As many Americans, led in part by advisers closest to the president (and celebrated by the media), begin to itch for another war to overthrow Assad in Syria, there will be many among my peers and friends who disagree with me. So let me clear a few items.
First, I may be adamantly opposed to your position on the matter, but I will still treat you respectfully and respect our friendship.
Second, there is a moral contradiction in any war that attempts to “export American freedom and democracy.” Nations like Syria have virtually no tradition of democracy. And even the great visionaries of the world must deal with the cultural realities of the places in which they seek to intervene.
Third, U.S. interventionist policy in the Middle East, from replacing the semi-democratically elected prime minister of Iran in 1953 and bolstering the power of the king, to supporting the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the 1980s, to supporting Saddam Hussein that same decade in war against Iran, to then throwing him out and placing Iran’s allies in power in Iraq, to throwing out Ghadaffi in Libya… have all resulted in serious unintended (to give the benefit of the doubt) consequences. Fighting against Assad is, in effect, fighting with Salafist (Islamic extremists) groups such as ISIS.
Fourth, the number of people killed in nations where the U.S. has intervened is far higher since these interventions (see video in the comments). Especially for Christians, moral consistency means that while we are pro-life of the unborn here, we are also pro-life globally. American bombs and drones have also killed thousands of men, women and children. That doesn’t mean we must be pacifists, but the Christian view of war ought to be considerably more aligned with what Augustine and later thinkers developed into the Just War Theory (which I discuss here), or the theories of modern conservatives of the 1940s, such as Russell Kirk.
Fifth, strikes against Russian-backed Assad lure the U.S. closer to direct conflict with Russia, which has also been strengthening ties with China and Iran. Given points three through five, even if we abandon principle and do a simple and pragmatic “cost-benefit” analysis, intervention still has a far less-than-stellar record. Is it worth the risk?
Sixth, if you have not, PLEASE read up on the history of the Middle East and the history of American interventionism. Here is my series on the modern Middle East, well worth the time to read if you want to understand what is going on much better:
I wasn’t sure if I would get back to this thread right away or not, as I’ve had a few more lined up on the docket. Then I was watching CBS Evening News tonight (with Scott Pelley), and they had a story intended to pull the heart strings of viewers. Interviewing a Yemeni refugee, they analyzed Trump’s executive orders halting any new refugees entering the United States from a number of Middle East Islamic countries.
Here’s the video:
Now, before I get blasted for my heartlessness on refugee policy by some or my ignorance of national security concerns by others, let me save you the trouble: Commenting on those is not the primary purpose of this post. Want to know my personal opinion on those? Sign up for my email.
I certainly do not have any problem with the story, or CBS interviewing the Yemeni girl. Her story is genuine, as far as I can tell, and there are many like it. It is just such tragedies as this that cause me to feel obligated to clarify reality–a reality all but ignored by the media and unknown by many people. That reality? That the U.S. military is currently subsidizing, equipping and actively assisting the Saudi Arabian government in its massive military operation against Yemen, including deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian aid groups, like Doctors Without Borders.
Here’s the situation in short:
The capital of Yemen (Sana’a) is currently under the control of the Houthis, a term that designates more of a political sect than a religious one, though the Houthis are primarily a branch off of Shi’ite Islam. These Houthis are currently being attacked by Saudi Arabian forces, who, with U.S. support, are siding with an ISIS/Al-Qaeda group inside of Yemen to overthrow the Houthis. In the process of what are primarily air and missile strikes, scores of civilians have been killed. According to the U.N., the war has displaced up to 2.8 million Yemeni (more than 400,000 families), killed around 4,125 civilians and wounded over 7200 (as of October 2016) (More information here, also linked at the end.)
What’s the backstory?
From 1978 to 2012, Ali Abdullah Saleh was the “elected” (staged elections without other options) president of Yemen (North Yemen until the unification of Yemen in 1990) – one of the many dictators in the Middle East (read about the rise of these dictators here). In 2009, the Obama administration began giving massive sums of money to Saleh to help fight Al-Qaeda in North Yemen (from over $30 million in 2009 to $176 million in 2010). Instead of fighting Al-Qaeda, Saleh used this money to help finance war against Houthis (who are not affiliated with Al-Qaeda). When Saleh began using this money against anti-regime protesters in 2011 (an outflow of the widespread “Arab Spring”), Obama cut the funding, but also authorized Hillary Clinton’s State Department to help ensure the election of Saleh’s vice president in a one-man election.
Ousted, Saleh then left with massive portions of his military, ironically joining the Houthis, who were happy to welcome their former enemy so long as he could now help them attack the new government in Sana’a. Saleh and the Houthis easily overthrew the new president and re-took the capital, despite the Iranian warning that doing so would provoke Saudi Arabia. The Iranian warning proved to be right, as it was not long after in 2012 that the Saudi government began its attack on Yemen.
Why did the U.S. agree to aid the Saudis? Notwithstanding a long-time alliance with the Saudis, there was a deliberate effort on the part of American policy-makers to “placate” (words from the White House under Obama) the Saudis after tension regarding the Iranian nuclear deal, a deal that upset the Saudi royal family.
So where does that put us now? I could go into detail into the all the consequences of the U.S. aid to Saudi Arabia, but I’ll leave that for my sources below. The United States is arming, equipping and actively helping an attack that is creating many of the very refugees that tug on our emotions with stories like that shared by CBS News. And these policies, for now, continue under Trump.
Now, don’t get me wrong, there are no good guys and bad guys here. The Houthis are no saintly regime or group (they are actually largely socialist totalitarians). But U.S. policy-makers are not responsible for the actions of the Houthis. Like everyone else, they are only responsible for their own.
I’ll leave you with a couple of items. Human Rights Watch has put out a report on the events in Yemen in 2016. This report goes into a great deal of detail on the war crimes in Yemen from both sides, including Saudi attacks on hospitals and civilian targets. And it’s not their clumsiness doing that; the U.S. is offering our own precision-targeting abilities as part of our aid. You can review the report here.
And here’s a video I pulled from that report. Yes, this one also tugs at heart-strings. This one helps round out the story.
A quick TV sound bite just doesn’t do justice to the current mess the U.S. has decided merits its own entanglement in and attention to in the Middle East. That’s what this post will ultimately attempt to clear up.
My first three posts on the Middle East conflicts laid out important background necessary to understanding the current scenario. You can access those here: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
Now on to our fourth part (but perhaps not our last…?).
Recall the U.S. interventions discussed in the previous post. If you need a refresher, I’d recommend revisiting that post before continuing with this one. If you’re prepared with where we’re at in the narrative, then read on!
There is one more event that I need to discuss to help build our context, this one vaguely alluded to in the previous post. To complicate the web of policy, prior to the First Iraq War in 1990-91, the U.S. policy had actually been in support of Saddam
A group of Iranians during the 1970s
Hussein during his war with Iran (1980-1988). In 1979, after a long-brewing backlash against the U.S.-backed Shah in Iran, demonstrations turned into revolution—or perhaps more accurately described, as is often the case in revolution, in multiple revolutions with varying ends. Ultimately, fundamentalist Shi’ite Muslims won the day, installing the Ayatollah as sovereign in social, religious and political life, and transforming what had progressed into a remarkably secular culture back toward their version of Shari’a.
Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-1989)
In all this mess, the U.S. was a natural adversary of the new regime. In addition to propping the Shah up back in 1953, they also allowed him sanctuary in the U.S. in 1979 when Iranians demanded he stand trial in Iran.
Consequently, when strongman dictator, Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, declared war on and invaded Iran the following year in 1980, the U.S. (and other Western countries) readily offered financial and supply aid. The long and bloody war essentially ended in a draw. (Incidentally, the Ayatollah’s effective halt to the Iraqi army and the war itself helped rally
far greater support for the Ayatollah among Iranians than prior to the war). And it was just a few years later that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, sparking the U.S. retaliation that resulted in the 1990-91 operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield. And we’ve made it back to that part of the story.
You’ll have to forgive me for unsatisfactorily omitting narrative elements that help to clarify the Second Iraq War beginning in 2003. For now, it is sufficient to explain that after the First Iraq War, the United Nations had demanded a close eye be kept on Saddam Hussein, and biological, nuclear and chemical development facilities were to be accessible to inspectors on demand. At first relatively compliant, Hussein slowly restricted their access throughout the 1990s, prompting U.S. bombing of Iraq under President Bill Clinton in 1998. But it wasn’t until 2003, with an alleged goal of taking out presumed nuclear weapon programs (which proved nonexistent), that we began a full-fledged invasion.
That story is important in regard to the current situation in Syria. Of the Iraqis, about 60% adhere to the Shi’ite tradition and 20% to the Sunni tradition. Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, had risen through the ranks through the revolutionary activity of his uncle, and once dictator, implemented both some secular socialist policy, and strict one-party rule (a common theme for the Middle East dictators of the second half of the 20th Century, if you haven’t caught that). While I’m not going into extensive detail regarding the terrors of his regime, he put down opposition brutally, killed thousands of Kurdish Iraqis with poison gas, and bombed some his own towns. At the same time, he allowed for some economic and educational freedoms not known before in Iraq. A mixed record with terrible abuses, to be sure!
Why does all this matter? Because when the U.S. deposed him in 2003 (declared a stunningly rapid success at the time), it opened the floodgates to Al-Qaeda, a Sunni-based military, members of which flowed into Iraq from Afghanistan and other nearby states, building on the already angry rhetoric spewing from people like their leader, Osama bin Laden. For a decade, the U.S. found itself caught in in the middle of a vicious civil, sectarian war. Oddly enough, that put the U.S. on the side of Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias in Iraq, which, with the U.S. military, virtually kicked the ruling Sunnis and their adherents out of Bagdad (which is now 85-90% Shi’ite). Numerous Sunni militias formed in opposition, and many eventually joined Al-Qaeda.
But we still need to link back to Syria. Don’t worry; we’re still headed there.
After a few years of siding with the Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias in Iraq (which of course, inadvertently supported the Ayatollah in Iran), the Bush administration began a policy switch (called the “Redirection”) in 2006, shifting support back toward Sunni groups, but primarily in neighboring Syria. Wikileaks documents from that time expose a deliberate desire to provoke a Sunni uprising in Syria with the intention of destabilization there. This was corroborated by further leaked Pentagon papers in 2011. Now operating under the Obama administration, these latter documents state that, “there is a possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria, and this is exactly what the supporting powers [of anti-Assad groups] want in order to isolate the Syrian regime….”. Who is referred to as the supporting powers? The U.S. and her allies. The same leaked documents listed “The West, Gulf Countries and Turkey” as the “supporting” powers, while also listing “Russia, China and Iran” as the powers supporting the Bashar al-Assad regime (background described in Part 2). (In fairness, the same leaked document admitted that such a organization as mentioned would threaten the peace process of Iraq.)
Quick clarification: The “Salafist” ideology referenced here is the radical Islamic fundamentalist ideology that drives Al-Qaeda, ISIS and other ideologically-affiliated groups.
In other words, U.S. policy in Iraq was in support of Iranian-backed Shi’ite groups, while at the same time favoring, or at least not opposing (but to be clear, not directly facilitating) the creation of a fundamentalist group in eastern Syria that would destabilize that country and help promote the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. (Yes, I know the big question is “why.” Keep reading; I will get there.)
That fundamentalist group proved to be ISIS—the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Now, that doesn’t mean that the U.S. policy actively supported ISIS (and obviously, the U.S. is no friend of ISIS; quite the opposite), but it is hard to imagine the creation of ISIS without U.S. intervention in the Middle East.
But I get ahead of myself…again.
Opposition to the Assad regime in Syria grew steadily in 2011 into a full-fledged sectarian, multi-faced civil war that many of my readers will have followed on the news for years, now. From the beginning, U.S. policy has been clearly on behalf of “moderate” rebel groups in Syria. Why use quotes? Because moderate, of necessity, must be used loosely. Virtually all opposition groups to Assad are sectarian and fundamentalist, though certainly some are more extreme than others.
Of these groups, perhaps the most powerful in early opposition days of 2011 and 2012 was al-Nusra (alternatively known as the al-Nusra Front), which was essentially the Syrian arm of al-Qaeda.
The problem is, many of these “moderate” groups supported by the U.S. ultimately became arms procurement groups for al-Nusra, meaning that many ultimately got their funding by selling weapons to al-Nusra, some of these weapons even supplied to them by the U.S.
So why did the U.S. even care about destabilizing and ultimately seeing the replacement of Assad in Syria? I alluded to this before. Two key U.S. allies, Israel and Saudi-Arabia, were both clearly upset by U.S. support of Shi’ites in Iraq. Assad, himself a nominal Shi’ite, is a primary ally of Iran. As both the Bush and Obama administrations have been clear about, though somewhat hidden under humanitarian rhetoric, taking out Assad would be a clear strike against Iran and a clear benefit for both Israel, which has a vested interest in ensuring that their own bordering enemies don’t grow too strong, and Saudi-Arabia, an avowed enemy of Assad.
Back to ISIS.
Virtually non-existent in 2012, ISIS was another group pledging allegiance to al-Qaeda. In 2013, it had a falling out with al-Nusra, putting the two groups at odds. In 2014, as many will recall, the nearly unheard of ISIS suddenly captured major Syrian cities, and expanded rapidly across eastern Syria and into Iraq, reaching as far as the outskirts of Bagdad. And of course, as many readers know, ISIS has declared itself an Islamic Caliphate, brutally claiming the lives of countless Christians, non-Sunni Muslims, westerners, and anyone else who doesn’t pledge allegiance to their ideology and rule.
So now what? The complexities of who supports who against who with who is enormous, and I won’t go into all that detail in writing. My goal has been to explain how things have come to where they are now. In conclusion, I include two videos below. The first, in addition to the visual benefit, does an excellent job explaining the current mess. The second is a piece by investigative journalist Ben Swann with revealing statistics on the tragedies of what has transpired in the Middle East.
Googling “before” and “after” pictures of Syria reveals many terrible scenes like this one, taken in Aleppo, one of the largest cities in Syria.
All in all, it’s hard (yes, I do tend to write in deliberate understatements) to show anyone walking away from the mess with clean hands. Perhaps we should understand that there are no praise-worthy members of this conflict. Millions of Syrians are now refugees, displaced, many finding solace in the same ideology that drives ISIS. Towns once thriving metropolitan areas are haunted by rubble and silence. Numbers uncounted have had their lives destroyed or taken. This does not imply that the situation under the dictators was good, but its certainly hard to make the claim that things are better. Perhaps, going forward, we should consider the unintended, or often very much intended, consequences of policy. So far, nearly every policy decision has led to its own bitter fruit of greater problems and more lives destroyed. A dose of humility and reflection may be in order. Watch the two videos below:
Our political candidates and commentators bring up Syria quite often. And with reason. The nation is embroiled in conflict–a very, very complicated conflict. What on earth is going on over there? Should we be over there? Well, like most things, it’s rooted in history–in this case, a history often overlooked and/or not understood by westerners. I get into the history first, and this will all help to make the current situation there make much more sense, and maybe offer some clarity to you all that our political “elites” really need to understand.
Yes, we know there is a large Islamic caliphate and terrorist organization known as ISIS. We know there is a massive emigration and refugee movement from war-torn regions. We understand that there is a leader in Syria who these same elites claim must be transitioned out of power. We know that the U.S. has been involved in Middle East affairs for at least a decade and a half (we’ve been involved much longer, but many of my own generation are not aware of this).
I’m going to take this particular blog, and a few afterward, to bring clarity to the current situation in particularly Syria and more broadly the Middle East. Specifically, I hope to do so by shedding light on important history regarding the formation of the modern Middle East and then details on the intricate labyrinth and nebulous nature of the current and numerous interests all operating specifically in Syria.
Truly, it’s something of a madhouse. For a glimpse, consider that at this moment…
The U.S. supports Sunni rebel groups in Syria while supporting Shi’ite forces in Iraq
The U.S. supports Kurdish forces in Northern Iraq, as well as Al-Qaeda affiliated groups in Syria, who both fight each other and who both fight against Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator
The U.S. is targeting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which Russia is also doing, and at the same time opposed to Russia’s support of Assad
The U.S. is opposed to the Badr Brigade in Syria, the same group that served as a primary ally in the Iraq War.
The Kurds, a current key U.S. ally, have a branch operating against Erdogan, the dictator of Turkey, another U.S. ally in the Middle East.
And I am only brainstorming a little bit of what could be the full enumeration…
I’ll get to all that! But first, how did the modern Middle East develop as it did? Many westerners are offered a vague, watered-down fly-over version of Middle Eastern history that amounts to something like, “There was a Roman Empire and then the Eastern Roman Empire, then there were Muslims, then a few Crusades and the evil Europeans tried to take over Palestine, and then mysteriously we have modern European nations that are ruled by evil dictators (in some countries) who need to be replaced by benevolent American and European foreign policy experts.”
The full picture gets as omitted from historical lessons as Kansas does by national Democratic candidates. And granted, that may in part be due to its complexity.
Now, while the importance of understanding the longer-range history of the Middle East merits its own study, I am only going back to the late Ottoman Empire (in this post) and afterward (in the upcoming posts), as the politics following the end of the Ottoman Empire are the most pertinent in understanding the present in places like Syria and Iraq. Ask many an American what the Ottoman Empire is, and you’ll get the same look you might by asking them to interpret the Star-Spangled Banner in Chinese.
The empire saw steady decline from its height in the 16th and 17th Centuries until the beginning of the 20th Century, by which point, on the eve of World War I, it was known as the “sick man of Europe.” A “last minute” attempt in 1908-1914 to secularize and industrialize Turkey (the heart of the empire) was too little, too late; in the end, a decision to enter the war on the side of the Germans and Austria-Hungarians secured their ultimate end. This landed the empire in the hands of the British and French victors, who, as we’ll see shortly, got to do what I consider to be a favorite activity of theirs: drawing lines on maps and calling them borders. (Forgive my oversimplification here; I will hope to offer some clarity to this point in the next post.)
The whole purpose of my commentary on this background is important to understanding the current Middle Eastern situation. Under the Ottoman Empire, for the greater part of its rule in the latter years, the Sultan and his government in Istanbul allowed for broad decentralized power. What this meant was that, outside of Turkey itself, the lands under Ottoman territory were somewhat lightly regulated by Istanbul, despite mandates that the peoples of the empire uphold Shari’a—Islamic—Law. Regions within the entirety of the empire were required to pay their taxes to Istanbul, but there was little to no extensive military or bureaucratic web able to secure any strict code of law across the entirety of the mostly-desert empire.
Istanbul c.1900 (still called Constantinople by many Europeans at that time)
And this is not to say that there was none of this; certainly that is not the case. Nor is this to say that the empire was one of consequential liberty; that is also a false conclusion. Certainly, many regions—especially the more populated—of the Ottoman Empire were ruled by their own local overlords in any variety of Islamic code, and the legal system would have been strictly based in Shari’a for many people (with exceptions, often at the expense of an additional tax; many Christians lived in modern-day Syria and some Jews lived in Palestine).
Nevertheless, much of the empire was set up in a very decentralized fashion based in local regions and ethnicities. Much was feudalistic, with a local landlord overseeing various regions of peasant-workers, other parts were more loosely governed in a sort of farming or herding tenancy-based system (as was much of the case in Palestine). Professor Akram Fouad Khater, in his source document anthology, Sources in the History of the Modern Middle East, explains the situation succinctly: “Before World War I, the Middle East and North Africa were fluid geopolitical spaces in which peoples with various languages, cultures, and ethnicities intermingled in the cities and larger towns and many others lived in rural isolation” (page 109, 2003 edition).
The main point, here, is that the Middle East is no less ethnically complicated than the tribes of North America upon the arrival of Europeans (which a quick google image search can show was covered in a multiplicity of various tribes).
In essence, there were no nations as we think of them today. There were many, many tribes and ethnicities and some large and some nuanced religious differences among them all as a part of a broader, loosely administrated empire. (And for all you PC-obsessed folks out there, I am not saying the Middle East was some epitome of perfect unity in diversity…that’s hogwash. Certainly the Middle East was as laden in inter and intra-religious, ethnic, and political conflict as anywhere else. That’s not the point here. The point is to understand what the Middle East was like prior to the modern states that compose it now so that we can understand how the creation of those states contributes to the current U.S.-embroilment in places like Iraq and Syria.)
Again, Khater puts it very well: “None of their political experiences prepared them to conceive of a political entity that was smaller than an empire and larger than a city or village” (page 110).
Enter France and Great Britain to figure out a new way to administer the Middle East in the wake of the Ottoman defeat in World War I. That’s next.
U.N., the war has displaced up to 2.8 million Yemeni (more than 400,000 families), killed around 4,125 civilians and wounded over 7200 (as of October 2016) (More information 
far greater support for the Ayatollah among Iranians than prior to the war). And it was just a few years later that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, sparking the U.S. retaliation that resulted in the 1990-91 operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield. And we’ve made it back to that part of the story.
