I have limited
time today to write so this incomplete note; A month prior to the Islamist
assault on the U.S. Embassy and C.I.A. station at Benghazi Libya Senators
Graham and McCain extolled military intervention in Libya as a reason to
militarily intervene in Syria. Evidently they did not comprehend the situation
of sandals on the ground in either Libya or Syria. Before military can work to
bring about a non-violent peaceful transition to democracy within a global
Facebook webpage empire the U.S. need airdrop in crack Democrat Party liberal
elites to supervise and coach the inexperienced neophyte godless atheist young
professionals who must locally lead their underverse Muslim brothers and
sisters to full liberal accountability as good citizens.
American
leadership apparently were clueless about Syria before supporting military
escalation of that conflict that led to the deaths of a quarter of a million
people or so. They didn’t like Assad because he is authoritarian-yet there were
reaso0ns for that such as that any middle eastern Arab government must be
authoritarian if it is to exist-even an ostensibly democratic one for some time
if it is to survive and put down attacks form dissident elements within and
extraneous violent military interventions from without.
Americans
perhaps didn’t realize that when Syrian boundaries were invented by the British
in the aftermath of the First World War Sunni and Shi’a Muslims were thrown
into the same bag as it were. Historically Middle Eastern sects and tribes of
patristic societies were not all that comfortable with one another unless
forced to live bucolically under authoritarian rule such as that of the Ottoman
Empire or Saddam Hussein and his Baathism. The minority Alawite population
needed to have an authoritarian power to let itself exist along with an
antagonistic Sunni majority. For the U.S. to support democracy in Syria was
fundamentally to support religious democide and purging of a religious
minority. U.S. leadership should instead support a reconciliation of the
British-set Syrian boundaries such that each party gets a fair viable portion of
Syria. I believe that Jordan should rule the Sunni portion for a century.
Many war-mongering
leftist corporatists of the Obama administration and media seeking war and
removal of the Assad government did not realize that besides securing a Syrian
peace-that now would require an authoritarian Alawite government for the
Alawite-Shi’a-Christian part of a divided Syria simply to reduce the number of
Sunni truck bombers for a century since the area is saturated with liberated
c-3 and c-4 from Iraqi and Libyan arsenals-the U.S. should support just those
nations it has a real responsibility for such as Israel, Iraq, Syria and
possibly Kurds in a state of their own, with military support. The Sunni nations
otherwise must find their own natural balance and battle it out for-themselves.
America can only practice constructive engagement and be a good example if
possible.
American
foreign policy following the end of the cold war hasn’t always been enlightened.
When President Clinton for example used a political rohipnol to get Boris
Yeltsin to relinquish its soft southern parts as Vladimir Lenin had done before
at Brest-Litovsk to Germany, the opportunity for long-range positive progress
with Russia in economic and security issues was forfeited. Apparently the urge
of Butch Street to snatch and grab land while they could was irresistible. They
may look enviously at the remainder of Russia’s natural resource wealth and
choose to engage negatively in the long range using military power and
sanctions to make unreasonable demands upon Russia such as being happy to give
it all up in the south and not share Ukraine even to the Dnepr. Russia also has
Syrian allies and that was a point against them too when the United States
sought to follow a Pollyannaish policy of Arab transition to democracy
non-violently.
It may be that
some U.S. leaders resented Bashir Assad’s support for insurgents in Iraq. Yet
most of the Middle East hated American military intervention there and regarded
America as overly supportive of Shi’a in Iraq. For many Sunni conservatives the
Shi’a should not exist at all and should rather become Sunni. Assad was however
an Alawite leader in a majority Arabian Sunni state. He needed to walk both
sides of the line in a tightrope act to keep Iranian friends and Sunni too
happy enough. He erred in supporting the insurgency of course.
Iran may have
been pleased with the harm to U.S. interests of the insurgency in Iraq yet
simultaneously concerned with suppressing it enough to cooperate with the U.S.A.
U.S. leadership may have help precipitate the Iraqi invasion of Syria that left
more than a million dead and a little payback might have been regarded as being
in order. The U.S. may have felt that Iran got its just deserts for taking the
U.S. embassy hostage during the Iranian revolution. And Iranians hated the
U.S.A. a little for the Eisenhower administration’s support of the restoration
of the Pahlavi dynasty to the Peacock throne early subverting the Iranian
democracy in the process.
Plainly where
the U.S. intervenes militarily beyond its own areas of existing special
interest it just throws accelerant into the fire of Arabian confusion, chaos,
populism morphing to Islamism etc. It ISIS were to become an established government
anywhere the Reagan doctrine might contain it and more easily destroy its
leadership if it comprised a threat to the U.S.A. or other N.A.T.O. countries.
Human behavior and degrees of Muslim fundamentalism are variables and constants
too. N.A.T.O. should defend Europe against Muslim infiltration, yet also
constructively engage the Middle East to restore the 95% of Syrian refugees that
live in the Middle East to get out of the camps and return to Syria.
Conflated theories about causes of conflict in the Arab spring
wars and the worth of military intervention should not be allowed to bring the
U.S.A. to throw more munitions and temporal targets that vanish and reform like
some kind of amoeba composite. The desire for populist revolt against authoritarian
regimes finds resonance with not only emergent godless atheist yuppies but with
Islamist radicals that can politically organize best in the sanctity of
mosques. The Arab Sunni states will need to balance themselves with evolving
forms of states. When the U.S. intervenes it just resets the entire cycle of authoritarian,
aborted democratic movement/fundamentalist revolt and so forth. In practice
democracy exists in Arab states when a military that is westernized supports
it. The military intervenes domestically whenever Muslims become too powerful
and want to move toward theocracy. The formation of democratic political
institutions is challenging and requires long-term tech support to just grow
out of isolated economic and social submission to repress government, royalty
or global oligarchs.