By Steve Bolton
Well-founded fears of “blowback” have thus far
paralyzed the West’s response to the civil war in Syria. Yet the current policy
of inaction constitutes an injustice against the suffering Syrian people, in
addition to carrying inevitable negative consequences for the West’s selfish
strategic interests. There is no scenario in which either the West or the
Syrian people can come out ahead in this crisis, but we can serve the cause of
justice while also reducing the long-term threat of Islamic jihadism, by
tackling the greater short-term threat of President Bashar Assad’s bloodthirsty
regime in a highly specific way: by saturating the country with humanitarian
aid on a scale not seen since the Berlin Airlift. This may not appear to be a
relevant solution at the moment, given that the rebels are clamoring for guns,
not butter, but its necessity may be apparent a few months from now, when
Assad’s unprecedented scorched earth policies have added man-made famine to
Syria’s list of miseries.
Some
news about the atrocities committed by both sides in the civil war have
filtered through the incompetent Western media, whose standards of journalism
have been eroding steadily ever since the heyday of the 1970s. This is
particularly true in the realm of foreign policy, which is considered too
boring and negative for the self-centered and jaded citizens of the West,
particularly those of America, to stomach these days. One symptom of this is
the bad habit among the foreign press corps of contriving “false balance” by
deliberately seeking out equal numbers of human rights violations by each side
in any conflict; this form of lying by misstating proportions has been a staple
of the Western media as far back as the Salvadoran Civil War of the ‘80s, when
it was used to justify state terrorism against leftist rebels. In the case of
the current war in Syria, mere sloppiness has led the media to portray Assad’s
secular government and the rebels fighting against it on an equal footing, as
if their respective proportions of the atrocities were somehow even. There can
be no doubt that the rebels, most of whom espouse some brand or another of
Islamic fundamentalism, have committed human rights violations of their own and
undoubtedly will commit many more if allowed to attain power. The mightiest
rebel faction, Jabhat al-Nusra, is committed to the cause of global jihad,
which in and of itself constitutes support for global genocide. Much like the
millions of ordinary Germans and Slavs who were caught between the Nazi war
machine and Stalin’s Red Army in World War II, the people of Syria are today
caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of Greek myth. There is one critical
difference, however, which is not being adequately portrayed by our media: the
nation is already in the clutches of the Scylla of Assad’s government, and will
be torn to pieces long before the future Charybdis of Islamic fundamentalism
ever becomes a reality. Because of the poor media coverage, the degree to which
the balance of terror has tilted towards Assad has largely gone unnoticed. In
its fury, the regime is lashing out with such wanton state terrorism that it
now represents the greater threat, much as the Nazis did in World War II. We
can deal with the quite tangible threat of Islamic fundamentalism later, but
there will be no “later” for the Syrian people if Assad is not stopped.
In
order for our policymakers to thread the needle through the Scylla and Charybdis,
precision will be required. That requires good judgment, which both the
political Left and Right sorely lack today, as well as accurate information,
which the press is not supplying. It may not be entirely fair to fault the
Western press for failing to put journalists on the ground in Syria, given the
chaotic factionalism which characterizes the rebel-held lands at present. The
absence of a single rebel authority opens the door to kidnapping or murder of
Western reporters by the most extreme Islamist factions, so there is some
greater risk involved than in visiting other war zones. Yet that does not
excuse the sloppy way in which the press has simply repeated the press releases
put out by the Syrian regime, without bothering to check their facts. Some
degree of propaganda can be expected in any war, but it is the job of competent
journalists to sort out the fact from the fiction, without automatically
assuming that both sides are equally guilty or that one’s version of the truth
should automatically be preferred. In this particular civil war, there can be
no doubt that rebel propaganda has so far generally been much more trustworthy,
given that the stories put out by the myriad factions and their supporters
typically turn out to be much more accurate than the reports manufactured by
the regime. Perhaps this is because the insurgents - despite the many moral
faults of their most extreme factions - at least must have the virtue of
courage, which means that they’re also more likely to exhibit other virtues
like love of truth. Furthermore, the grass roots manner in which the armed
opposition developed led to a lack of a coherent command structure, which means
that the rebels can’t afford to lie because this could lead to miscalculations
by allied factions in distant towns. The most reliable reporting to date has
come from amateur and semi-professional Syrians posting footage and commentary
to sites like YouTube and Twitter. This grass roots media corps is naturally
prone to partisan editorializing – which is not surprising, given that most are
untrained and have seen their friends and family members killed by the regime –
but at present, they are the best source for reliable information on the
conflict. They are painting a much
different picture of what is happening on the ground that the Western media,
who are merely reading the regime’s press releases, then calling academic
specialists in universities to get their commentary on them.
The Real Military Situation in Syria
In
the past three weeks in which the small city of Qusayr was besieged, the regime
and its allies in Hezbollah asserted on a practically daily basis that the
whole city had fallen, or that the conquest is 80 percent complete, or
alternatively that a particular section of it has fallen. Yet still the
hodge-podge coalition of rebel groups still clung to roughly the same area, day
after day, until this Wednesday. When rebels finally lost the city center, the
regime triumphantly declared the entire city liberated, in a claim which the
Western press simply repeated verbatim without bothering to substantiate it.
The same record of dishonesty is consistently reflected in the pronouncements
of the state media and its mouthpieces about the situation in other corners of
the nation, where the regime is still losing its grip. Their reports read precisely
like that of any other dictatorial regime on the brink of extinction, complete
with imaginary victories that border on psychotic denial and a lot of loose
talk about arresting bandits committing acts of hooliganism, which turn out to
be the fall of strategic military bases to the rebels. It is often said that dictators
who become fond of reading their own press releases first lose touch with
reality, then with their power base, and Assad is no different. He may be adept
at fooling both himself and the lazy Western press corps, but he cannot
perpetually obscure the fact that the rebels still have the upper hand. I was
stunned a few months back to discover that the revolt was still simmering at
all, given that insurgents were so badly outnumbered and outgunned after the
Syrian chapter of the Arab Spring began two years ago, not to mention
hopelessly divided. Now they have captured much of the north and center of the
country, including provincial capitals like Raqqa and Deir Ezzor, as well as
large swathes of the largest Syrian city, Aleppo, and the perimeter of the
capital, Damascus. In pure head-to-head infantry matches the insurgents have the
advantage, but they remain vulnerable to air strikes, artillery fire and Scud
rockets. This has led to the “War of the Airports,” in which the rebels have
concentrated mainly on picking off the innumerable fortified bases that the
regime forces have retreated to across the country. Although the rebels have
had great difficulty in storming some of them (particularly the Wadi al-Daif
and Hamidiya bases in Idlib and the Citadel in Aleppo), the handwriting is on
the wall.
Since
the Qusayr offensive started, several of the most strategically positioned
bases have been overrun, like the Youth Camp in Idlib, with others like the
Qarmeed brick factory, the air base at Mennagh and Aleppo prison ripe and ready
to fall. While the Western media has been concentrating myopically on the siege
of Qusayr, half of the much larger and more strategically positioned southern
city of Daraa has fallen in a matter of days. To make matters worse for the
regime, the rebels have secured their eastern flank on this front by capturing,
investing or neutralizing a wide number of bases and smaller cities in the
region, such as Bosra al-Sham, Tha'lah airbase, Al-Karak, Brigade 52 and Al-Harak.
Operations have even spread as far to the northeast of that province as Busr
al-Hahrir and in the last few days, they have expanded their influence over
towns much further to the northeast like Kafar Shams, Inkhil and Quneitra. Qusayr
ended more like the Alamo rather than Stalingrad, but the rebels managed to
give Hezbollah a bloody nose; in the long run, it will be more important in
terms of morale than in strategic necessity. The same cannot be said of Daraa,
which is far more populous and strategically placed. All the rebels in besieged
cities like Homs need to do is hold out long enough for their brethren to
finish their sweep through the Daraa region, which could be a deathblow to the
Syrian regime. As many Syrian bloggers have pointed out recently, Syria’s
terrain makes it much more difficult to invade Damascus from the north, where
Qusayr, Homs and the main rebel strongholds are. Because it borders Jordan and
Israel, as well as the relatively neutral city of Suweida to the east (which is
populated mainly by minority Druze), the conquest of the province of Daraa
would automatically secure both its supply line to Jordan and its flanks
towards three points of the compass. The regime forces have suddenly been
hemmed in on the north side of Daraa, creating an ever-narrower salient that dissipates
quickly into open countryside after reaching the suburb of Atman. If the rebels
keep up the pressure long enough on this front, there is a real possibility
that any regime withdrawal from the provincial capital will turn from a retreat
into a rout. There simply isn’t anywhere left for them to retreat to, except
northward along the highway that leads to Damascus, into rebel-held territory that
extends as far north as Namer and Dael. Their next stop would likely be the key
junction at Kherbet Ghazalah, which was in rebel hands just a few weeks ago. To
make matters worse for Assad, many of the suburbs of Damascus are under rebel
control or have been hotbeds of rebellion for the last two years, such as Daraya,
Mleha, Eastern Ghouta and Otaybah. If the rebels in Daraa pushed far north
enough to link up with these fronts just a few miles from Assad’s seat of
power, the ballgame would be over.
Counterproductive Counterinsurgency: How
Genocide Invariably Backfires in Guerrilla Conflicts
This
is the most likely scenario for the end of the regime, which is repeating many
of the classic counterinsurgency mistakes made in other civil wars across the
planet over the last 120 years. This is a subject I have some real expertise
in, given that I focused on the history on the counterinsurgency in Latin
America for what was basically my equivalent of a Master’s thesis. If Assad’s
generals were as familiar with counterinsurgency, they would be driven either
to despair or to defect, for the numbers are no longer in their favor. Historically,
successful guerrilla movements have almost always been badly outnumbered by the
regimes they defeated. For example, Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN)
could field only 8,500 fighters and 21,000 auxiliaries against 250,000 troops French
and Algerian troops in 1956. Although the number of FLN rebels tripled within a
year to 25,000, the French more than offset this by adding another 200,000
troops through conscription. Yet the FLN still won. Likewise, the number of
Vietcong rose rapidly from 150,000 to 220,000 troops between 1965 and 1966, but
were still badly outnumbered by the half a million Americans and 850,000 South
Vietnamese fighting alongside them. The pattern is pretty much the same in
other cases, such as the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran wars of the ‘80s, the Cuban
Revolution of 1959 and the Cuban war for independence. The Soviet Union fielded
100,000 soldiers against the mujahidin who fought against its invasion of
Afghanistan, to no avail.[1]
Using even the most conservative estimates cited at Wikipedia, the Free Syrian
Army (FSA) now fields 60,000 to 140,000, the Syrian Islamic Front 20,000 and Jabhat
al-Nusra 6,000.[2]
They are augmented by at least 2,000 hardened veterans from the floating army
of foreign mujahidin, who have shown up in every major war in the Islamic world
since the Soviets were expelled from Afghanistan decades ago, including the
conflicts in Mali, Libya, Chechnya, Iraq, Pakistan and Somalia. This
establishes a lower boundary of 88,000 men on the rebel side, which is more
than enough to take on the remainder of Assad’s dwindling forces, if history is
any guide. The Syrian Army numbered almost a quarter of a million men two years
ago, but is now down to about 60,000, thanks largely to defections to the rebel
camp, particularly among the Sunni Muslims who make up the majority of the
nation’s population. To make up for this mammoth manpower deficit, Assad has
augmented his forces with another 60,000 volunteers in the National Defense
Force, plus another 10,000 irregular shabiha,
despised by the rebels for their routine atrocities.[3]
Assad is increasingly dependent on his minority Alawite sect to staff these
paramilitary groups and the rump of the Syrian armed forces, but by appealing
to sectarian divisions in this way, he has shot himself in the foot. One of the
fatal weaknesses of many failed guerrilla movements is to limit their appeal to
only a small minority of a nation’s population, with the classic example being
the failure of the Communist guerrillas of Malaya to widen their appeal beyond
the minority Chinese in their 12-year insurgency (1948-1960). The opposite situation
now prevails in Syria, where 60 percent of the population is estimated to be
Sunni Arab Muslim, compared to about 11 percent for the Alawite sect. Greek
Orthodox and Armenian Christians account for another 12 percent and the Druze
for 3 percent, but both have maintained guarded neutrality in what is shaping
up as a Sunni-Alawite conflict. Kurds account for another 10 percent of the
population and have largely expelled the regime’s forces from their territory,
but occasionally squabble with the rebels and have yet to take offensive action
beyond their home territories. The allegiance of the half a million Palestinian
refugees residing in Syria was lost when Assad’s soldiers began
indiscriminately shelling the Yarmouk Camp near Damascus. This may have been a
factor in the decision of Hamas, the Islamic radical group fighting against
Israel in the Occupied Territories, to offer their expertise in urban warfare
to the guerrillas. Assad’s cultivation of sectarian divisions has backfired by
alienating the Sunni majority without bringing him any new allies except
Hezbollah. An upper limits of about 7,000 members of that Lebanese Shiite
militia are now operating in Syria, chiefly around Qusayr and a couple of
villages near Aleppo that account for much of Syria’s minuscule Shiite
population. This small increase in manpower is a drop in the bucket, but cost
Assad by allowing rebels to recast the battle as both a sectarian struggle and
a fight against foreign invaders.
Historically,
insurgencies that have unequivocally reached the second of Mao Tse-Tung’s three
stages of guerilla warfare have yet to be defeated on the battlefield... For a
fuller treatment of the history of 20th Century guerrilla warfare, see the
eighth chapter of The Retreat of the West, which would have served as my dissertation if I had
been able to finish my doctorate. Suffice it to say that the few insurgencies
which have been defeated once they showed signs of reaching Mao’s second stage,
such as opening “liberated zones” across a third of a regime’s territory, have
only been defeated by their own hand. A few have given up the fight after
forcing the ruling regimes to concede democratic reforms, as was the case in El
Salvador. Assad’s brutality has gradually turned the Sunni majority and some of
Syria’s non-Alawite minorities against him, which means the rebels probably
will not meet the same fate as the Malayan guerillas. The best hope for the
regime’s survival lays in the possibility that the rebels will prematurely jump
into the third of Mao’s stages and begin fighting conventional battles they
cannot win, which is what destroyed the Communist rebels who nearly took over
Greece in the aftermath of World War II. Not long ago, I thought that the
Syrian rebels were likely to fail for precisely this reason, but they surprised
me by not only holding territory, but seizing half of Aleppo and much of the environs
of Damascus. It is also possible that the rebels could antagonize minorities
like the Kurds, Christians and Druze sufficiently to impede their takeover of
the entire country, but thus far they have wisely refrained from overreaching
themselves. Islamic extremism may goad factions like Jabhat al-Nusra to cross
this line at any moment, but even if this occurs, this still wouldn’t
antagonize the Sunni majority. It is also possible that the regime will manage
to capitalize on the factionalism of the rebel movement, which is perhaps the
most decentralized but successful insurgency in the last century and a half of
world history.
None
of these pitfalls is likely to overcome the most overwhelming advantage held by
the Syrian rebels: Assad is giving them no choice but to fight to win. The
unbridled brutality of the armed forces and the shabiha have left most of the
country with no alternative but to fight to the last man, woman and child,
because he’s going to kill them all anyways. When counterinsurgency fails, it
is usually because the ruling regime can’t resist the temptation to resort to
state terrorism in order to make up for its own unpopularity and inability to
identify the guerrillas hiding within the civilian population. This allows the
guerillas to rapidly create whole armies from scratch, for the simple reason
that the masses have no choice but to fight. Indiscriminate violence was what
brought down the dictatorship of Anastasia Somoza in 1979, when he began
bombing his own capital, thereby forcing the common people to side with the
Sandinistas. It is also what cost us the Vietnam War, for the South Vietnamese
and American forces bombed the countryside flat to the point of destroying 50
percent of the housing in some provinces, then sent in “Zippo Squads” to burn
down much of what was left standing of ordinary peasant villages; this was part
of a long range plan to a rehouse the entire peasant population in planned
communities euphemistically called “strategic hamlets,” which eventually took
on the cast of concentration camps. The common denominator in all of these
successful insurgencies has always been indiscriminate state terrorism; human
rights violations are not merely moral issues, but strategic blunders that hand
victory to rebels when committed in the context of guerrilla wars. One of the
only remaining ways that the Syrian rebel movement can squander its victory is
to begin committing atrocities on the same scale as the regime. This is what
cost Sendero Luminoso, a brutal Communist insurgency that controlled about a
third of Peru in the early 1990s, victory against an equally cruel right-wing
dictatorship; the “Shining Path” planned on committing genocide once it
attained power, so the Peruvian people are fortunate that is shot itself in the
foot. It is still possible for the Syrian rebels to meet the same fate, but
that depends on their own will, which is not something Assad can directly
affect. The only cards he has left to play are indiscriminate weapons like
artillery shells and fuel air bombs, which can only put off the inevitable for
a short time by raining destruction on entire neighborhoods. I don’t mean to be
wryly humorous when I say that this tends to turn whole neighborhoods against
those who lob the shells and drop the bombs; throughout history many incompetent
military men have forgotten this fact, including the American counterinsurgency
experts who stupidly thought they could win the “hearts and minds” of ordinary
Vietnamese by first burning their villages to the ground, then offering them
candy in their new homes in “strategic hamlets.”
Assad
has painted himself into an even narrower corner by taking counterinsurgent
genocide to a whole new level. The bottom line is that the rebels cannot
surrender, or they and their families will die in a bloodbath of unprecedented
proportions. For both sides, it is either kill or be killed, which is why the
focus of the Western media on peace conferences, diplomatic maneuvers among the
Great Powers and so forth is simply silly window dressing; like it or not, this
war is going to be decided on the battlefield, but Assad has settled on a
strategy that amounts not only to mere state terrorism, but genocide. So far,
we lack definitive proof that Assad has ordered the use of chemical or
bacteriological weapons, although he would certainly do so in a heartbeat if
the West had not promised military retaliation if he crossed that “red line.”
Instead, he has settled on a particular type of scorched earth strategy that
has never before been used against a modern popular rebellion: starving the
vast majority of the people into submission. The annals of Africa’s recent wars
hold plenty of dark episodes of hunger being used as a weapon, such as the
Sudanese war in Darfur. History also tells of a few instances of scorched earth
tactics like this being employed to deny natural resources to foreign invaders,
most notably by the Russians in the Napoleonic Wars and World War II. Over the
past two months, stories have trickled in from widely separated provinces of
Assad’s forces torching as much farmland as they can, in what is certainly a
coordinated, conscious policy of starving the majority of Assad’s own population
into submission a few months down the road. They have also shut off the water
to cities like Hama, which is barbaric, but not unprecedented in the history of
warfare; attempting to starve the vast majority of one’s own homeland, as Assad
seems to plan on doing, has never been attempted before. It is unlikely to
succeed, because the rebels have no choice except to win, even if they have to
clamber over a mountain of emaciated skeletons to do it. Nonetheless, the West
cannot allow him to get away with this for a number of reasons. I would prefer
only to cite the overwhelming moral ones, but inevitably, this will not
persuade selfish policymakers who think only in terms of strategic gain. I must
then point out the extreme threat that Assad would represent to the whole
region, should he win through such tactics. Not only would this demonstrate to
dictators everywhere that they can starve overwhelming majorities of their
populations into submission at will, but it would leave Syria as a vassal
state, dependent entirely on Iran and Hezbollah for external assistance. Worst
of all, it would leave him internally dependent on tens of thousands of the
most vicious, vile and violent type of thugs, triumphantly reveling in the
certainty that massacres and mass starvation pay off. The Assad regime has always been guilty of
the lion’s share of human rights violations in this war, but the ledger is now
ridiculously one-sided; his war strategy now consists of little but cowardly
massacres by the shabiha, lobbying artillery shells at civilian neighborhoods
and torching his own farms. If we allow the Scylla to devour Syria out of fear
of the Charybdis, this monster will turn against us next.
The Implications of the Retreat of the
West for the Charybdis of Jihadism
There
is certainly great danger in the rise of groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, which are
likely to unleash a genocide of their own in due time. I still stand by every
warning I issued in Out of the Frying Pan, into the Fire: Syria’s Bloody
Transition to Islamic Fundamentalism.
At the moment, however, Assad represents the greater moral, humanitarian and
strategic threat. It is highly unlikely that we can stem the tide of Islamic
fundamentalism in either Syria or the rest of the Middle East in the long run,
but it may be possible to enhance the chances of an outcome similar to the
aftermath of the Arab Spring in Libya. When lamenting the 2012 attack on the
U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, or the presence of jihadist training camps in
Libya’s southern deserts, we should keep in mind that the weak, mildly
fundamentalist government in power there is the only alternative to a
full-blown jihadist state. Many Libyans reacted negatively to the embassy
incident, in large part out of gratitude to NATO for its role in helping oust
Muammar Khadafy, a bloodthirsty dictator in the same mold as Khadafy. By
intervening against Assad forcefully but in a specific and disciplined way, the
U.S. and its allies might also cultivate some of the same good will in Syria.
Secondly, the longer the Syrian war lasts, the more radicalized its people will
become. It is no accident that the virulence of Islamic fundamentalism varies
among the countries rocked by the Arab Spring in direct proportion to how
violent the revolutions have been. For this reason, it is highly unlikely that
the type of government that emerges from the wreckage of this civil war will be
at all to our liking, but it is possible to at least minimize the radicalism
and perhaps prevent the emergence of a full-blown Taliban-style state by
bringing the war to a close sooner rather than later. It may be tempting for
our policymakers to exploit the Syrian war in order to drive wedges between anti-Israeli
militias like Hezbollah and Hamas, but it would not be wise to aggravate this
sectarian division across the Middle East any further. It is indeed fortunate
for the West that this falling out occurred, for the bad blood it has brought
about between Sunnis and Shiites throughout the Middle East may delay Iran’s
ascension as the leading Islamic power and also mask Israel’s rapid decline in
power for another generation. Egging on a fight between two monsters is rarely
a wise choice, because the common people are the ones who get trampled, then
teach their descendants to perpetuate the feud. Deliberately prolonging and
aggravating any war is immoral, just as standing aside and letting Assad murder
his own people is wicked, but there are also sound selfish strategic reasons
for resisting this temptation. Most of
the Shiite world is already led by fundamentalists, but the same is not yet
true of the Sunni majority of the Islamic world, whose allegiance we can still
lose; the further the conflict spreads and the longer it lasts, the greater the
risk that Sunni jihadists will gain further prominence in places like Lebanon
and Jordan.
America
and its allies simply don’t have many options in Syria, for reasons related to
the long-term trend in global power distribution I refer to as the Retreat of
the West. That calls for more intelligent use of what options we do have, in
order to minimize the “blowback” that is certain to occur no matter what course
of action we decide upon. The most pressing threat at the moment is the risk of
hunger a few months from now from Assad’s scorched earth policy, which
constitutes an act of genocide against the Sunni majority. It is also in our
interest to bring about an end to the war as quickly as possible to minimize
the degree of radicalism the next rulers of Syria are bound to exhibit. Even in
the best case scenario, the blowback is going to be far worse than the Benghazi
attack, but we can at least cultivate some good will among the common people
ahead of time to minimize it, just as we did in Libya. I prefer to analyze this
in terms of justice, but more selfish Westerners won’t accept this unless I
couch in terms of strategic gain: the West’s material support against Khadafy
was the difference that kept Libya from becoming a full-blown jihadist state,
complete with applause for the Benghazi attack, just as our support might help
temper Syria’s radicalism somewhat. The consequences of inaction may be worse
in the long run than intervening in the wrong way. Arming Syrian militants may
not seem like a good idea, but it is not as if Al-Qaeda’s reach is limited by a
shortage of small arms; providing small weaponry like rifles may go a long way
towards hastening the end of the war, given the fact that shortage of basic
armaments is the major factor holding the rebels back. On the other hand, we
can attain the goal of toppling Assad without taking that chance, simply by
providing humanitarian aid in large quantities. The greatest danger to Syria in
the coming months will be the use of hunger as a weapon, which the U.S. and its
allies can easily take out of his hands by air dropping as much food, medicine
and clothing as needed to sustain the rebels in every city. The beautiful thing
about such a policy – at least for those who don’t find beauty in
humanitarianism for its own sake - is that butter can’t directly bring about
the deaths of those who provide it, unlike guns. It is perishable and is
therefore a temporary advantage. If the Syrian rebels are well-fed, clothed and
have adequate medical supplies, then they are likely to defeat Assad much
sooner than later, but without leaving more guns laying around that others cans
pick up in the aftermath. Many of the rebel factions would indeed bite the hand
that fed them if Assad were out of the picture, but they’ll find it harder to
do with toothless assistance of this kind. Detractors may rightly point out
that Syria still has impressive air defenses which need to be taken into
consideration, as well as a substantial arsenal of conventional weaponry that
can be turned against us. That’s what the master stroke would consist of
though: by providing aid in this way, we have sufficient cause to take out
those air defenses and conventional capabilities once and for all, thereby
assuring that neither Assad nor any future Sunni fundamentalist regime could
use them against us. This would also allow Israel to overfly Syria with greater
ease for a generation, till the cash-strapped Islamist government that follows
can afford a new air defense system.
We
can have our cake and eat it too, at least in the short run. The big picture
isn’t quite as rosy though, for there is no scenario in which the West comes
out ahead in this. In terms of all ten forms of power mentioned by political
scientist Hans Morgenthau, the West has been in decline against the rest of the
world for much of the last century. As I detail in The Retreat of the West, the declining proportion of military,
economic, demographic and other forms of power exercised by North America,
Europe, Russia and Australia has led to many of the most prominent upheavals in
global politics in that time span, ranging from the decolonization of the mid-20th
Century to the Vietnam War to the collapse of the Communism to the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan. One of the latest symptoms was the Arab Spring, which
replaced leaders that were pliant to Western interests with ones exhibiting
more independence and less favor toward the Western idea of secularism. Islamic
fundamentalism, in all of its various shades, represent the return of the
Middle East and the rest of the Islamic Umma
to what they once were before the West’s rise drove them back centuries ago: a
civilization bent on carrying out jihad through the violent methods Mohammed
explicitly recommended in the Koran. At present, we can cooperate to an extent
with some fundamentalists against common monsters like Assad, just as we did
against the Soviets a generation ago, without sharing the same strategic goals
or morals. In the long run, however, the Islamic world will inevitably return
to what it once was in the wake of the receding power of the West, which will
inevitably bring the Clash of Civilizations spoken of by political scientist
Samuel P. Huntington to the fore. The poor reporting of the foreign press corps
obscures the fact that no matter what course of action we take in Syria, we are
not going to be able to keep the Islamists out of power in Syria in the long
run. Since the emergence of the first Islamists among Iranian dissidents and
rural Afghan tribes in the mid-‘70s, the overwhelming political trend of the
Middle East has been in one direction, towards fundamentalism, in every corner
of the region. In fact, the Islamists are now trying to outdo each other in
their pious devotion to the most questionable commands in the Koran, in a
process I refer to as “Islamic leapfrog” for lack of a more formal term.
Fundamentalism is spreading bother laterally and vertically throughout the
region, with no end in sight.
As I
predicted in previous columns, the triumph of Islam throughout the region was
likely to bring about a clash between different brands of radicalism, which
manifested itself much sooner than I thought in the rivalry between Hezbollah
and Iran and one hand and Hamas and Syria’s Sunni rebels on the other. This
sectarian battle – a civil war within Islam itself, in actuality - has created
such ill will that it will probably keep them from making common cause for
another generation. This may preserve Israel’s existence for a time, but as I
wrote in The Unpromising Land, the handwriting is on the wall. Because Israel was settled primarily
by European Jews, its establishment in 1947 can be seen as one of the last
symptoms of the rise of the West. The same factors that are sapping the
strength of the West are also affecting Israel’s power base though, which is
why its military fortunes have gone in one direction since the peak of its
power in the Six-Day War of 1967. Now the mighty Jewish state cannot even
handle guerrilla movements within its own Occupied Territories, or adequately
deal with a small militia like Hezbollah firing missiles from a territory that
Israel once raided with ease. When the dust settles in Syria, it is entirely
likely that the next regime will not only be a more implacable foe of Israel,
but also a more competent and driven adversary than Assad’s Baath regime.
Today, the best fighting forces on the ground espouse one brand of Islamic
fundamentalism or the other, which does not bode well for peace along the Golan
Heights. Nor does the likelihood of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, which
neither Israel nor America can do much about. The Retreat of the West is
occurring in large part due to impersonal political and social forces acting at
a glacial pace on the scale of several centuries, so it is going to be quite
difficult for the West to maintain its position in the region for many more
generations; this does not bode well at all for the long-term future of Israel,
which is likely to last for a time and then succumb to the sea of Muslim states
surrounding it, much like the state of Outremer established in Palestine by the
Crusaders nine centuries ago.
Israel
has no room for maneuver, which means it must make much wiser choices than it
has in the past; it cannot control the erosion of its power base through impersonal,
global social forces, but it can stop aggravating it by deliberate depopulation
through abortion and contraception, among other things. The lure of Western
commercialism has led Israel into these sins, which are also bringing about the
slow suicide of the West as a whole. If it were still actually Jewish in
religion rather than merely in ethnicity, Israel might have a chance of
survival; without it there is none, for the Jewish state cannot even protect
itself from the murderers within. Likewise, if the West were actually
Christian, there might be some hope of forestalling the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism. Secularism is almost dead in the Middle East because it is an
artificial construct implanted in the heyday of Western hegemony, which is
passing at a glacial pace. Once the West realizes that it was artificially and
undemocratically implanted here as well, then perhaps we can forge a response
to Islam. We still have a vast advantage in several forms of power over the
Islamic Umma, as we do over the rest
of the Third World, but we are destined to squander it for the same reason that
smokers rationalize away quitting on the grounds that they haven’t gotten
cancer yet, thereby guaranteeing that someday they will. As crises like the Syrian
civil war multiply and become more difficult to ignore, it will become clearer
that the West has no antidote for the lure of Islamic fundamentalism, for it
has no object of worship of its own, save for the idol of Mammon. Secularism
cannot defeat an enemy like fundamentalism, especially when wedded to the
worship of wealth, which is the true “opiate of the people.” We can go on
losing at “rock-paper-scissors” for a few more generations, but the truth is,
we will not be able to stem the rise of Islamic fundamentalism without
countering it with a powerful religion of our own, one that calls for
self-sacrifice and martyrdom that can match the misplaced bravery of a Jabhat
al-Nusra, a Hezbollah or a Hamas. A civilization built on the sands of
commercialism simply cannot win against one that is willing to die for its
ideals, no matter how misguided or evil they might be, because one cannot go
shopping after death. Some of the factors that are gradually tilting the
balance of global power away from us cannot be easily addressed – unlike some
of the suicidal consequences of the commercial religion we’ve all been
converted to, like abortion and birth prevention. The Great Apostasy spoken of
by Fr. Malachi Martin and other 20th Century Catholic writers is thus hastening
the Retreat of the West. The ultimate answer lays in convincing those who are
gaining power in places like the Middle East at our expense not to use it for
evil ends, but such a sea change in philosophy and morals would require something
resembling a religious conversion. Our post-Christian civilization has no
religion to convert them to, except for the Gospel of Greed. That is why our
options are constrained today in Syria and will be even narrower in the future,
as such manifestations of the Retreat of the West increase in tandem with our
declining power.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in
journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at
Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in
U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a
paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate
in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has
been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to
psychology to economics since age 9.
1 pp.
225, 230, 248, Bolton, Steve, 1998, The Retreat of the West. Unpublished
dissertation, available online at https://www.dropbox.com/s/6oqmpb6rn1tptdl/Retreat%20of%20the%20West%20Final%20Version%20II.pdf?m
2 The
upper limits of the estimates are 140,000 for the FSA, 10,000 for Jabhat
al-Nusra and 5,000 for the mujahidin. I suspect the numbers of mujahidin are
exaggerated, given the relatively low body count of foreign jihadis. It is also
likely that the FSA’s numbers also include fighters who can’t fight because of
the shortage of weaponry. For the original numbers, see the Wikipedia page
“Syrian Civil War” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_civil_war
3 Alexander,
Caroline, 2013, “Syrian Army Advances Signal Assad May Survive for Years,”
published in the online edition of Business Week on May 23, 2013 at http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-05-22/syrian-government-advances-signal-assad-may-survive-for-years
