Recently there has been a fuss about a
document entitled Critical Junctures in
United States Policy toward Syria: An
Assessment of the Counterfactuals.
It says it is part of a 'research project':
The project seeks
to conduct a systematic review of critical policy junctures in the Syrian
conflict, identify alternative policies that the US government plausibly could
have adopted at these junctures, and assess the likely effects of these
counterfactual actions on the conflict and associated atrocities against
civilians.
It was removed from the web site of the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
It essentially concluded that nothing could be done about Syria, so that
Obama's policy decisions, while perhaps not optimal, would have made little
difference.
Some have decided that this is a terrible
blow to the serious study of Syria. For
example New York Magazine did a
probing piece
on the takedown, and on Twitter, Zack Beauchamp of VOX comments on a Tablet article
about the incident as follows:
Not a single quote in this piece contains a
substantive critique of the Holocaust Museum's study
This seems like right-wing political
correctness: The study was pulled due to political pressure, not scholarly
missteps
The study is based on interviews with
respected Syria analysts or former US government officials. It purports to deliver mature thinking on the
situation, leading to, and I quote, "a deeper understanding". It seems that the contributors are serious
intellectuals who raise important issues that needed to be debated. Well OK, I downloaded the piece before it
was taken offline. I'll quote some of
what it says, and then deliver some of that substantive criticism it's thought
to deserve.
I'm not doing this just to carp. I'm doing it because the West's self-righteous but timid response to one of the greatest atrocities of our times has been, all along,
diligently abetted and excused by these analysts. Their fateful opinions call for scrutiny.
The study is built around "Five
critical junctures and associated counterfactuals". They are, in full:
1. Obama's August 2011 statement: Most
interviewed for this paper identified Obama’s August 2011 statement that “the
time has come for President Assad to step aside” as the most consequential
juncture, the so-to-speak original sin. A more nuanced statement developed via
a thorough interagency process and accompanied by a well-conceived strategy
might have led to fewer atrocities.
2. Clinton/Petraeus arming plan: The
summer 2012 decision not to adopt the Clinton/Petraeus plan to vet and arm
“moderate” rebels is among the most contentious and yet least significant of
the critical junctures with respect to the issue of minimizing civilian deaths.
Implementing the plan might have proven counterproductive by extending the
duration of the conflict.
3. Chemical weapons "red line":
Obama’s September 2013 decision not to undertake standoff strikes to enforce
his “red line” against the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons stands as his
most controversial policy decision on Syria, and arguably of his entire
presidency. Conducting limited stand-off strikes followed immediately by
intensive diplomacy might have led to a reduction in the level of killing.
4. Prioritizing ISIL over the Assad regime:
In the late summer 2014, following ISIL’s “blitzkrieg” across Iraq and parts of
Syria, the Obama administration made a formal strategic shift prioritizing Iraq
and the fight against ISIL over counter-regime objectives in Syria.
Implementing a more muscular anti-regime policy as part of a broader counter-ISIL
strategy in Syria in 2014 is unlikely to have led to a lower level of
atrocities against civilians.
5. No-fly zone over all or part of Syria:
The option to enforce a no-fly zone over all or part of Syria has been raised
at various times throughout the conflict, specifically in 2012, 2013, and 2015.
More creative options for enforcing a partial no-fly zone—perhaps over northern
Syria using standoff weapons or employing different tools—should have been given
greater consideration.
According to the document, once you
consider the 'counterfactuals' associated with these 'junctures', you have to
conclude the following:
No silver bullet: No
single shift in policy options would have definitively led to a better outcome
in terms of the level of atrocities in Syria.
The tone here evokes analytical rigor, but
the content, not so much.
May I suppose that when you shift policy,
you move from one option to
another? 'No single shift' is quite a
claim: it implies that you might move to any possible option. So when you say 'no single shift' would have
definitely led to a better effect, you imply that no possible option would have
done so. So apparently whoever came up
with this 'study' thought that all possible options had been considered and
found wanting.
Thought, or pretended to think. Did they really suppose they had considered
all possible options? It's clear that
there is one option they were dying to dismiss:
removing Assad, which they occasionally mention under the now-pejorative
label of 'regime change'. Yet this is
the only option that seems a serious candidate for a silver bullet: it's hardly surprising that the others are
found wanting, given they are carefully specified to have only limited
objectives. 'Regime change' isn't even
directly discussed, but introduced in the discussion of the first
'juncture'. And though the analysts seem
to think 'regime change' is a single option, there are many possible ways to
effect régime change: if you were out to
change a régime, you would of course consider a number of alternative
strategies. It is quite clear that the
analysts were not inclined to do anything of the sort.
The possibility of régime change comes up
only in the 'counterfactual' associated with 'juncture 1', Obama's statement
that Assad should step aside. Here is
what the document says:
Counterfactual
1: Make the statement, but back it up with a
well-conceived and well-resourced strategy. Advocates of this counterfactual
called for the development of a robust regime change strategy using a mixture of
military and non-military measures. The assumption
undergirding this counterfactual focuses on minimizing the killing by removing Assad
as the key perpetrator behind Syria’s killing and atrocities, stressing the
importance of aggressively pursuing regime change. Some
assumed that in making the statement the President would commit to action. As one former
senior State Department official noted, “Not necessarily invasion and occupation, but other
means.”[34] Proponents of this policy option favored an earlier and more intense
use of indirect military intervention, primarily by arming the rebels, or
direct action short of outright invasion.
It is hard to imagine the viability of
this counterfactual given Obama’s antipathy toward regime change and his election vow to withdraw
America from Middle East conflicts, not engage in a new one. Moreover, given the challenge and
complexity of regime change in Syria, it is difficult to
envision how this approach, to be successful, would not have required fairly
massive military intervention,
resulting in potentially far higher civilian deaths.
What does this tell us about the quality,
intentions and scope of the analyses?
One of the reasons given for dismissing
this option is that Obama didn't like it.
But the claim was not that there was no silver bullet given Obama's
tastes. It was that no shift, whether or
not Obama liked it, would have done any good.
So this objection is besides the point.
So what's left is: massive military intervention would be
counterproductive. Elsewhere in the
document support for this claim goes a little beyond this pronouncement that
success can't be imagined. We hear that:
Given the
fractiousness of the armed opposition at that point, regime change in Syria by
2014–2015 could have led to an even greater level of violence and killing as
rival factions would compete for power. Moreover, the increased radicalization
of armed groups by that time might have led to the “catastrophic success”
scenario marked by the empowering of extremists who might have committed
further atrocities.
The unintended
consequences of this policy decision might have been significant, particularly with
respect to the level of killing and the duration of the conflict. This type of
intervention runs a much greater risk of escalation and a slide down the
“slippery slope” of deepening US military involvement and intensification of
conflict. This in turn might have led to greater killing.
Intensifying
military efforts against the regime likely would have been met with counter-escalation
by the regime and its allies, as well as broader destabilization across the
region.
Does this amount to serious consideration
of the options? We are told that certain
bad things might have happened. This
introduces possibilities without assessing their actual probability. Yet that's part of exploring the truth of a
'counterfactual'. Are these just fears,
or real likelihoods?
Throughout the debate on Syria, the warning
about bad outcomes have been amplified using two dubious techniques. The first is equivocation about the nature
of military intervention. The second is
the trick of dangling intervention when it seems to pose dangers, and yanking
it away when it might counter the dangers.
Consider first what 'military intervention'
means. The document makes it sound like
America would be deeply involved, and in a way that is true. But that's not the same thing as 'deepening
US military involvement', which I take it means the involvement of the US
military. The one does not imply the
other either in logic or in the realities of the situation. The US could be deeply involved, in a
'military intervention' if you like, without any US forces being deployed to
Syria at all, and without even some US-run train-and-equip program in Turkey
and Jordan.
With the exception of Lebanon, which Israel
is deeply committed to keep hobbled, Syria has nothing but enemies in the
region, notably the Gulf States and Turkey.
(Jordan is at least no friend of Syria, but in any case will do exactly
whatever the US wants it to do.) In the
background lurks another enemy, Israel, with nuclear weapons. To effect régime change, the US did not have
to send its armed forces into Syria.
For the most part, what it had to do was simply drop all its opposition
to regional efforts to remove Assad. His enemies were prepared to support the rebels with massive military
aid; with US encouragement they would have been even more prepared to do
so. At most, the US might have had to
increase the air-to-air capacities in its numerous large bases in the
region. It's not even clear that that
would have been necessary. Israel, with
far fewer resources at its disposal, has used stand-off weapons to make a mockery of
the Syrian air force without even entering Syrian airspace. So it is, to use the document's phrase,
'difficult to imagine' how the US and regional powers could fail to reduce the
régime's air power to negligible levels, again without even entering Syrian
airspace. And in these circumstances,
it is also difficult to imagine anything but rebel victory.
Here analysts jump in and speak of 'dangers'. Some of these are real, some are not. The idea that Assad could 'counter-escalate',
as suggested elsewhere in the document, is ludicrous. How?
With what? So it cannot be Assad
who is going to 'intensify' the conflict.
It can only be his allies, Russia and Iran/Hezbollah.
But suppose otherwise; suppose Russia was
sufficiently committed to its place in Syria to take enormous risks and expend
enormous resources. Since we're doing
counterfactuals, it seems quite likely that Russia could be induced to abandon
Assad instead. What Russia really wants
in the region is its one naval base outside the borders of the former Soviet Union: Tartous.
The anti-Assad coalition, including of course the US, could offer to
guarantee Russia perpetual access to the base, and the right to expand it as it
sees fit. And of course the US has much
more to offer. It could back the
lifting of sanctions on Russia, it could even accept the annexation of Crimea. It is 'difficult to imagine' that in the face
of such inducements, Russia would prefer a hot war in Syria.
Given Russia's retirement from the stage,
the case of Iran is simpler. With no air
cover, Iran would not be in a position to do anything. It could make trouble elsewhere, but contrary
to popular belief, Iran is not an agressive power: in modern times it hasn't made war on anyone,
ever. Moreover Iran has a potentially
more useful base for its ambitions than Lebanon: the US, unwilling to deploy
the large ground forces it would need to run the place, has turned over
virtually all of southern Iraq to Iran.
But the US doesn't care that much if Iraq goes even further to hell, so
it could move against Iranian proxies there and in Syria if it felt so
inclined. So it is unlikely that Iran
would have the means or inclination to create any massive destabilization of
the situation, much less keep Assad in power.
No doubt these suggestions would be met
with loud huffing and puffing from the analysts. But either you consider all options, or you
don't get to say nothing would have helped.
Please note, that is the issue:
not whether the option would be wise or moral or in some other sense
'acceptable', not whether it would have led to a better world, not whether it
would serve US or European interests, but whether it would have 'led to a
better outcome in terms of level of atrocities in Syria'. And clearly the 'scholarly' enterprise fails
here. It doesn't consider all the
options, and nothing it does consider permits the conclusion that 'regime
change' wouldn't have helped.
So the first danger, escalation, is far
from established. The second danger is a
more realistic prospect. It is that the
'fractured' rebels will nurture or drift towards 'extremists'. Then, it seems, infighting and revenge
killing will produce "further atrocities'.
That's not just likely; it's almost
certain. Very few wars end without
'further atrocities'. But it would be
bizarre to suppose that the anti-Assad coalition couldn't keep these to a level
orders of magnitude below what Assad has wrought.
For one thing, the coalition would continue
to enjoy absolute air superiority: the
sort of MANPADS the rebels possessed would not be any threat to the coalition's
aircraft. So no indiscriminate air
attacks, no barrel bombs. This alone
makes it much less likely that the rebels could inflict civilian casualties at
anything like the régime's scale. Air
power and cutting off supplies could do only so much to contain the rebels,
however; they would have plenty of weapons.
Possibly fuel supplies would limit their range. But analysts manifest obtuseness or
dishonesty when they suppose that, if the rebels wanted to commit massacres,
well... one just has to throw up one's
hands.
This is plain nonsense. Given a coalition-backed victory, for the
first time there would be forces committed to preventing atrocities (though it
must be admitted, the Russians seem to do this a bit). These would both be forces fully aligned with
regional powers and under their supervision, and, if necessary, coalition
troops. Some of them might even be
Western troops. But the notion that
this would inevitably lead to some quagmire or spiral of intensification is
utterly implausible. Evacuations and
safe zones do not fit into such that sort of disaster scenario. This is peace-keeping, not
nation-building. There are many examples
of peace-keeping in war zones that haven't had the slightest tendency to
escalate.
In short here is a 'policy shift', an
option, that the analysts never considered, and had to consider if the
conclusion that no shift would help is to stand. Why didn't they? Since we are in the realm of speculation, I
would like to suggest why.
These analysts do not shape their thinking
out of concern for the level of atrocities.
They are not concerned about Syrians, except in the sense that they are
concerned about Arabs running wild. Even
then, they are not concerned about what will happen in Syria. The analysts are concerned, and the record
shows this, about terrorism against the West.
They are concerned, despite many contrary considerations they ignore,
about placing MANPADS in 'extremist' hands, and they are concerned that
extremists would establish a base from which they would attack Western targets.
There are two problems with this. First, if that is the analysts’ dominant
concern, they should say so. The
document pretends, and specifies, that the only consideration for evaluating
strategies is minimization of atrocities.
If so, that some alternative raises the prospects of terror attacks on
the West has no weight at all. So the
document is undermined by dishonesty. In
the second place, if terror attacks are their concern, they should at least
consider the consequences of persisting in the strategy that has led to
terrorism against the West in the first place:
the toleration or, more often, strong support for every murdering,
torturing, secularist tyrant that has ever oppressed the peoples of the Middle
East. To pretend mature prudence without
even exploring the ramifications of these allegedly prudent conclusions simply
manifests the obliviously cruel attitudes that are a large part of the problem
in the first place.
In other words, the suppressed document
offers nothing but excuses for inaction we have heard many times before, enhanced
with the effrontery of scholarly airs and pretentious sophistry. Perhaps, as an example of what is wrong with
Western thinking about the Middle East, it was not such a good idea to take the
document offline after all.
It remains only to offer suggestions as to what the document reveals about the mentality of the analysts.
It is telling that the document's measure
of helpfulness is whether or not atrocities are reduced. This is to lower a veil of ignorance on the
Syrian conflict from the word go. When
three people were killed in the Boston Marathon bombing, that was an
atrocity. When 10 or twenty or thirty
or a hundred people have died in terrorist attacks in Europe, those were all
atrocities. 9-11, which killed fewer
that 3000, that was a massive, unforgettable atrocity. The West spares no efforts in its attempts to
reduce these horrors. What then are the
crimes of Assad, which involve the killing of perhaps 200,000 innocent
people? What are fates of those he
tortures to death in the tens of thousands - inserting rats in vaginas,
castrating children, letting someone lie tied up in a hallway until dead of
starvation?(*) What are the massacres he
sponsored, including slitting babies' throats? To speak vaguely of 'atrocities' misses a distinction that the
participants in this enterprise - given its sponsoring institution - ought to
have grasped. Assad is the sponsor, not
of mere atrocities, but of a full-scale holocaust. And to turn away from this realization is
just what makes the analysts think it absurd, adolescent, extreme to do
whatever it takes to destroy Assad and his régime, even bargains with Russia
and Iran, even placing a few more weapons in the hands of radical Islamists.
Imagine if Assad was doing what he did to
white Europeans, or Jews, or Afro-Americans.
Would it then not seem a matter of the greatest urgency? But for these 'scholars', that would be
yielding to adolescent hysteria. These
were only Arabs. The matter - and the
whole document could not make this plainer - was not urgent at all. This carnage isn't worth risky scenarios,
that is, scenarios that offer even a slight, unproven, unquantified level of
risk, even if letting the carnage continue might carry with it still greater
risks. Such is the perspective of analysts
who invest themselves with the moral radiance of the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum.
(*) For references, see the appendix to this.
