Why We Should Not Attack Syria

A Limited Set of Strikes?

President Obama has asked Congress to approve a limited set of strikes in Syria. The strikes, he says, are intended to punish the Syrian government for gassing its own people but not to affect the outcome of the Syrian civil war.  We should do this, he says, because we must send a message to the world that the use of poison gas is unacceptable to us and that we will attack anyone who uses it.  If we allow the Syrian government to get away with using poison gas, we will embolden others who might want to use it and thus make the world into a more dangerous place than it already is. In other words, this will be a purely humanitarian series of bombing raids or missile attacks.

When we put it bluntly that way, we can see immediately how absurd it is. First of all, there is every chance that our bombing raids will kill lots of people (collateral damage) even if our targeting is excellent, and we know that our targeting, while it may be good, will not be excellent. Mistakes will be made. Intelligence will be faulty, as it always is. So, we will probably end up killing nearly as many people as Assad’s gas attacks did.
Second, the idea that we will make a single series of strikes and then walk away is not believable. We have been through this before. After the strikes, we will discover that Assad continues to be a bad guy who does bad things to his people, and as the civil war grinds on, the people will continue to suffer. How, we will ask ourselves, can we allow that, and how can we allow the effort of the first strikes to be wasted?  With just a little more effort, we will tell ourselves, we will be able to attain our goal, whatever it is.

So, we will conduct more raids, or we will put in teams of Delta Forces or Navy Seals to “advise” whichever groups of insurgents we decide to support. Those teams will be insufficient for us to attain any worthwhile goal, but along the way, some Americans will be killed. So, we will expand our effort because, after all, we have to support our troops in the field.  Then, more Americans will be killed, and we will increase our effort again. And so it will go. You know I’m right. You’ve seen this movie before.

What is Our Goal?

Then, there is the question of what our goal is. The idea that we only want to act as a referee to insure that the Syrian civil war is fought according to the Marquis of Queensberry rules is nonsense. We have interests in the Middle East. We care about the oil, and we care about the shipping lanes that run through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. We have allies in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Israel, and we have enemies there like Iran. So, it is disingenuous for us to act as if we only wanted to be an honest referee. We do care how the civil war ends.

Unfortunately, we have no idea how to advance our interests in Syria.  We cannot stomach Bashar Assad, but his opponents in this war include radical Islamist groups, and replacing Assad with a radical Islamist government would not help us much. Moreover, such a government would be opposed by Israel, by Saudi Arabia and by Egypt. (Remember? The Egyptian army has just deposed an Islamist government, and we have tacitly supported the army’s action by refusing to label it as a “coup.”)  If we were living in 1918, we could just walk in and take over Syria. It would become a “protectorate.”  But we live in 2013, and that is not an option.

So, we don’t know what our goal is in Syria, and committing military force in the absence of a clearly defined goal is stupid and criminal.  The first requirement for a successful military campaign is that it must have a clearly defined objective than can be attained by military action. If you haven’t defined what “winning” means, or if you have defined an unattainable objective, you can never win. You can only inflict damage on your enemy.  That was the core problem in Vietnam. We never defined a goal there that was attainable. Our military forces in Vietnam performed splendidly, and our troops made enormous sacrifices, but in the end they were all for nothing. Thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died in the war, and when we left Vietnam in 1975, we got the same deal that we could have obtained for free in 1945, in 1954 or in 1965.

We would like to say that our goal in Syria is to establish a peace-loving, democratically-elected government that is friendly to us, but such a goal is not attainable by military means. We tried it in Iraq, and what is the outcome? Today, Iraq has a Shiite government that is friendly to Iran and that supports Bashar Assad.  Today, people in Iraq are being killed every day by Sunni insurgents. 

We have been fighting in Afghanistan for more than a decade, and what is the outcome?  The Afghan government is famously corrupt, and the Taliban continues to be important in the Afghan countryside. Maybe, the Taliban will be defeated, but that will not make the government honest or democratic.

Stay Out of Syria

So, we should stay out of Syria because we don’t know what we could do there to advance our interests. That is hard to accept, but it is true. If we attack Syria, we will be drawn into a war that will cost many American lives and far more Syrian lives, and we should not do that without an objective that we really believe we can attain.