12 September, 2013

“Syria Is Not A Country”

“Syria Is Not A Country” � The Dish:
The reason we have such a brutal civil war right now is the same reason we still have a brutal civil war still going on in Iraq. The decades’ long, brutal oppression of a majority group has finally broken with the Arab Spring. All the tensions and hatreds and suspicions that built up in that long period of division and destruction are suddenly finding expression. Inevitably, this will mean much more sectarian bloodletting in the short, medium, and long run. It may mean an endless cycle of violence. The idea that these parties can reach a political agreement to end the civil war in the foreseeable future is as plausible in Syria as it was in Iraq. It still hasn’t happened in Iraq – after over 100,000 sectarian murders and an exhausting civil conflict – and after we occupied it for a decade and poured trillions of dollars down the drain.

Any political solution to Syria is more than a heavy lift. It’s an impossible one. Only the parties involved can make it happen and none of them is anywhere close to that right now. For the US to take responsibility for this mess, to take on the task of finding a negotiated settlement, would be as quixotic as it would be bankrupting – of both money and human resources. By luck or design, Obama has now handed that responsibility to Putin. He’s welcome to it.

America, the anti-imperial nation, has no business trying to make British colonial experiments endure into the 21st Century. No business at all. It’s a mug’s game – and no one in the region will ever, ever give the US credit or any tangible benefits for the Sisyphean task. We will be blamed for trying and blamed for not trying. We will be blamed for succeeding and blamed for failing.