A lesson before the fighting
|
Version 0 of 1. When will most Americans and many political leaders recognize — as President Obama has — that there are limits to our ability to solve other countries’ problems? And when will we learn that our views may not work for others? That’s especially true when dealing with cultures, religions, languages and histories that we don’t fully understand. Yes, that’s right. I am talking about the Middle East. Rory Kennedy’s moving documentary about U.S. misadventures in leaving Saigon, “Last Days of Vietnam,” shows that later generations still haven’t learned critical lessons. Robert McNamara, Defense secretary during a critical period of the Vietnam War, wrote in his book “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam ” that “Our misjudgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.” Just how much did the George W. Bush administration know about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and its history before the United States led an invading coalition and then tried to reshape the Baghdad government? Three weeks before the Iraq war began, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told the House Budget Committee on Feb. 27, 2003, that Iraq had “on the order of $15 [billion] to $20 billion a year in oil exports which . . . might finally be turned to a good use instead of building Saddam’s palaces.” He went on: “There is a lot of money there. To assume that we are going to pay for it [Iraq post-war reconstruction] is just wrong.” He was just wrong. Like other Bush officials, Wolfowitz also said Iraqis are “23 million of the most educated people in the Arab world, who are going to welcome us as liberators.” He added: “The notion that we are going to earn more enemies by going in and getting rid of what every Arab knows is one of the worst tyrants — and they have many governing them — is just nonsense.” That proved to be nonsense. We’re still trying to understand Iraq. And just what do we know about Syria, where we have called for its blood-stained president, Bashar al-Assad, to step down? And what about the barbarous terrorist group Islamic State, which we are now bombing in Syria and Iraq and training soldiers to fight? Do Americans know that beginning in 2006, four years of devastating drought caused enormous crop failures for Syrian farmers, resulting in 800,000 Syrians losing their livelihoods, according to a U.N. report? Hundreds of thousands moved to cities seeking jobs, where crowding already existed after an influx of 200,000 Iraqi refugees who had fled to Syria after the U.S.-led invasion. When the first protests against the Assad regime began on March 15, 2011, in the mostly Sunni town of Daraa, the issue was the government’s failure to react to the drought, exacerbated by drops in subsidies and salaries. Those demonstrations spread because they gave voice to decades-long secular and ethnic anger that was always there within the country’s Sunni majority as well as Kurd, Druze and other Syrian minorities. The Assad family’s brutal use of force had held those frustrations in check. In the early 1980s, for example, Bashar’s father [Hafez al-Assad] destroyed the town of Hama, killing at least 10,000 people to end an uprising by the Sunni-led Muslim Brotherhood. As longtime Middle East expert William R. Polk wrote in December for The Atlantic, “Failure to act decisively, Hama had shown, inevitably led to insurrection. Compromise could come only after order was assured. So Bashar followed the lead of his father who ordered a crackdown. . . . It failed. . . . So what had begun as a food and water issue gradually turned into a political and religious cause.” What about the U.S. attempts to find moderate Syrians to fight the Islamic State and Assad? Where did the hundreds if not thousands of rebel groups come from that oppose Assad? Historically, Syrian territory has been home to different religious and ethnic peoples, many who came as the result of invasions or migrations. Over four centuries under the Ottoman Empire, the majority Sunni Muslims lived alongside enclaves and neighborhoods in cities and towns that took on their own identities. Christians, Shiite Muslims such as Alawis and Ismailis, along with Jews, Druze, Yazidis and Kurds, kept their customs and languages. After World War I, France was granted the mandate over Syria. The French tried to make it more of a nation but faced decades of uprisings and a split between Muslims. Out of that came the first Assad regime in 1971. The militias trying to overthrow Assad resemble groups that fought the French, each with its own goals. Mixed in are foreign jihadists who dream of a new Islamic caliphate, far beyond Syria’s borders. Among them is the Islamic State. Americans must realize this is not an old-fashioned fight between forces of freedom and tyranny, good and evil. Obama appears to recognize that there are no good on-the-ground options in Syria for the United States. Staying in the air seems to be the right way to play our limited leadership role. For previous Fine Print columns, go to washingtonpost.com/fedpage. |