Tom Nichols explains in a Federalist column why President Obama’s policies played a large role in the present Syrian disaster.
It didn’t have to be like this.
The Los Angeles Times reported … that Syrian opposition forces backed by the CIA and the Pentagon are now fighting each other. (Buzzfeed’s Mike Giglio actually wrote this story more than a month ago, with the simple but true headline: “America Is In A Proxy War With Itself In Syria.”) The Syrian conflagration has entered the phase where pretty much everyone shoots at everyone else: “Any faction that attacks us,” an officer from the one of the CIA-supported groups told the LA Times, “regardless from where it gets its support, we will fight it.”
Well, of course they will. Every group in Syria is now in a Hobbesian free-for-all. The death toll is now climbing toward the half-million mark. No one has any incentive to do anything but kill or be killed.
There will be no settlement. The recent “cease-fire” is the Russian variant of that term—used the same way by the Russians in Ukraine these days—meaning “a period of combat in which the Russians help the Americans pretend that no one is fighting.” The Russians, of course, claim they’ve left Syria, when they mean they’ve flexed enough muscle and killed enough of Bashar Assad’s enemies that they can now leave a smaller force in place. Assad remains in power, and likely will stay there.
It’s easy to read about this situation—best described by a compound noun that includes the word “cluster”—and reach the conclusion that the U.S. intelligence and military establishments have no idea what they’re doing. The problem, however, is not with American tactical and operational excellence: we have that in abundance. Rather, Syria represents a failure of U.S. strategy and a lack of presidential leadership.
