As the crisis in the Middle East deepens and U.S. military escalation gains impetus, a mix of exceedingly strange bedfellows is developing in the region -- none stranger than Syrian autocrat Bashar al-Assad and Washington. In the hysteria of this moment in Washington when it comes to ISIS, the idea of bombing Syria is being mentioned seriously for the first time, which would, of course, mean (however implicitly) allying with al-Assad. Juan Cole presents some of the grim complications of that possible development at his blog this morning. Tom Obama staffers are leaking the alleged necessity of cross-border bombing as a trial balloon. For my generation, it all sounds drearily familiar. Richard Milhaus Nixon and Henry Kissinger felt they needed to bomb Cambodia to stop North Vietnamese infiltration of troops into South Vietnam. They did so secretly and without Congressional or public authorization (you never want your country secretly going to war against another). They destabilized Cambodia and paved the way to the Pol Pot genocide that polished off a million of Cambodia’s five million people, a far higher percentage of the general population than the Nazis genocided in Europe in the 1940s. The Obama people are at least speaking publicly about bombing Syria, though not of getting Congressional authorization. I suppose they think the dreaded AUMF (Authorization of Military Force) of 2001 still applies to an al-Qaeda offshoot like IS. Nor it there an analogy from the Khmer Rouge to the Baath, though the Baath has also piled up mountains of skulls bleached white in the sun. (The UN puts the deaths in the Syrian civil war at 191,000, but many of those are indirect, e.g. people thirsting to death on being forced to flee their homes because of fighting between government and guerrillas, and it is at least alleged that slightly more direct deaths have been perpetrated by IS and its de facto allies than by the Baath Army. The calculus of mass murder is a dreary and unedifying business. For someone who doesn’t think morality is irrelevant to foreign policy, this debate is extremely distressing, since it reveals a dark world in which one’s only recourse against war criminals is a tacit alliance with other war criminals. Though, Realists would point out that such conundrums are common in history. FDR and Churchill openly allied against Hitler with the Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin, the paranoid head of a police state who had enormous amounts of blood on his hands. Ironically, the medium to far Left in the US and Western Europe agrees with the Neoconservative Meyer about a preference for al-Assad. In the end, the idea that aerial bombing of IS in Syria is necessary should be interrogated. Giving close air support to the Kurdish peshmerga paramilitary to take the Mosul dam could practically work, as it worked in Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance and in northern Iraq in 2003 (when the US helped the Peshmerga take Mosul from the Iraqi Baath). But just bombing IS vehicles on the Syrian side, without there being any force to take and hold territory on the ground, has merely logistical implications (presumably Washington doesn’t want them moving around gasoline and kerosene for their vehicles– they smuggle Syrian oil). That could, however, be done on the Iraqi side of the border. juancole/2014/08/budding-cambodia-policy.html Whatever the Cameron government says in London, or the NSC staffers say in Washington, however, the proposed Obama “Cambodia strategy” in Syria does ally the West with Damascus and makes it even more likely that the Baath regime’s momentum of the past 18 months will continue on to a dreary Algeria-like fragile victory over the rebels. In turn, the Obama administration’s de facto policy (as opposed to what they say), may be beginning to align with that of the Czech Republic (which has all along supported al-Assad), Russia and Iran.
Posted on: Sat, 23 Aug 2014 16:00:01 +0000
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