Juan Cole: The Hubris of the Syria Interventionists

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/289-134/19431-focus-the-hubris-of-the-syria-interventionists

The hawks who are deeply disappointed that diplomacy has likely forestalled a US military intervention in Syria in the foreseeable future often attempt to tug at our heart strings by pointing to the over 100,000 dead and the millions of displaced, implying that the US has a responsibility to intervene to stop the carnage on humanitarian grounds.

If the world were such that the US could in fact do so, perhaps they might have a point. The problem is that social engineering on that scale is currently beyond even a superpower. We need a humanitarian realism to forestall the utopians from taking us into quagmires. There is nothing wrong with doing good where you realistically can. Trying to do good by military means where you cannot can be deadly to both you and the victims.

Syria resembles Iraq in many respects. It is a multicultural country with 60% Sunni Arabs, 10% Kurds, 10-14% Alawite Shiites, 10-14% Christians, and smaller Twelver Shiite, Druze and Ismaili communities. Iraq is a mirror image, with a Shiite majority and a Sunni Arab minority.

Both countries were ruled for decades by the Baath or Resurrection Party, which claimed to be socialist and Arab nationalist. The Baath Party insists on a one-party state. In both countries, an ethnic minority captured the upper echelons of the Baath Party, using its control of the state to reward coreligionists. In Iraq, the Sunni Arabs disproportionately dominated the higher ranks of the Baath Party and officer corps. In particular, the Tikriti clan of Saddam Hussein took the highest posts. In Syria, the Alawite Shiite Arabs were disproportionately represented at the heights of power. In particular, the al-Assad clan took the highest posts.

[pampango]

1. Excellent article, eridani. Thanks for posting. "Don't help the combatants. Do help the refugees."

So the hawks, whether of the manipulative and vicious sort or of the humanitarian sort, who keep squawking that the US needs to do something are beginning with the premise that the US can do something effective. It can't.

That the Syria situation is so like that in Iraq makes the analogy compelling. I am not saying that all interventions are doomed. Kosovo and Bosnia aren't paradise, but they turned out just all right. But Syria is not like Kosovo, where you had a compact territory being invaded by another ethnic group. Syria is all mixed up. The tanks are inside the cities. The cities are multi-ethnic for the most part. There is nothing you could bomb without killing the civilians you were hoping to protect (Syria differs in this way also from Libya).

It may be a positive that the question is even being broached. Millions were polished off in Congo in the 1990s and it didn't get mentioned on the evening news in the US. Likewise, the Algerian civil War of the 1990s and early zeroes passed without comment in America.

What the US and its allies can do is improve the conditions of the 2 million Syrians displaced abroad, and try to figure ways of getting food and necessities to internally displaced noncombatants. The US hasn't been bad on refugee aid, but it can do substantially more, as can Europe and the Arab League. Ignoring the plight of a third of the country (the DPs) while strategizing how to scramble fighter-jets is the opposite of humanitarianism.