As Palmyra Falls to ISIS, What Are the Syrian Government’s Prospects?
So, yet another city falls, and the city has some very nice ancient architecture, which we will no doubt soon see sledgehammered. Some Palmyrans apparently thought the international “community” might protect them since they’re a great cultural site. I’d laugh if it wasn’t so sad.
ISIS has fought well and fought smart, and came into a regional war which had been going on for years. (One can argue, in Iraq, since the first Gulf War.) They have a huge ideological advantage in claiming to be the Caliphate reborn, and they have made ground. I keep hearing speculation that Syria’s government is on its last legs, but I have no feel for whether this is true or not. In large part, they appear to have been giving back gains.
One advantage the Syrians have is that they have to fight in their core areas; if they lose, there will be no mercy from ISIL. Everyone knows what they do to prisoners. A second advantage is that Hezbollah can’t afford for Assad to fall. If he does, their supply routes to Iran are cut off.
Back in 2008, I was in Las Vegas, and I sat at a table with a wealthy Syrian merchant and his beautiful wife. We talked about what we did, and he thanked me for what I did at the time, because he understood that I got paid shit in order to work against events like the Iraq war. I thought that was awfully gracious, given how little success those of us who oppose such stupidity as Iraq or arming the dissidents in Syria have had.
It’s not that I have any mandate for Assad; he’s a truly horrible man who appears to personally delight in torture. But war and anarchy have huge costs, and the early opposition were always very dubious people–perhaps not quite as bad as ISIL, but certainly no great improvement over Assad and without the saving grace of competence, meaning that they couldn’t necessarily expect to win the war quickly.
And Assad proved to be a lot more determined than most observers expected, the Syrian army, under Iranian and Hezbollah tutelage improved, and so on.
I’m not against all war, or against all violence. Sometimes they are the least worst option. But Syria never passed that test.
I wonder what happened to the gracious Syrian merchant I met. Are he and his wife and children alive? Being wealthy, did he get out? It’s not that he was more deserving of life than any other Syrian just because he happened to play blackjack with me.
But he was kind and gracious, and I remember him. And I wonder how many kind and gracious Syrians and Iraqis have died, men and women I would have liked, in the Middle East.
With no Iraq invasion, there is no ISIS. Saddam was a bastard, but again, the status quo was better than what the invasion caused.
The barrier for “just war” is high, and it is both pre- and post-facto: Fuck it up, and it doesn’t matter how wonderful your intentions were. Idiots used to go on about the Pottery Barn rule: “If you break, it you own it.” They didn’t mean “You then have to fix it.” Japan and Germany were rebuilt, but the preparations for Iraq made it clear that such rebuilding would never happen there, and the aftermath of Libya has been a clusterfuck.
Perhaps not always right, but perhaps you really do need to pass the “Nazi” test, and Saddam, Assad, and Qaddafi were never Hitlers, despite the rhetoric used to justify each war or intervention or “aid.”
Leave people alone. If they want to overthrow their rulers, great, but that’s their business and not yours. Short of actual genocide (which we never intervene against anyway–see Rwanda or Cambodia), war is almost always worse than the status quo, and outside intervention rarely seems to make the situation better. (See the Ukraine for this also–and yes, Maidan was an intervention by outside forces.)
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I read everything you wrote, and more than once. As far as I can tell, we both think that the international institutions are overly dominated by the great powers, particularly the Western ones, and particularly the USA. And we only disagree on what to do about that. So, yes, our positions are not all that far apart. And, if you were to read what I wrote more carefully, particularly my last post, you will find that it is not your position, which is actually quite defensible but which I happen to disagree with, is not my main complaint about you. Rather, it is your manner, which is an odd combination of “to the manner born” smug self satisfaction combined with a peculiarly, under the circumstances, pugnacious brand of make-believe “street fighter” attitude.
That being the case, perhaps you should engage less in pretending to pull rank (hint: you don’t have any), posturing as someone with “skin in the game” (hint: you don’t have any), claiming to rely on your insider knowledge (hint: you don’t have any, and it doesn’t matter anyway), and engaging in ad homonym attacks (hint: there is no basis for them, and, in any case, they are illogical and add nothing to the discussion).
Again, we have a simple disagreement of opinion about the preferred course of future action. Neither position, therefore, yours or mine, is a matter of fact. And I would also point out, once again, that my position, far from being some sort of “lazy American” take, is actually one hundred eighty degrees removed from the typical American view, and has been promulgated, for decades, by respected leftist thinkers and commentators and Third World leaders and activists. I have also attempted to buttress my opinion, with factual statements backed by credible sources and by expert opinion, and you have done whatever it is that you have done, both of us over the course of multiple posts. Can’t we just leave it at that?
Sure wish I’d read your disqus profile before I started wasting electrons. I know I lapse into the self derivative if I don’t watch it, but that… just wow.
Ad homonym till the end. Whatevs.
Technical complaint: I can’t get more than the last 3 comments up on my screen, and I see no place to click to load the older comments.
To the right of the bottom comment should be a link called “newer comments”. While the name is inaccurate (oops, but not fixable without much messing with the theme), it will get you, in fact, to the older comments if clicked.
Thanx, but it did not work.
I tried it on four different browsers, and all clicking “Newer Comments” did was to get me the very first comment, and no others. 🙁
Update: I hit “refresh” on the first-comment-only page and the first 100 loaded.
Same as Id Monster for me, except reloading the page doesn’t correct the problem.