Trump, Syria, and the Blob

Back to accounts of Trump's staff thwarting him.  Among the plans they allegedly thwarted  were trade war with China (now underway), withdrawal from NAFTA, withdrawal from a free trade agreement with South Korea, withdrawal of our troops from South Korea, a preemptive military strike on North Korea, invading Venezuela, cutting off all aid to Pakistan, and a large scale intervention in Syria.

All but one of these are more or less unanimously seen as really bad ideas.  The exception is Syria.  The book reports that when Bashar Assad launched a chemical attack in Syria, President Trump said, “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them.”  Secretary of Defense James Matthis agreed and then promptly did not even make contingency plans for such a possibility, but proceeded with a pinprick strike on the one runway that launched the attack.  The Blob applauded, saluted Trump for restoring the US credibility that Obama had squandered in not launching such an attack at the time of the first chemical attack, and pointed out that, since the attack did not lead to escalation, there was no reason for Obama not to have done so earlier.  Apparently unnoticed was that the pinprick strike had no effect whatever on the war, except to temporarily deter further use of chemical weapons.  When Assad used them again, the Trump Administration launched pinprick strikes on three sites, as strategically meaningless as the first attack, but just as pleasing to the Blob.

Before getting into the details of any proposed large-scale intervention, can we dispense once and for all with the most common justification given for such an intervention.  The argument is that since Obama made a threat to intervene, the threat must be followed through or US credibility is lost forever.  Implied here as that this was the first time in the entire history of the US that a President ever made a threat and failed to follow through.  But, in fact, Obama's threat was not as clear as many have read into it.  His actual words were:

We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. . . . That would change my equation. . . . We’re monitoring that situation very carefully. We have put together a range of contingency plans.

That is a threat, of sorts, but one that leaves a lot of wiggle room for anyone who wants wiggle room.  The Blob obviously did not.  This thread, for instance, gives other threats made and not kept, many of the involving North Korea.  And, most famously of all, Donald Trump made his "fire and fury" threat, not not one member of the Blob seems to believe that had no choice but to actually start a war with North Korea, or we would lose all credibility.  In short, the Blob is so insistent that Obama should have intervened in Syria because it favored such intervention on the merits, not because it was convinced that all threats must be carried out.

So what are the merits here?  What it comes to, as far as I can tell, is a conviction that if only we had intervened earlier or more forcefully, we could have toppled Assad.  What would have happened next never gets addressed.  This article is a fine example:

Instead of implementing what had sounded like the commander-in-chief’s directive [to overthrow Assad], 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.

In other words, the author thinks we should have toppled Assad now and worried about what would follow later.  We tried that in Iraq and Libya.  It didn't go so well.  The usual response is that this time we didn't intervene and it went even worse.  Often also present is the insistence that the moderate opposition (as opposed to ISIS and other Islamist fanatics) would have prevailed if we had intervened sooner, and that the worst atrocities happened only after the Russians intervened, and that we could have prevented them by toppling Assad sooner.  Consider this article, which takes for granted that we could have safely intervened to topple Assad in 2011 (when the revolt first broke out), in 2013 (the whole chemical weapons "red line") or even as late as summer of 2015, when Assad's army was shattered, but that delay led to Russian intervention just a few weeks later. 

An alternate interpretation is obvious -- the Russians intervened to prevent the overthrow of their ally, Assad.  There was not some magical intervention date in 2015 that could have been avoided by toppling Assad earlier.  Rather, the Russians, after seeing their ally Qaddafi toppled, had no intention of allowing it to happen again.  They intervened when they saw Assad was in real danger of falling.  If Assad had been in danger of falling earlier, the Russians would simply have intervened earlier. 

But suppose we had intervened more aggressively, to the extent that the Russians would have risked a direct military confrontation with us if they had intervened.  Perhaps then we would have toppled Assad.  But then what?  No one in the Blob appears to have thought that far.  In all probability, the rival factions would have been at each other's throats and an imploding failed state with endless civil war would have ensued.  Certainly there were plenty of extremely nasty Islamist factions out there, including ISIS.  Well, what of the "moderate" opposition we backed in 2011?  The so-called "moderates" proved remarkably difficult to find and arm even at the beginning, and nice guys go down fast during civil wars. 

Well, some people have said, even that would be better than what we have now.  Libya is a mess, but the death toll has been a lot lower than in Syria.  But Libya at least is fairly peripheral to the Mideast's great power struggles.  Libya can burn to the ground for all US and Russia, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia care.  Syria, on the other hand borders with Turkey and is only one country away from Iran and Saudi Arabia.  If Assad had fallen, all parties would be arming one faction or another, escalating the civil war.  Anyone who does not think Russia would have found someone to back, if only to stir up trouble, is being uncommonly naive.

Well, what of diplomacy backed by force?  There are some (including, as I understand it, John Kerry) who believe we might have successfully negotiated an end to the civil war if we had been willing to back our diplomacy with force.  I would be all in favor of that.  However, so long as we made Assad's removal a non-negotiable condition and Assad, with his Russian and Iranian backers, made Assad staying in power a non-negotiable condition, the chances of a negotiated solution seem fairly close to none.

And now Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers are gearing up for the final battle and a potentially massive humanitarian catastrophe.  And some are calling for a last US stand.


The Blob is not truly as uniform as sometimes implied.  The first time the Assad regime used chemical weapons during the Trump Administration, Mathis prevented a large-scale intervention.  Some members of the Blob disagreed.  Some are still calling for a last-ditch attempt.  But I agree with this critic of both Obama and Trump:

The “red line” retreat was a humiliating moment for U.S. power but I’ve never understood how an alternate course wouldn’t have ended in retreat anyway. If O had hit Assad, Assad almost certainly would have defied him afterward by using chemical weapons again. That’s what he did to Trump, after all, after the first U.S. strike on him in April 2017. What would Obama have done then? Another token bombing run, a la Trump? A small contingent of troops? The insuperable obstacle for every president on Syria is that Americans don’t understand what national interest is at stake and have had their fill of Middle East adventures over the past 20 years. There’s always support at the beginning of hostilities for punching a bully in the eye, but if the bully’s going to ignore you and keep doing what he does, you’re forced to either keep punching or to acquiesce and walk away. Trump was willing to throw a couple of jabs, Obama was willing to throw none, but neither one was going to commit to a sustained fight for purely humanitarian reasons. And so the question: If Obama had hit Assad in 2013 and then ended up retreating after Assad shook it off and kept gassing people, wouldn’t we have paid a price in lost credibility anyway? What price in terms of American lives lost might we have paid if Obama had committed to a McCain/Graham-style strategy of perpetual escalation to preserve American prestige?

I, for one, and glad that James Matthis avoided a large-scale intervention in Syria, and I suspect most Americans would agree with me.  But some members of the Blob may not.