At long last, there may be some good news out of Syria. Russia, the United States, and some of the combatants in the Syrian Civil War have agreed to a partial cease-fire — one that does not apply to ISIS and the al-Nusra front. It will likely hold only so long as the various warring powers view it as advantageous, but in the meantime it’s worth taking stock of the Obama administration immense moral and strategic failure — a failure that has not only created a humanitarian crisis in the Middle East, it is causing deep cultural and political strains in Europe. Over at the The Atlantic Kathy Gilsinan interviews Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and while the entire interview is worth reading, the following excerpts are particularly important.
First, Tabler makes the vital point that continued Russian gains in Syria can actually harm the NATO alliance far more than did Russia’s intervention in the Ukraine. How? By ramping up the refugee crisis:
Tabler: [If Aleppo falls] It would be a tremendous loss for the U.S. and its traditional allies: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan. It’s already been extremely costly for most of those allies, but it would be a defeat [in the face of] the Russian-Iranian intervention in Syria. This would also be a huge loss for the United States vis-à-vis Russia in its Middle East policy, certainly. And because of the flow of refugees as a result of this, if they go northward to Europe, then you would see a migrant crisis in Europe that could lead to far-right governments coming to power which are much more friendly to Russia than they are to the United States. I think that is likely to happen.
Gilsinan: So it changes the entire orientation, not just of the Middle East, but of Europe as well.
Tabler: It will soften up American power in Europe, yeah. And put into jeopardy a lot of the advances in the NATO-accession countries, which are adjacent to Russia, as well.
Gilsinan: That’s a staggeringly significant outcome for relatively cheap [expenditures] on Russia’s part.
Tabler: It is, isn’t it? I don’t think most people get how much of a blowout this really is. I don’t think most people understand: This defeat of the United States by Russia in Syria, it’s not just about Syria. It’s about our presence in Europe.
Moreover, this outcome was avoidable from the beginning — and may still be avoidable — if we’d done the truly wise and humane thing and established safe havens in Syria early in the conflict:
Gilsinan: That’s an interesting dynamic to me, because you almost wouldn’t have seen it coming, or at least I wouldn’t have, from this direction. Russia wasn’t really able to change the entire orientation of Europe by intervening in Ukraine, say.
Tabler: Right, but this is the result of the American miscalculation that the Syria crisis could be contained. And so we’re seeing now the failure of policy which happened years ago. It’s not just about military intervention in Syria. It is about the failure to create safe areas in order to protect [people] so that they wouldn’t go running for their lives to Europe. And that’s the real tragedy here. And it’s simply because the White House did not believe that the cost was worth it.
There was nothing reasonable about the administration’s strategic gamble:
Gilsinan: Do you think that that calculation—that the Syria crisis could be contained—obviously it’s wrong in hindsight, but could this have been foreseen, or was it a reasonable gamble at the time that turns out to have failed?
Tabler: No, it wasn’t a reasonable gamble. All the trajectories for displacement of persons, as part of the overall humanitarian disaster generated by the civil war, these trends have been present for years. It’s not that the government didn’t pick them up—many in the U.S. government did. It’s that the decision was to do nothing that involved efforts to protect civilians. There was a decision to support the rebels covertly, there was a decision to try and get a train-and-equip program to fight ISIL, we know all about that, it didn’t go well. But there was no effort to protect civilians inside of Syria, other than to distribute aid in neighboring countries and to try and get that aid across the border.
Remember those words when administration officials and their allies hector Americans for the lack of “compassion” as they browbeat the public into accepting a tiny fraction of the refugees created by this humanitarian disaster. It’s compassionate — and strategically wise — to create safe havens for refugees. It’s foolish to adopt policies that lead to a mass-scale refugee/migration crises. And always remember, there is precedent for a bipartisan effort to protect vulnerable civilian populations. In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, President Bush established — and President Clinton maintained — no-fly zones that protected our Kurdish allies from extermination at the hands of a vengeful Saddam Hussein. This action gave the Kurds the breathing space they needed to create and establish one of the Middle East’s most vibrant communities.
While that much upside was never available in Syria, we could have prevented the disaster that’s presently unfolding. While one can hope that the current partial cease-fire helps ease the crisis, there’s no longer any room for optimism. I’ll believe peace when I see it.