have divided Iraq into a loose federation of three countries. What they've chosen to ignore is that the Iraqis themselves have essentially implemented it on their own.

Because it should be by now apparent that you cannot have democracy or stability in artificial nations comprised of tribal ethnic groups that want autonomy from one another, Biden-Gelb should be at least looked at as a model for most of the Middle East.

With the exception of Israel, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, these countries were political creations of the various Versailles Conferences of 1919-1922 and maintained as expedient client states during the Cold War. They will eventually disintegrate on their own, the only question is how.

If the United States wants to extract itself from the morass of the Middle East, which it very much should, it should use its diplomatic influence to hasten the creation of a new, more homogeneous Arab states that better represent the national aspirations of their people.

Anyone who knows anything about the isolationist nature of American history should know that Americans are the very last people who should be involved in the poisonous pit of Arab politics. The region is likely to be eventually dominated by Egyptian and Iranian "superpowers" anyway, so why not expedite that?

All the status quo is likely to produce is more frequent revolutions that will be impossible to manage from outside the region. Such revolutions will make it impossible for Israel to have anything other than a war economy and remain forever dependent on an American ally that is rapidly approaching bankruptcy and irrelevance.

The map is eventually going to shake itself out. It is much better for everyone if it does so unopposed from the outside.