My new column on Syria for The Week is now online. I wrote this over the weekend after the Russian and Chinese vetoes of the U.N. resolution. Here is an excerpt:

During the debate over intervention in Libya, it was widely recognized that other abusive states, such as Syria, had patrons that Libya lacked, which was why intervention in Libya was politically feasible in the first place. Libya’s strategic insignificance was the key to building international consensus to authorize action against Moammar Gadhafi. Syria is a very different case, as the fall of the Assad regime is as unwelcome to Russia and Iran as it is desired by many in the West.

This is not only a recipe for deadlock at the U.N., but also for a clash of interests between Assad’s patrons and Assad’s enemies that could lead to a larger crisis. As we hear more calls in the U.S. and Europe to support anti-regime forces, Western governments and Syria’s Russian and Iranian patrons are on a path to make Syria’s internal conflict into a proxy war. That seems likely to escalate and prolong the suffering of Syrians and to destabilize the region.

I noticed that Joshua Foust and M.K. Bhadrakumar have made some similar arguments today. Bob Wright also made some similar observations about Western reactions to the double-veto.

The Russian and Chinese governments had already heard Western governments promise that they didn’t intend to seek regime change in Libya (which is also what they’re saying about Syria now), and those promises were intended just to get skeptical governments to drop their objections to some form of international response. Small wonder that these governments don’t believe Western diplomats when the latter say that they are explicitly ruling out something.

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Noah Millman doesn’t think the danger of Iranian retaliation would dissuade Israel from attacking:

From an Israeli perspective, a strike on Iran would be a defensive act – perhaps wise, perhaps unwise, but in either case a response to an Iranian provocation, and not an act of aggression.

Needless to say, Iran would perceive it as an unprovoked and blatantly illegal act of aggression, and might well respond, as it has threatened, with rocket attacks. But Israel would not perceive these attacks as justified retaliation against its aggression – it would perceive them as further evidence of Iran’s hostility.

It shouldn’t really matter whether or not the Israeli government sees an attack on Iran as a form of “anticipatory self-defense” (or whatever euphemism for unprovoked war we’re using these days). The cost-benefit analysis should be the same: if it’s true that Israel is unprepared to cope with retaliatory strikes that would almost certainly follow an attack on Iran, and if it’s true that an Israeli strike would delay Iran’s nuclear program by a few years at most, the costs still outweigh the benefits regardless of how justified the government believes it is. Obviously, advocates of preventive war always think that they’re justified in striking at potential threats. That doesn’t immunize their states from the adverse consequences of these actions, and by all accounts the Israeli military appears to be well-aware of the adverse consequences that attacking Iran would have.

By the same token, Western public rhetoric about attacking Iran and “keeping all options on the table” might make the Iranian government think that it had nothing to lose by striking first at the states that are very publicly threatening it. That doesn’t actually make subsequent Iranian attacks defensive in nature, and it doesn’t make the risks of U.S. and Israeli retaliation any less serious. No one cares if a government believes its “preventive” war is justified unless the government eliminates the threat it is supposedly preventing. If the threat isn’t eliminated (or, in the case of Iraq, does not exist), there are still military and political costs for the government to pay.

If Noah is right that “Israelis do not, in general, think very far into the future – take care of today’s problems, and let tomorrow worry about tomorrow, is the national attitude,” that makes it even harder to believe that Israel would attack Iran in the hopes of delaying a nuclear program that might someday lead to a nuclear weapon. The case for Israeli “preventive” war against Iran is based on the assumption that Israel cannot “let tomorrow worry about tomorrow,” but that Israel must worry about tomorrow’s problems right now before it is “too late.” If Israelis don’t “think very far into the future,” wouldn’t that make the Israeli government more concerned about the prospect of Iranian retaliation in the short term?

If the U.S. joined Israel in an attack on Iran, I suspect that the reaction here at home would be colored very much by the public’s prior views about whether the U.S. ought to be involved in an Israeli-Iranian war. According to Rasmussen, 48% favor helping Israel under such circumstances, while 37% prefer the U.S. do nothing, 13% are unsure, and 2% want to help Iran. Americans in favor of U.S. support for Israel in such a war would indeed see Iranian retaliation as proof of Iranian villainy. That doesn’t make things any better for the American military and diplomatic personnel that will be targeted in the event of a war with Iran. I would like to think that the adverse consequences for U.S. forces in the region would be more important to U.S. policymakers than how the public would react to U.S. involvement in another unnecessary war.

P.S. If the Israeli military has a recent record of being unprepared for more straightforward military campaigns in neighboring Lebanon and Gaza, why is the Israeli government going to believe that it is capable of pulling off a difficult, risky air attack on the other side of the region? Wouldn’t the experience of the 2006 Lebanon war discourage Israeli leaders from launching a war against Iran? Bush rejected requests for aid that would have helped Israel attack Iran, and that was probably informed by the administration view that attacking Iran was a bad idea. Is Obama more likely than Bush to give Israel a green light?

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The editors at The National Interest make an incorrect claim in an otherwise sensible response to this Charles Lane article:

But Lane offers up a case that undermines his central point: Iran. Calls for war with Iran echo from every GOP debate, with only Paul (and previously Huntsman [bold mine-DL]) expressing reticence.

I know I’m beating a dead horse (and dead campaign) here, but can’t we all acknowledge at this point that Iran was one issue where Huntsman was completely on board with the hawkish views and “pro-Israel” one-upmanship of the rest of the field? While it’s true Paul didn’t call for war with Iran, he wasn’t really reticent. He was quite vocal in his opposition to any policy that he thought might put the U.S. on a path to war with Iran. Huntsman arguably went farther than any other hawk in his agitation for war, but because of his less combative personal style and his exaggerated reputation for moderation this somehow went largely unnoticed by most of his admirers and detractors. His Iran policy was virtually indistinguishable from that of McCain, whose campaign he imitated in other ways besides electoral strategy.

Huntsman insisted that sanctions were mostly useless, declared that Iran had already decided to build a nuclear weapon (for which he didn’t have any evidence), treated military action as virtually inevitable, repeatedly claimed that the U.S. needs to “remind the world what it means” that Israel is a friend of America, and said that “all elements of national power” should be available for use against Iran. Acknowledging Huntsman’s hawkishness on Iran would have strengthened the editors’ argument that neoconservative assumptions continue to have great influence among most Republican candidates.

Lane’s article gets some things right, but he also misunderstands Huntsman, so much so that at one point he says, “Huntsman has sounded almost like George McGovern at times….” No, he hasn’t. Maybe he has sounded like Richard Haass, but that’s quite far removed from “come home, America”! Huntsman’s “nation-building at home” line is one that Obama has also used. It’s a dumb phrase, but it means something very different from what McGovern had in mind.

Lane misses some other things. For example, he writes:

What none of the Republican candidates quite does is fully embrace the Bush administration “freedom agenda,” with its risky push for greater democracy in the Arab and Muslim world.

The example he cites is Bachmann’s opposition to the Libyan war (which was informed by her anti-jihadism more than anything else), which overlooks that Perry, Santorum, Romney, and (eventually) Gingrich supported the war, and it doesn’t pay close enough attention to the rhetoric most of the candidates have used about supporting opposition movements, especially in Iran. Even Huntsman joined the chorus on that point. The Iranian opposition doesn’t want the kind of “help” they’re offering, but these candidates remain firmly convinced of the desirability of democracy promotion provided that it doesn’t undermine U.S. allies. Of course, that was always the major caveat of Bush’s “freedom agenda.”

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The New York Times reports on the Tuareg insurgency in northern Mali fueled by the remnants of Gaddafi’s arsenal:

In life, he delighted in fomenting insurgencies in the African nations to the south. And in death, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is doing it all over again.

Hundreds of Tuareg rebels, heavily armed courtesy of Colonel Qaddafi’s extensive arsenal, have stormed towns in Mali’s northern desert in recent weeks, in one of the most significant regional shock waves to emanate directly from the colonel’s fall.

Who would have guessed that overthrowing a government in one country would have destabilizing effects on its neighbors?

As the report explains, this is different from previous Tuareg uprisings, because the insurgent group MNLA is much better-armed thanks to the weapons acquired during the war in Libya:

Analysts who study the region agree that the latest Tuareg resurgence is something new, and that Colonel Qaddafi is largely responsible, posthumously.

“This is a fairly significant military force,” said Pierre Boilley, a Tuareg expert at the University of Paris. “The game has changed. They can directly attack the Malian Army. I think the army will have trouble.”

Stratfor’s profile of the MNLA and the situation in Mali can be found here.

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Greg Scoblete answers last week’s post on Israel and Iran:

I think his response conflates a question of efficacy (is it a good idea?) and probability (would they do it?). I tend to agree that a strike is probably on balance a bad idea for many of the reasons highlighted in Larison’s post.

But I also think that when push comes to shove Israel is willing to tolerate the risks associated with a strike much more than they are willing to tolerate the risks (as they see them) of not attacking.

Scoblete is right that I am basing my judgment about the likelihood of an Israeli attack on how likely it is that such an attack would achieve its objectives. Since it seems clear from all accounts that the Israeli military understands that an attack would not significantly delay Iran’s nuclear program, and they see that an attack would invite serious retaliation from Iran and its proxies that would threaten the civilian population in Israel, we have to believe that the Israeli government is willing to court immediate risks to its people for the sake of protecting itself against a threat that does not yet exist. The last two Israeli governments have made some blunders in recent years, but they cannot be so reckless as to start a regional war that wouldn’t even eliminate Iran’s nuclear program.

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