A Syrian man makes his way through the rubble of destroyed buildings in Aleppo on Dec. 17. (Youssef Karwashan/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)
The fall of Aleppo just weeks before Barack Obama leaves
office is a fitting stamp on his Middle East policy of retreat and withdrawal.
The pitiable pictures from the devastated city showed the true cost of Obama’s
abdication.
For which he seems to have few regrets, however. In his end-of-year
news conference, Obama defended U.S. inaction with his familiar false choice: It was either stand aside or
order a massive Iraq-style ground invasion.
This is a transparent fiction designed to stifle
debate. At the beginning of the civil war, the popular uprising was ascendant.
What kept a rough equilibrium was regime control of the skies. At that point,
the United States, at little risk and cost, could have declared Syria a no-fly
zone, much as it did Iraqi Kurdistan for a dozen years after
the Gulf War of 1991.
The U.S. could
easily have destroyed the regime’s planes and helicopters on the ground and so
cratered its airfields as to make them unusable. That would have altered the
strategic equation for the rest of the war.
And would have deterred the Russians from injecting
their own air force — they would have had to challenge ours for air
superiority. Facing no U.S. deterrent, Russia stepped in and decisively altered
the balance, pounding the rebels in Aleppo to oblivion. The Russians were
particularly adept at hitting hospitals and other civilian
targets, leaving the rebels with the choice between annihilation and surrender.
They
surrendered.
Obama has never appreciated that the role of a
superpower in a local conflict is not necessarily to intervene on the ground,
but to deter a rival global power from stepping in and altering the course of
the war. That’s what we did during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Moscow
threatened to send troops to support Egypt and President Nixon countered by
raising America’s nuclear alert status to Defcon 3. Russia stood down.
Less dramatically
but just as effectively, American threats of retaliation are what kept West
Germany, South Korea and Taiwan free and independent through half a century of
Cold War.
It’s called deterrence. Yet Obama never had the
credibility to deter anything or anyone. In the end, the world’s greatest power
was reduced to bitter speeches at the United Nations.
“Are you truly incapable of shame?” thundered U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power at
the butchers of Aleppo. As if we don’t know the answer. Indeed the shame is on
us for terminal naivete, sending our secretary of state chasing the Russians to
negotiate one humiliating pretend cease-fire after another.
Even now,
however, the Syria debate is not encouraging. The tone is anguished and
emotional, portrayed exclusively in moral terms. Much less appreciated is the
cold strategic cost.
Assad was never
a friend. But today he’s not even a free agent. He’s been effectively restored
to his throne, but as the puppet of Iran and Russia. Syria is now a platform, a
forward base, from which both these revisionist regimes can project power in
the region.
Iran will use Syria to advance its drive to dominate
the Arab Middle East. Russia will use its naval and air bases to bully the Sunni Arab
states, and to shut out American influence.
It’s already
happening. The foreign and defense ministers of Russia, Iran and Turkey
convened in Moscow this week to begin settling the fate of Syria. Notice who
wasn’t there. For the first time in four decades, the United States, the once
dominant power in the region, is an irrelevance.
With Aleppo gone
and the rebels scattered, we have a long road ahead to rebuild the influence
squandered over the past eight years. President-elect Donald Trump is talking
about creating safe zones. He should tread carefully.
It does no good to try to
do now what we should have done five years ago.
Conditions are much worse.
Russia and Iran rule. Maintaining the safety of safe zones will be expensive
and dangerous. It will require extensive ground deployments, and it risks
military confrontation with Russia.
And why? Guilty
conscience is not a good reason. Interventions that are purely humanitarian —
from Somalia to Libya — tend to end badly. We may proclaim a “responsibility to
protect,” but when no American interests are at stake, the engagement becomes
impossible to sustain. At the first losses, we go home.
In Aleppo, the damage is done, the city
destroyed, the inhabitants ethnically cleansed. For us, there is no post-facto
option. If we are to regain the honor lost in Aleppo, it will have to be on a
very different battlefield.
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