CANNAN: No Easy Solutions In Syria

The photograph above was one of AFP’s finalists of the year.  You can view the portfolio of finalists who submitted their reporting of the Syrian Civil War by clicking here.  ~Editors

As Americans and the rest of the world wait for the first state election returns to come in tonight, I’d like to ask you to look farther afield at a critically important global topic that has no chance of being settled tonight.  There are indeed world events far from Florida or Ohio that should never have essentially vanished from our national conversation,  even if our news media quickly lost interest (in early 2009) in covering human catastrophes that were both hastened and prolonged by American foreign policy.

After more than a year in which we have become obsessed with hot microphone revelations, a plagiarized speech, deleted emails, and hammering blackberry phones to bits, I’d like to remind you that approximately 420,000 people have been violently killed in a country named Syria over the last 5 years.  And counting.  Want some perspective on that?  The war in Iraq from the invasion in 2003 until the US withdrawal in 2011 took about 150,000 lives.  Obviously, these numbers have to be rough estimates.  But the both the scale and the scope of what continues today in Syria remains tough to grasp.  Suffice it to say that all of the fervent warnings from Middle East experts back in 2010 that a war in Syria would be on a scale not seen even in Iraq or Afghanistan turned out to be very accurate.

As with most any Civil War, what began as a reasonable yearning for political change and a better life on the part of some Syrians quickly spiraled out of control.  What we are left with as a human family here in late 2016 to look upon with horror is a confounding and complicated bloodbath involving at least five local warring armies on the ground that has also become an flashpoint in the second Cold War between Washington and Moscow.  As bad as civil wars can be, Syria has proven once more that proxy civil wars between superpowers fought on the ground by competing regional powers are the worst we have to show for ourselves as a species since the end of World War II.  El Salvador didn’t ever turn out to be Spanish for Vietnam, but Syria certainly seems to be the Arabic translation, albeit without tens of thousands of US ground troops in heavy combat.  But there remains plenty of potential for that to happen also as the war grinds on and on.  Campaign talk of a “no fly zone” in Syria might seem very familiar, but there weren’t Russian airbases and aircraft in Iraq competing for airspace.

While American leftists still feign outrage over some rather ancient US-backed overthrows of foreign governments during the first Cold War – Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and Chile (1973) to name a few – they remain largely incapable of recognizing what their beloved Obama administration has been very prolific in doing the same thing a lot more recently.  This is what Americans, left and right, need to face up to and finally acknowledge.

In Libya (2011), Egypt (2011), and Ukraine (2014), the Obama administration successfully backed the overthrow of foreign governments.  Full stop.  In Ukraine, that government was a democratically elected one that was actively seeking better relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia next door.  For an administration elected eight years ago as the “anti-war” ticket that immediately set out to pursue a “reset” of relations with Russia, it seems almost impossible now that this could have all unraveled so quickly.  But it did, and none of us should be surprised that a new Cold War is upon us.

But the Obama administration’s ill conceived and terribly deployed attempt to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria from afar did not quickly bring down his government like it did elsewhere.  Instead, it enabled the shocking rise of ISIS, the fracturing of the country into several warring territories, and the beginning of a humanitarian nightmare that continues in Syria.  Now we are left with a 5 year tale of human misery that spans several time zones and even three continents.  One that actually makes Iraq during the Bush years pale in comparison.  Why?

Historians will have to answer that with time.  My best hypothesis right now is that a combination of President Obama’s media and ego-driven view of himself as a transformational figure and Secretary Clinton’s personal affinity for power and prestige both took a big hit with the 2010 midterm election results, and they decided thereafter that their quest to remake America in their image would have to move abroad after such an electoral beating at home.  Whatever the case may be, they should have backed off their bizarre obsession with the removal of Assad’s government – a well known Putin ally and host of a Russian naval base – years ago when it became abundantly clear that these secular and democratic Syrian rebels they were arming didn’t really exist to any meaningful extent.  Instead, they doubled down, continued to arm shadowy groups that in some cases turned out to be ISIS, and then began bombing both ISIS and Syrian government targets.

After so many years of an ever-worsening catastrophe in Syria, is it too late now to arrange some kind of deal with the Kurds, Assad, Turkey, Mr. Putin, and Iran that at least can defeat the Jihadists and end the worst of the current war?  Is it too late to stop the second Cold War before it spreads from Aleppo and Donbass to the Baltic countries, Moldova, and even the high seas?  It might be..

We may yet see five more years of misery and horror in Syria, and a greater war spread throughout the region.  I think the key here would be for the larger powers, personal egos checked, to acknowledge that there are no great or quick answers here – but also that the continued military and political stalemate is the worst of all options.  Our next president is going to have to deal with the Syrian debacle, and with a Vladimir Putin whose United Russia party just won 343 of 450 seats in the Russian Duma.  Let’s hope that whomever that is has the wisdom and foresight to make a good deal with some bad people, and recognize that the previous American administration were also some of the bad people who have been making things worse in Syria for many years now.  Refraining from publicly calling Mr. Putin a dictator would be a good start.


Sean Cannan is a registered independent who holds a BA degree in International Relations from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an AAS degree in Information Systems Technology from Piedmont Virginia Community College.  In addition to holding several professional IT certifications, he is also a founding member of the Human Rights and Scientific Honesty Initiative. 

Сейчас уже никто не берёт классический кредит, приходя в отделение банка. Это уже в далёком прошлом. Одним из главных достижений прогресса является возможность получать кредиты онлайн, что очень удобно и практично, а также выгодно кредиторам, так как теперь они могут ссудить деньги даже тем, у кого рядом нет филиала их организации, но есть интернет. http://credit-n.ru/zaymyi.html - это один из сайтов, где заёмщики могут заполнить заявку на получение кредита или микрозайма онлайн. Посетите его и оцените удобство взаимодействия с банками и мфо через сеть.