Color the scenarios in Syria any way you wish. America’s inaction in Syria has, in part, facilitated them, and America’s continued inaction will only exacerbate them.
Say Assad wins. That is, he retains power in a mini-Syria, with rebels holding other parts of the country. The US will have leverage with neither Assad nor the rebels, who will constitute one more anti-Western and anti-American terrorist breeding ground. Except that this time, it will be adjacent to Israel, heightening the risk of an Israeli attack.
Or say the rebels win and drive Assad from power. Double the risks enumerated above.
Or say that Assad and the rebels keep fighting. If that happens, it means that both sides will have more deadly weapons than they now possess. These, too, heighten the chances of a wider war. And there are many possible targets, since the civil war could intensify alongside Syria’s Lebanese border, or Turkish border, or Jordanian border, or Israeli border.
Then, what happens to the hundreds of thousands (or more?) of refugees created since the outbreak of the protest in March, 2011? At a minimum, there is more human suffering. There is also the drain on the economies of countries that choose to come to the refugees’ aid. There is also the distinct possibility of major destabilization in Jordan, Lebanon and even Turkey.
Not to mention, what happens to American credibility? President Obama said that if weapons of mass destruction were used in Syria, that would be a “red line” and the US would act. The US has not acted. The message is loud and clear: The US will not stand by its word or its wisdom. This only emboldens the enemies of the US everywhere.
To those who say that American intervention is dangerous because we could be helping jihadist or other enemies of the US, good morning! This is precisely why, as we observed at the time, the US should have intervened before the conflict had attracted jihadists and before it was a full blown civil war. Now the matter of intervention is much more tricky, but, as also noted on this page, the imposition of a no-fly zone would hinder Assad’s naked brutality and that of any other player with access to air power.
The inaction of the US and of other major Western powers eerily and frighteningly feels like the late 1930s, when the fascists and the communists were fighting it out in the Spanish civil war. The larger powers looked on. It was a fool’s dream to think that that conflict could be contained; it just wasn’t known in which specific directions it would explode. That became clear soon enough. In retrospect, the Spanish civil war was but the smallest portent of the far worse evils to come.
As the late Lester Gold used to say, luck is not a business plan, and hoping for the best is not a foreign policy. Merely to watch the events in Syria, to fecklessly declare “red lines,” to deplore, to go to the UN, to beg Russia to stop arming Assad, to conduct internal debates inside the administration about whether to take action — all this is just asking for much bigger trouble than there already is.
Copyright © 2013 by the Intermountain Jewish News
