With
each passing day our new president is discovering that every big
problem he faces is like Obamacare — if there were a good, easy solution
it would have been found already, and even the less good solutions are
more than his own party is ready to pay for or the country is ready to
tolerate.
But
on Tuesday, tragically, Trump got this lesson in foreign policy via a
truly vile poison-gas attack on Syrian civilians, many of them children,
reportedly perpetrated by the pro-Russian, pro-Iranian, murderous
regime of Bashar al-Assad.
President Trump came to office with the naïve view that he could make fighting ISIS
the centerpiece of his Middle East policy — and just drop more bombs
and send more special forces than President Barack Obama did to prove
his toughness. Trump also seemed to think that fighting ISIS would be a
bridge to building a partnership with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
It
was naïve because ISIS does not exist in a vacuum — nor is it the only
bad actor in the region. ISIS was produced as a Sunni Muslim reaction to
massive overreach by Iran in Iraq, where Iranian-backed Shiite militias
and the Iraqi government forces of Nouri al-Maliki tried to crush all
vestiges of Sunni power in that country and make it a vassal of Iran.
(If you think ISIS is sick, Google the phrase “power drills to the head
and Shiite militias in Iraq” and you will discover that ISIS did not
invent depravity in that part of the world.)
Continue reading the main story
The Iranian/Shiite onslaught against Iraqi Sunnis ran parallel with Assad’s Shiite-Alawite regime in Syria,
turning what started out as a multisectarian democracy movement in
Syria into a sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Assad figured
that if he just gunned down or poison-gassed enough Syrian Sunnis he
could turn their democracy efforts into a sectarian struggle against his
Shiite-Alawite regime — and presto, it worked.
The
opposition almost toppled him, but with the aid of Russia, Iran and
Iran’s Hezbollah militia, Assad was able to pummel the Syrian Sunnis
into submission as well.
ISIS
was the deformed creature created by a pincers movement — Russia, Iran,
Assad and Hezbollah in Syria on one flank and Iran and pro-Iranian
militias in Iraq on the other. When Trump said he wanted to partner with
Russia to crush ISIS, it was music to the ears of Assad, Russia, Iran
and Hezbollah. Like everyone else, they figured they could manipulate
Trump’s ignorance to their advantage.
So,
last week, someone named “Rex Tillerson” (who, I am told, is the U.S.
secretary of state) declared that the “longer-term status of President
Assad will be decided by the Syrian people” — as if the Syrian people
will be having an Iowa-like primary on that subject soon. U.N.
Ambassador Nikki Haley made the same point even more cravenly, telling
reporters that the United States’ “priority is no longer to sit there
and focus on getting Assad out.”
Is
there any wonder that Assad felt no compunction about perpetrating what
this paper described as “one of the deadliest chemical weapons attacks
in years in Syria,” killing dozens of people in Idlib Province, the last
major holdout for Syrian rebels.
Mind you, Donald Trump
did not cause this Syria problem, and he is right to complain that it
was left in his lap by the Obama team, which had its own futile strategy
for dealing with Syria — trying to negotiate with Russia and Iran, the
key players there, without creating any leverage on the ground.
But
if you’re looking for a culprit for why America has refused to
intervene in Syria, you have to look both to your left and to your
right.
“The
only obstacle to putting real U.S. military leverage into Syria is
democracy in America,” explained the foreign policy expert Michael
Mandelbaum, author of “Mission Failure: America and the World in the
Post-Cold War Era.” “The American public simply does not want to spend
the blood and treasure to produce what would probably be a less awful
but still not good outcome in Syria.” And that is a byproduct of the
failed George W. Bush interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Alas,
though, I now think doing nothing is a mistake. Just letting Assad keep
trying to restore control over all of Syria will mean endless
massacres. A negotiated power-sharing solution is impossible; there is
no trust.
The
least bad solution is a partition of Syria and the creation of a
primarily Sunni protected area — protected by an international force,
including, if necessary, some U.S. troops. That should at least stop the
killing — and the refugee flows that are fueling a populist-nationalist
backlash all across the European Union.
It
won’t be pretty or easy. But in the Cold War we put 400,000 troops in
Europe to keep the sectarian peace there and to keep Europe on a
democracy track. Having NATO
and the Arab League establish a safe zone in Syria for the same purpose
is worth a try. And then if Putin and Iran want to keep the butcher
Assad in Damascus, they can have him.
It’s either that, President Trump, or get ready for a lot more days like Tuesday. As I said, every problem
is like Obamacare — never as easy as you thought to fix. The least bad
alternatives can be forged only by a compromise in the middle, and, like
your hotels, they’ll all soon have your name on them.
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