Sign O' The Times -
Sign O' The Times - Our success in Iraq is starting to get a lot of peoples' attention.
Not least of which is the Star/Tribune Editorial Board. Since Baghdad fell last week, they've had a sudden attack of common sense.
What's happening now between the United States and Syria is predictable and wise -- provided the proper skill is applied from Washington. The Bush administration is attempting to use what happened in Iraq as a lever to force a change in the behavior of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad and his regime.
It's funny that this surprises the Strib editorial board. Some of us benighted conservatives have been predicting this all along (and if my permalinks were working, right about here I'd link back to a few of my old posts on exactly this subject from last summer).
I think that in the days after 9/11, the Administration prioritized the states in the Middle East, and came up with a list looking a little like this:
- Afghanistan: That's where Al Quaeda was hiding out. Take them out, find out a lot about their MO.
- Iraq: Sits amid terror sponsors Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, all of whom need attention. But Hussein had WMDs - an immediate threat. And Iraq's position is too strategic to pass up; controlling Iraq lets us
- squeeze Iran - they're between two US-friendly states now, which is paying dividends for Iraqi moderates, as we saw yesterday
- lean on Syria, which is now stuck between a US-controlled Iraq, a US-allied Israel, a US-friendly Turkey, a Lebanon that has been an endless money pit for three decades now, and the Meditarranean, which is a US/UK lake these days, and
- let us pressure the Saudis to stanch their support for militant Wahabism without the politically unpalatable notion of sending tanks to Mecca.
They continue:
It wants Damascus to hand over Iraqi officials who apparently have found safe haven there. It wants the Syrians to stop supporting terrorism against Israel. It wants Syria to abandon the chemical programs that the CIA says it has. It wants Syria to play a more respectable and responsible role in the region.
The logic of applying that pressure is strong. Imagine how the stunning victory in Iraq looks from Damascus: In three weeks, a relatively small allied force totally defeated the Iraqi military and occupied the country. It did that despite qualms at home and almost universal condemnation abroad, despite being denied access to open a needed northern front through Turkey, despite horrific weather. In the process it lost very few of its own soldiers and kept the civilian death toll low. The victory means that Washington's voice will be listened to in Damascus -- especially with 300,000 U.S. troops just next door.
Nice to know the Star-Tribune can catch onto the blazingly obvious.
No, that was catty. A good chunk of the Strib's audience is used to getting their foreign policy information from the likes of Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore. A lot of this - realpolitik, for those of us who paid attention to history made before 1967 - is new to many Strib readers, and the editorial board is doing them a service, although it can't be going down easy.
This is America's neoconservative foreign policy on full display. It is more muscular and less inclined to work through a community of nations.
45 nations supported us. We spent at least eight months getting them on our side.
What's "less inclined?" The Administration spent more time working on getting multilateral cooperation this time than the Bush 41 administration did in 1991. George Senior didn't have to deal with Franco-German perfidy
It has a grand vision for the world that involves the United States aggressively taking on threats from rogue or failing states. It gives much of the world the willies, and that's partly its point.
There's a great deal to debate about that approach, but Americans should be careful whom they listen to, and that's not the hotheads on talk radio who just love to think this means America will arrogantly strut its stuff now. That's unlikely to happen.
Americans should be careful who they listen to, indeed. Most of the media are no better informed, or less in error, than the worst caricature right-wing talker (I'm thinking Michael Savage).
On Syria, for example, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, chief intellectual architect of the interventionist approach, recently said, "We'd like to see change in a lot of places, but it's going to come about by different means in different places. I think it's important . . . that we make it clear that the military is not the only instrument -- it isn't even necessarily the main instrument."
Whatever else I may say about the Strib, bravo to them for at least finding that quote. It says a lot.
A few convincing, and relatively cheap, victories like Afghanistan and Iraq, and you don't need to use military force for the rest of the problem. You'll see Syrians, Saudis, Iranians, Palestinians, Israelis...maybe even the EU, all thinking a lot more clearly.
Other influences also make military action against Syria unlikely. First, Iraq is going to require an intense American focus, including a military focus, for a long time. Two, the American economy is in bad shape, and voters are not happy with President Bush's handling of it. With the campaign for 2004 getting underway in earnest soon, the last thing Bush needs is further division and further economic damage from another war.
While I'd be the last to urge war, least of all for frivolous reasons, and I don't believe war with Syria is going to be necessary (Assad is no Hussein), I think the Strib is mistaken; the war didn't hurt the economy. The uncertainty and waiting and wondering that led up to it did. Speaking as a job hunter, things seem to have picked up a lot in my own little corner of the job market since the shooting started. Not that that's a justification for war - but the Strib has the causes and effects wrong, I think.
Finally, even the most hawkish Bush administration officials acknowledge that American relationships worldwide have taken a severe bruising over Iraq and might break completely if the United States now took on Syria. Even British Prime Minister Tony Blair wants the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be the first order of business. Washington can't afford a break with Blair.
And the Strib is mistaken to separate Syria from the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.
It's been in Syria's best interest for the past 35 years to sabotage any potential settlement - and they have. Repeatedly. They have played their part in refusing to absorb refugees from the '67 war; three generations of Palestinians have grown up in camps largely due to Arab (especially Syrian) intransigence. The Palestinians were worth more to the Syrians as a disaffected minority, a foetid malarial swamp of anger and disenfranchisement, than as people who'd settled and found peace.
Leaning on Syria will help bring and end to the killing - indeed, there are signs it is already.
Notwithstanding the success in Iraq, there clearly are limits on American power. The White House appears to recognize that. It seems to be jawboning Syria in an effort to effect change there without arms. If it works, it will be a victory every bit as important as the victory over Saddam Hussein
Indeed.
They say nothing succeeds like success. The victory in Iraq has caused a lot of people to see more clearly; people in Damascus, Teheran, Gaza, Tel Aviv...
...even a few at the Star/Tribune offices in downtown Minneapolis. Could you have imagined such an editorial before the events of this past month?
Me either.
Posted by Mitch at
April 16, 2003 09:49 AM
