Today I was pleasantly surprised to find that the TV set hanging nearest my treadmill at the gym was displaying not Olympic figure skating or the mentally-exhausting noise of Fox's The Five, but some actual news! Happy as I was to have something worth watching while I worked off some french fries, I was soon depressed by CNN's big story.
Syria's gone to hell, that much is well known, but evidently one of the rebel groups is so fanatical, so vicious, that even al Qaeda thinks they're too spicy and other revolutionaries have had to turn back and retake towns this Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has occupied. Meanwhile the violence in the country has accelerated even as the peace talks failed - turns out the regime willing to bomb, torture or starve its population considers rebel demands for Assad to leave power to be "unrealistic." Assad's supporters, supplemented by seasoned Hezbollah militants from Lebanon, have made some recent gains, but Saudi Arabia has made new offers of anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons for the Syrian opposition (hopefully they won't give any to those ISIS guys).
The whole region's coming together to participate in this event. It's like the Olympics, except 136,000 people have died.
This is exactly what we were worried about when the fighting started, that some of the rebels we could back against Syria's tyrant might turn out like the mujahideen we aided during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which led to the Taliban, and you know the rest. The good news is that not all the rebels are like that, so there'd have to be a further bloodbath, as ISIS killed and terrorized its opposition into submission, before the extremists took power and turned Syria from an authoritarian regime to a theocratic nightmare. Of course, to get that far they still have to defeat Assad's forces. So the good news about Syria is that it could be worse.
Obviously this isn't what the United States wants the Syria situation to look like, but unfortunately is the result of its actions during the civil war. If you want a specific outcome, in this case an Assad-free Syria, you need to be willing to take actions to make that outcome happen. Training and arming the Syrian Free Army is a start, but if that isn't enough, what are you willing to do next? Not provide air support, it turns out, or seriously enforce a "red line" on WMD use. And if a president who is very much willing to ignore the legislature and rule by decree decides in this case to leave military involvement up to a divided Congress, it's probably going to be hard for Assad to feel threatened by America.
So if Obama's handling of Syria has been a bit of a complete failure, what do we do next? Representative Cantor made a speech calling for a strong, interventionist America fighting for freedom and democracy and all that jazz - though the bits in the article don't mention Syria specifically, and seem more about America's greatest national concern, keeping Iran from nuking Israel. Senator McCain just wants Obama to use the intervention plans already drawn up, or presumably the updated version of them, coming "far sort of an Iraq-style invasion." And the op-ed for CFR mentioned no-fly zones and drone strikes against Syrian al Qaeda groups as things we could be doing to help.
I'm sure it'd be less simple than these guys make it sound - I think I remember that Syria has a lot of modern anti-air defenses, unlike most of the countries we've flattened in the past decades - but I'm curious about the options being left off the table. For example, why not an Iraq-style invasion? From what I remember, the actual "war" part of the Iraq War went swimmingly, was a bit of a turkey shoot even. It's only once we had to rebuild and occupy the country that we discovered that our military is a lot better at toppling governments than making new ones. But if we make no commitment to such a rebuilding project, maybe found someone else to do it, we could end the war quickly and skip the sort of misery we went through in Iraq and are wrapping up in Afghanistan.
I guess others aren't suggesting this because they figure without an American occupation, those ISIS guys or someone like them would probably take over. On the other hand, we've got the Taliban poised for a comeback in Afghanistan, and Iraq is hardly the way we'd like it, so just because we occupy a country doesn't mean we'd do it right.
The other omitted option is simple: drone strikes on Assad. Get his house on satellite, blow up his car one fine morning while he drives to work, boom, the major impasse in the peace talks is removed. Maybe the lull that follows would lead to a peaceful resolution, maybe the confusion in the regime's leadership would let the rebels swing the war their way.
But of course we can't treat the leader of a government, no matter how murderous and illegitimate, the same as a common terrorist. And since drone assassinations seem to be the biggest thing in the president's military toolkit, I guess we'll see where Syria's fighters - and the nations willing to get involved - take the conflict next.
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