fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Syria, Iraq, and Going “All In”

Max Boot packs several lazy assumptions from our foreign policy debates into this paragraph: The flip side of a victory for Assad and his patrons in Hezbollah and Tehran is that the U.S. has lost. Obama’s defeat in Syria hasn’t been nearly as costly, at least so far, in American blood or treasure as President […]

Max Boot packs several lazy assumptions from our foreign policy debates into this paragraph:

The flip side of a victory for Assad and his patrons in Hezbollah and Tehran is that the U.S. has lost. Obama’s defeat in Syria hasn’t been nearly as costly, at least so far, in American blood or treasure as President Bush’s temporary defeat in Iraq, from 2003 to 2007–but it is likely to prove more enduring and more damaging to American interests in the region because there is no “surge” on the horizon to save the day.

The big mistake here is to conclude that a significantly weakened Assad regime represents a “loss” for the U.S. If Assad has “won” by retaining his hold on power and control over some of the country, that is not much of a victory. It is only when compared against the breezy, premature assumption that Assad would and must “go” that it seems like any kind of defeat for the U.S. and its allies. If not for some foolish rhetoric and excessive optimism in 2011, we would be in a better position to recognize the conflict in Syria as the very damaging and costly liability for Assad and his Iranian patron that it is.

The Syrian civil war has been a disaster for Syria and its neighbors, but there is no reason to think that conditions would be noticeably better if the U.S. had gone “all in” as Boot wanted and helped to bring down the government. It is worth considering how much worse off the region might still be if the regime had collapsed early on as many Westerners hoped, how many more refugees and displaced people there would be in need of assistance, and how much more chaotic the entire country would be. As terrible as things are in Syria, it is still very difficult to imagine how the U.S. would have improved anything if it had gone “all in.” Given the experience of the last decade, it should be only too easy to imagine how things might be even worse than they are.

The mythology surrounding the “surge” has always been tiresome, but it becomes positively dangerous when people rely on it to defend the Iraq war as some sort of “victory.” If one believes that the greatest foreign policy debacle of our generation was merely a “temporary defeat” that was “saved” in the end, one is likely to believe all sorts of unreasonable and unfounded things about American victories and defeats overseas. It still impresses me how the same people that urged on the Iraq war think that they can now credibly warn about growing Iranian regional influence when they still can’t or won’t acknowledge what an enormous boon the overthrow of Hussein has been to Iran. If one judges the success or failure of U.S. policy in the region by how much it has increased Iran’s influence, the Iraq war was undeniably a massive defeat, and that came about by heeding the wishes of those that wanted the U.S. go “all in” there.

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here