Bill Clinton wants us to “win” in Syria. “Win” what, exactly?
by David Atkins
I’ve received more than my share of lashes for being something of an unashamed liberal interventionist, but I’ll be the first to strongly disagree with Bill Clinton on this:
Bill Clinton told Sen. John McCain he agrees that President Barack Obama should act more forcefully to support anti-Assad rebels in Syria, saying the American public elects presidents and members of Congress “to see down the road” and “to win.”
At another point during a closed-press event Tuesday, Clinton implied that Obama or any president risks looking like “a total fool” if they listen too closely to opinion polls and act too cautiously. He used his own decisions on Kosovo and Bosnia as a point of reference.
The former president also said commanders-in-chief should avoid over-interpreting public opinion polls about whether the United States should get involved in crises overseas…
“Some people say, ‘Okay, see what a big mess it is? Stay out!’ I think that’s a big mistake. I agree with you about this,” Clinton told McCain during an event for the McCain Institute for International Leadership in Manhattan Tuesday night. “Sometimes it’s just best to get caught trying, as long as you don’t overcommit — like, as long as you don’t make an improvident commitment.”
That is the worst possible foreign policy advice. Syria isn’t just messy: it’s a catastrophe of disarray. It’s much more complicated than this, of course, but simply and charitably speaking it’s as follows: on one side is Assad, mass murderer, dictator and human rights violator. On the other side is a group of hardcore Sunni islamists and Al Qaeda affiliates. Pick your poison.
In a perfect world, there would a large, capable multinational force that could threaten to narrowly destroy the leadership of both sides unless they instituted a cease fire, then extradite Assad, begin a reconciliation process and hold elections under the watchful eye of peacekeepers and election observers–without the ability for any nation to privatize the assets of the country or exploit them for self-interested gain.
We don’t live in that world. There is no such force, in large part because the United States, the EU, Russia and China are much too fond of playing Risk with one another to worry about dead and dying Syrian children. Much better to consider proxy wars with Iran or Israel, and to fret about the fate of Gazprom in the East and Exxon in the West. Important things. Realpolitik, don’t you know. Why, these proud nations ask themselves, should they do anything so noble as to cooperate to make peace and save lives? Pushing chess pieces around the world stage is much more interesting. Plus, they can claim the moral high ground: to stop the mass slaughter of children in a brutal and bloody civil war with no good guys would be imperialism. It’s far nobler just to let the slaughter go on unabated. That’s the progressive approach, or so they say.
All sorts of good reasons on the right and on the left, then, for the nations of the world not to cooperate with each other. Not on this, not on climate change. Not on anything, really. It’s all good.
So we have no such cooperative organized alliances of nations. The UN is toothless and functionally useless. Which in turn leaves a bunch of solitary nation-states to intervene or not as their leaders see fit. That seems productive.
Which brings us to the United States and Syria. Yes, the United States could arm the Syrian rebels, which in turn would lead to increased bloodshed by Sunni extremists against, well, anyone who doesn’t buy into their brand of religious fanaticism. Or the United States could do the unthinkable and help the mass murdering dictator conduct his campaign of genocide. Both of these would entail massive blowback, nor is it clear that they would do even temporary good.
Or the United States could do nothing, watch Syrians slaughter one another en masse, and eye Russia and China balefully as all three glower at each other to make sure that none of them impact any of the others’ precious, precious oil and gas interests.
Given the short-sighted stupidity of the world’s current political structures, that’s actually the best bet at this time. It’s appalling that Bill Clinton doesn’t know that. Doing nothing beyond persistent diplomacy (which accomplishes nothing in this case) is the right approach. So do nothing.
But that’s not something to be proud of. The fact that nothing good can be done in Syria isn’t something to shrugged over insouciantly with a self-satisfied smugness about national self-determination. It should be the profound shame of every citizen of every nation in the world, and an indictment of the profound greed and cowardice of their leaders.
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