You could be forgiven for thinking that this administration is intentionally conducting its campaign against Islamic State militants as incompetently as it can. In a roundabout way, the White House might provide some post hoc vindication to the nation’s leading noninterventionists; an ideology that has no political home, but is currently best typified by Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul. Due to the president’s feckless and spasmodic approach to addressing the crisis in Syria – a nightmare half a decade in the making – many of the non-interventionist’s admonitions now seem prescient.
“It is chaos over there. We will be sending arms into chaos,” Paul warned in a March speech to his Senate colleagues. It is a theme he has been echoing since he opposed intervention into the Syrian civil conflict in mid-2013. “This is an important moment,” he told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. “You will be funding, today, the allies of al-Qaeda.” In the absence of Barack Obama’s directionless and self-serving approach to the Syrian conflict, this admonition might have been remembered as just one of many overreaching rhetorical flourishes. Sadly for American interests abroad, Paul can claim to be foresighted.
Today, the United States is literally arming al-Qaeda.
American commanders confirmed recently that some of the handful of militants with the New Syrian Forces surrendered approximately 25 percent of their equipment to the al-Qaeda-linked group Nusra Front. “The equipment, which included U.S.-issued ammunition and pick-up trucks, was ‘surrendered’ to a Nusra Front affiliate in order to ensure that the rebel fighters could pass freely through territories controlled by the terrorist group, the Pentagon said,” the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo reported. “The arms exchange occurred after a group of around 70 NSF graduates crossed into Syria on the morning of Sept. 20, according to the Pentagon.”
That’s the clearest picture that the Pentagon could provide to reporters regarding what might have happened to the latest batch of US-backed fighters to infiltrate Syria earlier this month. It doesn’t get any prettier from there. A Monday dispatch via Nancy Youssef in The Daily Beast revealed the extent of the confusion among Washington policymakers when it comes to measuring their successes – or lack thereof, as the case may be – in the fight against ISIS in Syria.
“The Pentagon, responding to reports in The Daily Beast that a specific U.S.-trained commander had defected along with most of his unit to a group affiliated with al Qaeda, will now concede that an unnamed commander who actually had been rejected by the U.S. as a possible trainee for the fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State had somehow acquired access to U.S. equipment that he then handed over to al Qaeda affiliates,” Youssef reported. The Pentagon initially believed that it could account for “100 percent” of the equipment provided to anti-ISIS rebels only to sharply revise their assessment downward in subsequent reports.
Paul backers, liberal non-interventionists, and other proponents of Fortress America will pounce on this setback for U.S. interest – and it is a setback – but legislators would be wise to ignore their triumphalism. The present disastrous state of American foreign policy toward the Middle East as a whole is not an argument in favor of isolationism but a testament to the value of robust and early intervention into conflicts that threaten Western interests and collective security.
Had the United States not reluctantly drawn “red lines” that would trigger a military response, only to fail to follow through on them, the present might have been a dramatically different one. Bashar al-Assad had lost all international legitimacy following the use of chemical weapons on civilian populations. Today, his regime is propped up militarily by his benefactors in Moscow and Tehran. Though they would have resented it greatly, neither Russia nor Iran would have been able to react with much consternation if the West had responded to Assad’s atrocities by establishing no-fly zones across the country. While Western powers protected civilians and anti-Damascus rebels from the air, the regional coalition Obama reluctantly assembled to execute strikes on Syrian territory in 2014 could have been cobbled together two years earlier to effect changes on the ground. Understandably, there was almost no stomach among members of the international community in 2012 to be party to an “unbelievably small” war that would have been “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”
This is admittedly, however, all counterfactual. The present realities are untenable, but the means of addressing them are all in their own way suboptimal. The United States continues to mouth feebly a demand that Bashar al-Assad must go, all the while appearing to nod favorably toward a transition government that includes the delegitimized president. Washington insists that Iran and Russia not exacerbate the situation in Syria further, but undermines that message by engaging in publicized dialogues with both countries. In doing so, the administration is communicating to the world that the rogues’ gambit in Syria is paying off in reduced isolation and heightened stature. There are no longer moderate Syrian rebels to arm. There are no clear secular, Western-oriented proxies upon whom Washington can rely in order to form the backbone of a stable transitional authority in a post-Assad world. Committing American troops to the Syrian hornets’ nest would likely be a far bloodier affair than it would have been in 2012 or even 2013. The state of play in the Middle East is a tragedy without many redeeming factors or an end in sight.
It would, however, be a perversion of logic to let politicians like Paul who advocated for non-intervention from the start cite the chaotic fruits of that policy preference as vindication for their views. A spiraling refugee crisis, the casual use of weapons of mass destruction by rogue government and terrorist groups alike, and a medieval terrorist organization that makes al-Qaeda appear tame and rational by comparison; these are the wages of inaction. The lessons of Syria, if there are any to be learned, should first be that no matter how bad a foreign crisis appears today, it could be worse. It is not always advisable to wait and see just how vexing and intractable a foreign predicament might become.
