by Barry Rubin
Recently, an advocate of an attack on Syria remarked something along the following line to a much wiser expert:
“Some nerds try to tell a balanced truth, but that’s not effective in making policy.”
I was shocked, though not surprised.
That is the cynical “player” view. But even if the policy is right, the
cooking of intelligence is dangerous.
DEBATING WHETHER EVEN FIVE
PERCENT OF THE SYRIAN REBELS ARE MODERATE IS LIKE DEBATING WHETHER
GRAVITY EXISTS OR WHETHER THE WORLD IS FLAT. IT IS DEMONSTRABLY PROVABLE
NONSENSE.
The course of national security policy
never runs smoothly. Let’s remember that towards the end of the
Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian
forces on the Faw Peninsula in southern Iraq.
And the Iraqis used chemical weapons,
too, most notably on the Iraq Kurdish border village of Halabja. There
were no U.S. air strikes in response. That’s because the Americans were
in effect on the Iraqi (!) side trying to hold the threat of radical
Islamism regarded as the greater of the two evils, even against Saddam
Hussein.
Is this true again? No. Realpolitik is a
tough and nasty world. It is selective and unfair, but it should not be
stupid. The Syrians don’t act in favor of U.S. interests.
But equally helping the Muslim
Brotherhood and the Salafists win the war to supposedly save Western
civilization from al-Qaida (and actually setting up a tyrannical
repressive state that will provoke future wars) is stupid too.
Let’s not sentimentalize the Syrian rebels. The problem is not to help them, but, if anything, to set a red line.
And remember there were atrocities in
Syria in the years that the Obama Administration courted Bashar
al-Assad. Every person who is not lying knows that the Syrian rebels are
radical terrorist Islamists, as Jonathan Spyer explains.
Everybody. And you can bet that if the opposition wins, Christians,
Alawites, and perhaps Druze also will fear massacre. So did Christians
under the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
On the other hand, note Egypt. In the
1990s, the Egyptian army fought against a terrorist insurgency, not
against the Brotherhood but against the Salafists. The army even
arrested wanted terrorist’s parents to get them to turn themselves in.
That was nasty, but the United States
was pursuing its legitimate interests in that the Egyptian government
was favorable to those interests and to regional peace and stability.
Basically the test of foreign policy is
whether the “friend” wants to kill you and war against you. Remember,
that’s what Iraq did afterward, and there is every reason to believe the
Syrian rebels—like the Egyptian Brotherhood, too—would do so.
So bomb Syria, maybe. But don’t aid
al-Qaida and other anti-Americans with weapons. A one-time attack on
chemical weapons facilities will not win the rebels the civil war nor
should it try to do so. Assad knows that, which probably means he would
not respond to an American attack.
Can anyone in Washington make the
distinction between drawing a red line and installing a nightmare
regime, as bad as the present one, in Syria? Frankly I’m not sure.
Kerry says that there will be no boots
on the ground in Syria, which means 1) weapons to the rebels, some of
which will get to al-Qaida; and 2) training. Don’t be fooled. 3) And who
knows what comes next if/when Americans are attacked? This is the
backdoor to side with Sunni Islamists in the civil war.
And that’s it. If the administration is
going to train rebels–and that’s what it now hints–the administration
is not drawing a red line but trying to find a back door for arms to
rebels to put a Muslim Brotherhood government in power in Syria. It’s a
trick! Congress must vote NO on intervention in Syria! It is to fool
Congress. These fools think that the only way to keep al-Qaida out of
power is by putting the Brotherhood into power!
Read this devastating article by a retired general. It
is the most amazing refutation of a commander in chief that I have ever
seen. It is revolutionary in the persuasiveness of its argument.READ IT
Barry Rubin
Source: http://www.gloria-center.org/2013/09/how-to-tell-the-good-guys-in-syria/
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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