In this world, it is often dangerous to be an enemy of the
United States, said Henry Kissinger in 1968, but to be a friend is fatal.
The South Vietnamese would come to appreciate the insight.
So it is today with Aleppo, where savage reprisals against
U.S.-backed rebels are taking place in that hellhole of human rights.
Yet, again, the wrong lessons are being drawn from the disaster.
According to The Washington Post, the bloodbath is a result of a
U.S. failure to intervene more decisively in Syria’s civil war: “Aleppo
represents a meltdown of the West’s moral and political will — and … a collapse
of U.S. leadership.
“By
refusing to intervene against the Assad regime’s atrocities, or even to enforce
the ‘red line’ he declared on the use of chemical weapons, President Obama
created a vacuum that was filled by Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Revolutionary
Guard.”
But the
blunder was not in staying out of Syria’s civil war, but in going in. Aleppo is a bloodbath born of interventionism.
On Aug. 18, 2011, President Obama said, “For the sake of the
Syrian people the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” Western
leaders echoed the Obama — “Assad must go!”
Assad, however, declined to go, and crushed an Arab Spring uprising
of the kind that had ousted Hosni Mubarak in Cairo. When the U.S. began to fund
and train rebels to overthrow him, Assad rallied his troops and began bringing
in allies — Hezbollah, Iran and Russia.
It was with their indispensable assistance that he recaptured
Aleppo in the decisive battle of the war. And now America has lost credibility
all over the Arab and Muslim world.
How did this debacle come about?
First, in calling for the overthrow of Bashar Assad, who had not
attacked or threatened us, we acted not in our national interests, but out of
democratist ideology. Assad is a dictator. Dictators are bad. So Assad must go.
Yet we had no idea who would replace him.
It soon became clear that Assad’s most formidable enemies, and
probable successors, would be the al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of
al-Qaida, or ISIS, then carrying out grisly executions in their base camp in
Raqqa.
U.S.
policy became to back the “good” rebels in Aleppo, bomb the “bad” rebels in
Raqqa and demand that Assad depart. An absurd policy.
Nor had the American people been consulted.
After a decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they saw no U.S.
vital interests at risk in who ruled Damascus, so long as it was not the
terrorists of ISIS or al-Qaida.
Then came Obama’s “red line” warning: The U.S. would take
military action if chemical weapons were used in Syria’s civil war.
What undercut this ultimatum was that Congress had never
authorized the president to take military action against Syria, and the
American people wanted to stay out of Syria’s civil war.
When Assad allegedly used chemical weapons and Obama threatened
air strikes, the nation rose as one to demand that Congress keep us out of the
war. Secretary of State John Kerry was reduced to assuring us that any U.S.
strike would be “unbelievably small.”
By 2015, as Assad army’s seemed to be breaking, Vladimir Putin
boldly stepped in with air power, alongside Hezbollah and Iran. Why? Because
all have vital interests in preserving the Assad regime.
Bashar Assad is Russia’s ally and provides Putin with his sole
naval base in the Med. Assad’s regime is the source of Hezbollah’s resupply and
weapons to deter, and, if necessary, fight Israel.
To Iran, Assad is an ally against Saudi Arabia and the Sunni
awakening and a crucial link in the Shiite Crescent that extends from Tehran to
Baghdad to Damascus to Beirut.
All have greater stakes in this
civil war than do we, and have been willing to invest more time, blood and
treasure. Thus they have, so far, prevailed.
The lessons for Trump from the Aleppo disaster?
Do not even consider getting into a new Middle East war — unless
Congress votes to authorize it, the American people are united behind it, vital
U.S. interests are clearly imperiled, and we know how the war ends and when we
can come home.
For wars have a habit of destroying
presidencies.
Korea broke Truman. Vietnam broke Lyndon Johnson. Iraq broke the
Republican Congress in 2006 and gave us Obama in 2008.
And the Iran war now being talked up in the think tanks and on
the op-ed pages would be the end of the Trump presidency.
Before starting such a war, Donald Trump might call in Bob Gates
and ask him what he meant at West Point in February 2011 when he told the
cadets:
“Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again
send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa
should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/12/patrick-j-buchanan/lessons-trump/
