The Middle East Lends Itself to Controlled Experiments

I am generally not a fan of counterfactual histories.  They are attempts to show that if some other policy that the speaker/writer prefers had been followed, the outcome would have been much better than the one we have now.  It is much easier to imagine how things might have turned out better than to foresee all the ways some alternative course might have gone wrong -- what Donald Rumsfeld was (unreasonably) mocked for calling "the unknown unknowns."  There is no way to run a controlled experiment to see how these alternate scenarios might have gone if actually tried.*  Nonetheless, the Middle East has way of presenting thorny, persistent problems that defy all attempts to tackle them.  By attempting on approach and then another to the Mideast's intractable problems, be have as near as can be found to a controlled experiment in our various policy approaches.

Consider the first Gulf War.  Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army invaded and conquered Kuwait.  The US and a team of allies joined forces and drove them out.  However, our army stopped at the border and did not march on Baghdad to finish Hussein off, assuming that defeat would lead to his overthrow.  Although revolts broke out across the country, Hussein successfully crushed them and held on to power, leaving the US to wonder how to deal with him.  Conventional wisdom held that we had made a terrible mistake in not finishing Hussein off, and that all would have been well if only we had proceeded.  Then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney defended our decision, saying:

[I]f we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off.

Twelve years later, the US government decided that not deposing Hussein had been a mistake that we should correct, and Cheney (by then Vice President and widely believed to be the power behind the throne) was one of the strongest advocates of the invasion.  Cheney would have the opportunity to see a controlled experiment play out and his earlier predictions proved absolutely right.  One just doesn't hear very often anymore about the mistake we made in not going all the way after freeing Kuwait.

Current conventional wisdom holds that Obama could have prevented the mess that currently exists in Syria and the rise of ISIS if he had left a residual force of 5,000 to 10,000 in Iraq.  Like the old conventional wisdom that all would have been well if we had only deposed Saddam Hussein, this us not treated as a possible outcome, but as a self-evidence certainty. 

But we run into problems.  As for the residual force in Iraq the Iraqi parliament refused to authorize a continued US stay.  It is often proposed that the Nouri al-Maliki government really wanted US troops to stay and that an unofficial agreement could have been reached.  And then, it is assumed, the presence of US troops would have made everyone get along and prevented the rise of ISIS.  Maybe.  But I can think of any number of ways it might have gone wrong.  Since it is undisputed that the Iraqi people in general did not want US troops in their country, a new insurgency might have broken out against them.  The rise of ISIS was in response to al-Maliki's oppressive, anti-Sunni policies.  Was it the place of US troops to make Maliki change his policies?  And, if so, how long would Maliki have agreed to let our troops stay, and should be have kept troops in place against the wishes of the host government?  Well, now we are hearing hints of an ISIS comeback and conventional wisdom is unanimous that the only way to prevent it is to leave a small residual force in Syria.  I guess we will see just how effective such small residual forces are. 

Another error Obama is regularly accused of making in the Middle East is not speaking out soon enough and forcefully enough when demonstrations broke out against the Iranian government in 2009.  If only Obama had spoken out soon enough and forcefully enough in condemning the Iranian crackdown and supporting the protesters, conventional wisdom is certain that he would have toppled the Iranian government (and, of course, that we would have liked what took its place).  When anti-government demonstrations broke out again on Donald Trump's watch, Trump was not going to make the same mistake twice.  He immediately, loudly, and forcefully, expressed support for the protesters and condemned the crackdown.  In this he garnered great praise.  Obama critics everywhere demanded to know why Obama couldn't have done the same thing.  How difficult would it be?  Somehow, critics failed to notice the the protests nonetheless sputtered out, and that Trump's forceful speaking out had exactly the same effect as Obama's silence, which is to say, none at all.

But above all else, Obama is blamed for the ghastly civil war in Syria.  Conventional wisdom has it that if only he had intervened earlier and more forcefully in Syria's civil war, we could have toppled Assad and prevented the carnage.  Some accounts see our mistake as not moving earlier and more forcefully to arm the moderate opposition.  But above all, Obama's mistake is seen as not bombing Assad when he used chemical weapons in 2013, despite having pledged to do so.  Conventional wisdom assures us that dropping bombs in 2013 would have toppled Assad without escalating or requiring a significant ground commitment of US troops and would have maintained US credibility.  Conventional wisdom is emphatic that no President before Obama 2013 ever made a threat and failed to follow up on it.  And conventional wisdom does not think too hard about what would have happened if we had succeeded in toppling Assad, but simply assumes that all would have been well.

Well, we have had at least a partial test of conventional wisdom (twice) when Trump responded to chemical attacks by dropping bombs.  Conventional wisdom applauded, said this was exactly what Obama should have done, pointed out that there had been no escalation and the US had not committed ground troops and generally proclaimed US credibility to be restored.  Somehow unnoticed in all this celebration -- the air strikes were pinpricks, strategically  meaningless, with no effect whatever on the actual war.  So Trump has now performed a controlled experiment and conclusively proved that the US could have made airstrikes without ill effect so long as the strikes were strategically meaningless and had not actual effect on the outcome of the war, other than to deter further chemical attacks.  And I don't know.  Maybe the people who condemn Obama for not bombing any targets would have applauded a pinprick strike and said that it made no difference whether the attack actually had an impact on the war, the point was simply to do something establish US credibility.  But somehow I wouldn't bet on it.

But what if we had intervened earlier and more forcefully on behalf of the rebels.  Would have toppled Assad?  Possibly.  Conventional wisdom assumes that if we had acted early and forcefully enough, the Russians would have backed down, rather than risk a confrontation between nuclear powers.  But another outcome is possible.  Russian intervened in force only when it appeared that Assad was in danger of losing.  Possibly an earlier move to topple Assad would simply have meant earlier Russian intervention to prop him up.  That one does not lend itself well to controlled experiment.

But what if we had successfully toppled Assad?  So far as I can tell, conventional wisdom simply assumes that all would have been well.  The same source laments:

Instead of implementing what had sounded like the commander-in-chief’s directive, the State Department was saddled in August 2012 by the White House with a make-work, labor-intensive project cataloguing the countless things that would have to be in place for a post-Assad Syria to function. But how to get to post-Assad? The White House had shut down the sole interagency group examining options for achieving that end.

What he appears to be saying is that we should have toppled Assad first and worried about what would follow later.  But we had already performed two controlled experiments on what happens if you topple the tyrant first and worry about what to do next later -- Iraq and Libya.  Both countries degenerated into civil war and anarchy.  Given how immensely fragmented the Syrian opposition was, and how many different factions had backing of different Mideastern powers, by far the most likely outcome of toppling Assad would have been chaos, anarchy, and intervention and escalation by rival powers.  It is not unreasonable to want to figure out how to avoid such an outcome, preferably without requiring a large-scale commitment of ground troops, before removing the devil we know.  The only truly honest and open-eyed argument in favor of toppling Assad is to argue that such an outcome would still have been preferable to what we have now.  (I have heard that argument made, mostly on the grounds that the factions would have less fire power than the Assad has would and therefore be less destructive). 

And, I will grant, given that Assad has effectively won the war by now, that is one controlled experiment we will not have the opportunity to make.  But given how badly every intervention we have made in the Middle East has gone so far, can we please drop the assumption that all the ones we didn't make would have been great if only we had made them.

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*One might try complex, multi-player games.  I believe this can be made to work with economics, which follows actual economic laws.  But most other such scenarios are simply too complex and unpredictable for such games to be much use.