THE TOMAHAWK ATTACK ON SHAYRAT AIRFIELD: FOREIGN POLICY BY IMPULSE…AND LESSONS FROM THE BALKANS, CIRCA 1914

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 20^th century.   Could the same results arise from Mr. Trump’s seemingly beneficent gestures in the Middle East in the early part of the 21^st 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.