4/7/17
While virtually the entire U.S. political establishment,
and much of the world, is heaping praise on the Tomahawk cruise missile strike
on the Shayrat airfield near Homs, Syria, perhaps a few cautionary notes are in
order.
First, President Trump is an impulsive man and this strike
looks like a manifestation, and a dangerous one, of that impulsiveness. During the campaign, and even since assuming
the presidency, Mr. Trump decried U.S. meddling in the Syrian conflict. Upon getting news of the horrific chemical
attack on Khan Sheikhoun, though, Mr. Trump quickly reversed his position and ordered
the strike on the Shayrat airfield from which that attack was launched. The impulse that led to this 180 on Mr.
Trump’s part was doubtless a generous and admirable one; who doesn’t want to
bloody the nose of a tyrant like Bashar Assad who inflicts such horrendous
suffering on his own citizens, including the youngest and most defenseless
among them? President Obama had such
generous and compassionate impulses as well, but wisely, if awkwardly, kept
them in check. While Mr. Assad is a
very bad man, the world is full of very bad men in positions of power who think
nothing of killing and torturing anyone who is construed as even remotely
threatening to them. Mr. Assad is only
the currently most highly visible of these.
But we don’t exact retribution on all of these abominable men because we
can’t exact retribution on all these
horrible men. We do not have a
limitless capacity to wage war, a lesson that seems to have escaped Mr. Obama’s
predecessor but that since has been learned at great cost, perhaps not by Mr.
Bush but by those who have had to bear the costs of his adventurism.
Further, Syria is an especially dangerous place to act on
even one’s most generous impulses because of Syria’s alliances with the likes
of Russia and Iran. The former, while a
third-rate economic power, is certainly a military and geo-strategic player of
immense proportions with enormous stakes, including its only overseas base
outside the old Soviet Union, in Syria.
The latter is capable of concocting all kinds of mischief in all corners
of the world. It is indeed ironic that
such big power politics and calculation is being played out in Syria during the
same month, 100 years ago, that the U.S. entered World War I, a geopolitical
and humanitarian disaster that resulted from similar miscalculation in the
context of big power alliances. Doubtless
all the players in that fiasco thought they were doing the right thing, just as
many people seem to think Mr. Trump is doing the right thing now. But actions seemingly taken to address
humanitarian horribles led to even more unimaginable humanitarian horrors in
Europe in the early part of the 20th century. Could the same results arise from Mr. Trump’s
seemingly beneficent gestures in the Middle East in the early part of the 21st
Century?
Mr. Trump’s seemingly impulsive action against Shayrat
may even make things more complicated in Syria than they were in the Balkans in
1914, is such a thing is indeed possible.
By launching this attack on a Syrian government base while continuing to
battle their main, but fading, antagonists, ISIS, Mr. Trump has put us on both
sides of the Syrian war, a war that is, ostensibly, a religious war, with Sunni
rebels of all stripes fighting an Alawite (Shia) government. When one is on both sides of a war, and
especially of a religious war, one ironically rarely winds up on the winning
side.
Second, one hopes the intelligence regarding the origins
of the chemicals that killed so many so horrifically in Khan Sheikhoun is
correct or at least better than the intelligence that assured so many that
Saddam Hussein was swimming in weapons of mass destruction. Syria, along with its Russian patron, is
claiming that the chemical weapons that made real such nightmares for the civilian
populace had their origins not with the Syrian government but with the rebel
groups. According to this line of
argument, the rebels were stockpiling chemical weapons and the air attack from
Shayrat disturbed those chemical stockpiles, releasing them on the populace. The Pentagon and our best intelligence
assures us that this story is so much claptrap and claims there is no doubt
that the chemical weapons released on the civilians of Khan Sheikhoun were part
of the Syrian government’s cache of these horrifying weapons…and I tend believe
them. But we shouldn’t dismiss out of
hand even the lying, scheming Syrian government’s attempts at a seemingly
diaphanous defense. That the rebel
groups in Syria are fighting a monster in Mr. Assad does not make them good
guys; even the “moderates” among them have al-Qaeda ties. Does anyone think al-Qaeda is above using
chemical weapons on civilians?
Again, in this case, the intelligence is almost certainly
right; the Khan Sheikhoun attack was a vicious chemical weapon attack largely
centered on a hospital used by al-Qaeda linked rebels, not an attack on a
chemical weapons depot that resulted in a release of those chemical weapons to
wreak havoc on the population. But let’s
not assume that the rebels we are supporting are latter day Middle Eastern
Jeffersonians and adjust our intelligence to support that myth. Most of the rebel groups fighting Mr. Assad
are much more similar to him than they are to us.
Third, one of the oldest political tricks is to start or
intensify a war, or otherwise concoct or stir up a foreign bogeyman, when one
is in political trouble. The mullahs in
Iran regularly trot out the “Death to America” demonstrators when the economy
is lousy or young Iranians start to yearn for such subversive diversions as the
internet. Vladimir Putin’s foreign
adventures have seemed to coincide with periods during which oil prices were under
pressure and having desiccatory impacts on the Russian economy. In diverting people’s attention away from
domestic incompetence to foreigners at the gate, he is only following the
example of his predecessor Tsar Nicholas II, who led his country to Serbia’s
defense in 1914 not so much to defend Orthodoxy and the Pan-Slavic movement as
to divert his people from their flagging economy and their dalliances with the
rising leftist movements throughout Mother Russia. Even leaders in democratic countries use the
foreign bogeyman dodge; recall the Spanish-American War or our “liberation” of
Grenada. One hopes that the Tomahawk
strikes on Shayrat weren’t an effort on Mr. Trump’s part to score a “win”
during a several weeks period of bad news for his administration.
All that having been said and written, there are
positives to Mr. Trump’s actions in Syria.
For a change, the world now gets the sense that we have a president who
means what he says, not a faltering, self-doubting Hamlet of a man who draws
unnecessary lines and quickly erases them when his bluff is called. We don’t have a faker in the White House, at
least not in this application. That the
world now has more reason to respect the man in the Oval Office, or even to
think he is a little impulsive or crazy, is not a bad thing. One just hopes that Mr. Trump can control
his impulsiveness and/or that he is crazy like a fox so that such aspects of
his personality can redound to our benefit rather than to our ruin.
