Syria

A week ago, the Syrian military used sarin gas to attack Syrians. It is already named among the premier atrocities in a seven-years-and-counting long civil war that has regularly shocked the world with its brutality. Four days ago, President Trump elected to respond by firing 50 tomahawk missiles at the Syrian base where the attack originated. That attack represented a very substantial escalation of American military involvement in Syria, which has not directly engaged with the Assad regime before now. Russia, Iran, and Syria have since released a strongly worded statement promising relatiation for any future strikes. It is unclear whether Trump intends any additional action.

The situation in Syria is impossibly complex. Assad, with Russian backing, ISIS, a competing extremist group called the al-Nusra Front, Kurdish militias, and a number of other disparate groups in rebellion against Assad all control territory in various parts of the country. Finding an appropraite balance of power between even the non-extremist groups in the event that Assad were to fall would be an exceptionally difficult task, as the experience of post-Qaddafi Libya has shown. But many Democrats have joined Republicans in praising the intervention, small and relatively inert thought it was. Why?

The central and by far the most convincing argument for intervention is a moral one. Assad is an autocrat whose people rose against him en masse and who has spent the last seven years using every piece of military technology he posesses to force them into subservience, killing hundreds of thousands in the process. His brutal civil war, aside from facilitating the rise of ISIS, has created an international refugee crisis. The United States, as the primary superpower and world leader with - in principle if not always in practice - a commitment to human rights, therefore ought to have every reason to rally the world in an intervention on behalf of a people being murdered in large numbers and in grotesque ways by their government.

The argument against intervention is far more practical, and in that sense I think it is decisive. There is simply not much good that the United States can accomplish militarily in Syria, except with respect to continuing strikes against ISIS. Nothing short of a ground invasion at this point would serve to dislodge Assad, and doing so would bring us directly into conflict with the Russian military. We can continue to support rebel military groups, but these are so disjointed that victory for them over Assad and his Russian backing is a pipe dream. There was a time, before the situation was so chaotic and before the Russian military was so deeply involved, when a less dramatic form of intervention might have served to oust him. That window of opportunity closed years ago.

In addition, effective intervention in a case like this requires the support and cooperation of regional powers. In the Libya campaign, for example, the Arab League and America's European allies pitched in to a very general effort. Even with that broad support base, the result remains uncertain as rival governments continue to attempt reconciliation with international help. While not as chaotic as it was portrayed during the election campaign, Libya is still in a state of civil war until appropriate compromises can be reached among the two main parties. There is hope, but no guarantee of that happening.

Syria is a much more complicated battleground than Libya is or was. There is nothing approaching regional consensus on the preferred outcome in the way there was for Libya. Egypt is still grappling with the consequences of its own revolution and subsequent coup. Turkey is warily eyeing its restive Kurdish minority and therefore will do nothing that strengthens Kurdish troops, even if those troops are fighting Assad. One of the worst kept secrets in the Middle East is that Saudi Arabia and Qatar have financially supported Sunni extremist groups in the region and in Syria as a counterweight to Iran. Israel is in no way upset that several of its historical enemies are now openly fighting each other. It is this bewildering array of competing interests that has paralyzed the capacity of regional powers to respond.

I think, though I might well come to regret holding or expressing this opinion in the future, that Assad's dominance in Syria is a fait accompli. Once ISIS is properly defeated there is no way to keep him from holding power in Syria short of a ground invasion, which would probably mean war with Russia. I am not against intervention in the abstract for a humanitatian cause and with a reasonable probability of success, but there is no such probability here. Unless we are willing to risk a general war to oust Assad, getting him out of Syria is a lost cause for the foreseeable future.

Our focus then, if our concerns are humanitarian, ought to be seeing to the well being of the Syrian people, and in particular its refugees. President Trump's citation of the pitiful child victims of the recent gas attack to justify his response, in the context of his refugee bans and wolf-in-sheep's-clothing campaign rhetoric denigrating those fleeing the war, is an act of staggering hypocrisy and callousness. The missile attack is at bottom nothing more than geopolitical posturing. What's more, it is posturing that is recognized by everyone for what it is, and has actually accomplished nothing of value to anyone.