On the same day this week, a prospective US ambassador to the United Nations warned President-elect Donald Trump against US military involvement in Syria while the current UN ambassador offered empty threats of future “justice” for the bloodshed.
Trump should ignore both approaches. Instead, he should start working on plans to ease the suffering of Syrian civilians and to help shape the country’s postwar future. The Syrian civil war impacts too many American interests for us to sit this one out.
That is essentially what Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), an Iraq war veteran widely considered a candidate for the UN post, proposed in a meeting with Trump on Monday.
“I shared with him my grave concerns that escalating the war in Syria by implementing a so-called no-fly/safe zone would be disastrous for the Syrian people, our country and the world,” the former Bernie Sanders supporter said after her Trump Tower sit-down.
Elsewhere in New York, current UN Ambassador Samantha Power, during a Security Council session, read the names of Syrian generals responsible for alleged war crimes. She vowed to bring them to justice, adding, “The civilized world’s memories are long.”
Well, whether “civilized” or not, the people of the Mideast have much longer memories than the West’s Twitter-fed politicians. They won’t easily forget that America, once the world’s only superpower, largely ignored Syria at her greatest hour of need.
Into the vacuum went America-hating groups — Hezbollah, ISIS, al Qaeda. Those groups came out strengthened, fattened with recruits and battle-tested — bad news for the future of the war on terrorism. (Also: Allowing Iran to dominate Syria, as we have, encourages Tehran’s allied terrorists and pushes would-be Sunni allies into anti-American extremism.)
Where’d we go wrong? For starters, to paraphrase Woody Allen, 90 percent of foreign-policy success is showing up. And in Syria, we didn’t.
Vowing future “justice” for the generals who bomb Syrians in Aleppo (where an estimated 1 million are under siege, lacking food, medical facilities or shelter) simply doesn’t cut it. Not even close.
In fairness, “showing up” now is hard because since 2013 — when President Obama emptied his own threat of enforcing a Syrian “red line” — the void in Syria has been filled by others. Most significantly, Russia and Iran. If the United States were to get off the sidelines in any significant way, American military planners would need to navigate a host of warring terrorist gangs and their wealthy regional backers.
Yet, you have to start somewhere. So how about easing the suffering of civilians, rather than putting standing armies on one side or another of the civil war? It would be more than charity; it would enhance America’s interests.
On Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan renewed his call to create a safe zone in northern Syria. With American air cover (and, yes, “boots on the ground,” in the form of US special forces), such a zone could serve as a haven for besieged Syrian civilians.
It could also lead to a more strategic, American-led future reorganization of Syria as a loose confederation of separate Sunni, Alawite and Kurdish statelets.
Yes, it’s complicated. Turkey is more interested in fighting against our Kurdish allies than against ISIS or Hezbollah. But we won’t be able to lean on Turkey (or on our Arab allies) to do the right thing in their neighborhood unless we’re present in their neighborhood.
It’s also true that Russia already controls much of Syria’s airspace. Were US planes to intervene, it could lead to actual US-Russia conflict. But Israel has proved it’s possible to avoid the danger zone. Jerusalem has long been hitting Russian-allied Hezbollah targets in Syria since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struck agreements with President Vladimir Putin on how to conduct those strikes without baiting the Russian air force.
So there’s no reason Trump couldn’t negotiate similar understandings.
But none of that can happen if we mistake lecturing everyone about the horrors of war for “action.” Or announce in advance that we’re leaving the war against ISIS in Syria for Russia and Iran to deal with.
On the campaign trail, Trump events often played the Rolling Stones classic “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” off the album “Let It Bleed.” But bloodletting shouldn’t be our policy in Syria, because eventually we’re likely to be drawn into the war anyway — and when it’s costlier to do so.
So, yes, engagement in Syria isn’t what we want — but if we try, we just might find, we’ll get what we need.