President Obama is Blowing It in Syria

A basic mistake is that if something is like something else, then we should treat both things the same way. And yet some things are very much alike, while some small difference makes all the difference in how they should be treated.

This is overlearning some lesson of history. Conservatives (including me!) sometimes make this mistake when we think failing to act against a local tyrant is exactly like failing to act against Hitler. The lessons of Munich, the mistakes Britain made in appeasing Hitler, can be overlearned.  President Obama has overlearned the lesson of the Second Iraq War.

Let’s agree that Saddam was a bad man and a tyrant whose loss is not a loss. Let’s also agree that the American decision to “purge” the ruling regime at a lower level from the government and the armed forces of Iraq was a huge error. The occupation of Iraq was a failure, and Bush owns it, just as the cut and run from Iraq by Obama also failed.

We created a vacuum and then left.

Safe to say Obama has never managed to get foreign policy right because he cannot cope with the conflict between his desire to end war and the warlike world he inherited. Splitting the difference has proven the worst of all policies: horrid drone attacks that are hard to justify combined with stabbing old US allies (see Egypt and Israel) in the back. Even people who hated the regime in Egypt took note: the USA would throw old friends to Islamic extremists.

Meanwhile, Syria began to burn. Assad is not Abraham Lincoln. Assad is not even a good ruler, he is a terrible dictator,  but I have yet to see an alternative in Syria in any of the revolutionary regimes that is not far worse. Assad keeps Christians, Islamic religious minorities, and other religious groups alive. Most alternative groups in Syria  want these minority groups, many of whom have been in Syria longer than Islam, dead or expelled from Syria.

In this situation. Vladimir Putin, KGB colonel and thug, comes in and saves lives. There are religious communities in Syria that two weeks ago were reporting (in my parish) that they were weeks from extinction and the Russian Armed Forces have saved them. They witness weekly Americans arming terrorist groups that want them dead and then see Russian jets killing terrorists. Putin backs his friend Assad and is not letting them be killed.

Even if they do not like Assad, this is respected. Finally, the groups the Russians are killing are generally loathed by mainstream Syrians and others in the Middle East. The Russians do not need to put many troops on the ground or occupy huge areas, because unlike Iraq, they have large numbers of Syrian forces (especially the government trained army) at their disposal.

Putin is feared and respected. He is keeping people alive and killing some of the worst people on the planet. He is doing this with a very limited military intervention and is earning respect throughout the region. If you faced death or exile, and then Vladimir Putin appeared and save your ancestral village, you would be grateful.

And so Obama has lost Syria and a huge swath of Arab opinion for the United States by compounding Bush’s errors in the occupation of Iraq with his own. We are an unsteady friend and ally. We refuse to take ISIS on directly. We topple regimes or allow them to be toppled when the alternative is chaos or worse. The President and Secretary Clinton rejoiced to see the government of Libya overthrown and while nobody should mourn for Muammar, the alternative is worse. We allowed it to be broken and we did not buy it.

Here is my simple foreign policy bottom line: people who allow my family to die are making an error. People who save my family from imminent death are owed gratitude. I don’t like “owing” Vladimir Putin, but I do. God save the Church of Syria and God aid anyone helping her continue her work of charity and life. My government armed the killers. Putin is protecting us.

Way to go Mr. President: you are neither a peacemaker (drones!) nor triumphant in battle. You are weak when strength might help and you have left the role of savior to a former KGB agent.