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Arming Rebels Doesn’t Work (II)

Kagan ignores the costs of U.S. backing for foreign insurgencies.

Robert Kagan tries to make the best of the failures of past U.S. efforts to arm insurgents:

If the CIA report failed to note these facts, it should have, for they would have provided an instructive lesson for the president on Syria. For while it may have been true that the Nicaraguan rebels probably could never have succeeded in defeating the Sandinistas [bold mine-DL], that turned out to be beside the point. So long as they were fighting reasonably effectively, there was always the possibility that they might win. War is full of surprises.

Assuming that one wanted to apply this “lesson” from Nicaragua to the current conflict in Syria, we would have to believe that Assad could have been forced into making major political concessions when faced with a sufficiently well-armed and trained insurgency. That seems far-fetched at best, and the fact that something like this happened in one instance under very different circumstances is hardly a good reason to look to it as a model. It seems more likely that greater U.S. support for insurgents earlier on would have prompted Assad’s patrons to increase their support for the regime. This would not have resulted in a political compromise that led to Assad’s removal from power or the creation of a new government, but would have increased the number of dead Syrians on both sides of the conflict without changing very much.

Not surprisingly, Kagan doesn’t attempt to justify the obvious failures of other anticommunist insurgencies carried out as part of the Reagan Doctrine. For instance, support for UNITA achieved nothing except to fuel a terrible civil war. Even if one can discern some partial “success” that came from backing one or two insurgencies in the past, there are enough examples of complete failure that should make everyone very wary of pursuing such a policy. There may not be any absolute certainties or guarantees in foreign policy, but there are policies that fail often enough or do so much harm while “succeeding” that policymakers should know to stay away from them. Arming insurgencies to topple foreign regimes is one of them.

Kagan also neglects to mention the tens of thousands of people that were killed along the way to this “success” in Nicaragua and likewise overlooks the crimes committed by the insurgents. These things would remind us that the decision to take sides in another country’s civil war makes conditions for the people living there far worse, so that even “successful” support for insurgencies comes at a great price paid by the people of that country. Doing this is extremely difficult to justify under any circumstances, and it is even harder to defend doing it when the most likely outcome is nothing but more bloodshed and devastation.

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