Syria -- war and virtue

All of mankind's great and large nations--and many of its lesser and smaller ones--have been warlike.  An unfortunate statement to make, but nonetheless true.

Even though as individuals we are mostly peaceful, war and conflict seem to be solidly ingrained into our national behaviors.  For example, take a look at one of the noblest words in the English language -- virtue.  That's a word that conveys meanings of high morals and purely clean ethics.  The word's origin, however, is from the Latin language of the ancient Romans.  For them, "virtue" meant "manliness" and "valor," and those attributes came only from fighting in battles with Rome's opponents.  To be a virtuous person required behaviors, actions and personal commitments that could come only from participation in war.

The Romans neither originated nor concluded this behavior; they notably institutionalized it, and provided it with enough meaning that after twenty-five hundred years it resists any preparations made for its retirement.

With this background--and with certain other facts, too, that will be explained later--we ask ourselves now:  Do we make war on Syria?  If so, can it be virtuous?

President Obama and his administration--with unusual support from both Democratic and Republican Congressional leadership--believe that the time has come to militarily punish Syria for its use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war.

I'm having a hard time seeing that as a good idea.

In fact, I'm having difficulty finding any good ideas regarding Syria right now.  It looks like all of the options for action are seriously flawed, and it's been that way right from the beginning of this thing.  It doesn't seem likely that the passage of time will ever reveal any truly good ideas for actions that would yield a positive outcome.

Even if eventually the best decision turns out to be to take no action at all--tempting for its simplicity, and perhaps inevitable due to popular will--that does not mean that "best" is the same thing as "good."  It may be that it becomes the best decision only because it is the least bad decision.

Syria's civil war 

Map of Syria from the CIA World Factbook

Civil wars are always nasty and savage affairs.  It's usually best for outsiders to stay away and let the locals settle things on their own.  Outsiders who take sides in these things usually do so because they have something to gain, or to lose, from the war's outcome.  Even if they have no involved self-interest--rare, but not impossible--others will be unconvinced of motivation based on alturism.

Syria's civil war is living up to the nasty and savage image of these conflicts, perhaps worsened by the fact that both sides have had some outside help.  Neither side, of course, wants the other one to gain any more external support.  Oddly, then, the country's president--Bashar al-Assad--and his assorted military cronies have apparently taken recent actions--in using chemical weapons against their foes--that seem calculated to draw in even more outside involvement in support of their opponents.

These actions are odd--they are tragic and shameful, but also curious--because they produce very little immediate advantage, and yet the long-term result is to bring opprobrium to the perpetrator, and sympathy and support to the victims.  Since warfare use of chemical weapons is specifically banned by the rest of the world's nations outside of Syria, this use of these weapons is an open invitation to incursion for legal enforcement.  Assad and the people in his regime are not stupid; they know these things as well as we do.

Cynic alert:  here's your opening

The cynics among us will want to observe that the Assad cabal is pretty sure that they can get away with this stuff because there's nobody around who wants to do the enforcing.

That might be accurate.  Mr. Obama clearly wants to inflict punishment for the legal transgression, but the proposed punishment--lobbing a few cruise missiles at the offenders--does not equate to enforcement.  He also wants Congress to have a say in this, and the European Union insists on waiting for the report out of the United Nations on-site investigators.  These things require time, perhaps as much as a few weeks.  After our misadventures over the last decade in Afghanistan and Iraq, American public opinion has become almost isolationist; there might be enough of such feelings to cause Congress to vote against any military strike.  And there's no way to predict the results of the UN investigation.

The option that is most easily chosen, of course, is to do nothing.  Nothing, that is, in the military sense.  In the short run, America would therefore be making no direct contribution to increasing the brutishness of this conflict.  And that's an important thing, not only for the innocents who are caught in the cross-fire, but also because it has always been difficult to find the "good guys" in this war, the implication being that the good guys deserve assistance to help them win, and the bad guys deserve to lose.  But, if we cannot truly identify the good guys, then how do we know whom to help?
 

The future isn't what it used to be

But what of the long term?  The long-term consequences of inaction are unknown to those who do not act; inaction does nothing to shape the future.  On the other hand, Assad's odd behavior is probably an immediate action that he intends to use to shape the future.

Consider the possibility, though, that enough has already been exposed to the world so that "nothing" is really "something."  Assad, who once enjoyed relatively high and shiny esteem among the world's autocrats, is now covered in a thick layer of tarnish.  It's doubtful that he can ever again be polished up.  Maybe he doesn't care about that because of the way in which he intends to shape the future.  It's worth thinking about.

Assad actually has friends (sort of)

What about Assad's patrons, Iran and Russia?

I think Iran might end up being a wild card in this game.  Iran has enjoyed its alliance with Syria, but for the Islamic Republic's leaders have a lot of other moving pieces on the table--Iraq, Lebanon, Hezbollah, nuclear power--that might provide them with enough replacement value so that they wouldn't feel all that badly about losing the Assad regime.  Iranian leadership is contentious, conflicted and confused; typically, it is opaque, apparently even to those who make up the leadership.  Iran is a wait-and-see player for now.

Russia is different; it's always different, isn't it?  Russia has spent centuries stewing over the geographical fact that its southern naval forces in the Black Sea are so easily restricted from entering the Mediterranean.   Syria, since 1971, has fixed that problem by providing Russia with a strategic naval base at its seaport of Tartus.  Perhaps the passage of four decades' worth of time has diminished the value of that asset, but still it represents a tangible expression of the projection of Russian influence and power; why would Russia--especially under the self-absorbed, xenophobically-nationalistic and consistently vain leadership of the occasionally-shirtless Vladimir Putin--want to lose it?  So, Russia is committed to Assad for as long as Russia feels that an anti-Assad victory would threaten its use of Tartus.  Which means that Russia will use its Security Council veto to prevent any UN-sanctioned action against Syria.

Read here for the conclusion (especially if you skipped everything else); you can always go back to learn the why of it

This story will go on.  In the meantime, here's a surprising observation:  Giving credit where credit is due, let's acknowledge that Assad is currently in the cat-bird seat because he is a national leader who is actively doing something to shape the future.

We don't know what it is that he is doing, only that it has to do with his inexplicable use of chemical weapons.

If we think that Assad's past and current behaviors in his country's civil war are morally corrupt--and I do think so--then we ought to be morally-concerned about his vision for the future.