.@hxhassan: #US-led coalition against #ISIS risks losing support if it does not clarify its aims http://t.co/51mxc7R1mG
— ATFP (@ATFP) October 2, 2014
In the article summarized and linked above, Hassan Hassan channels Syrian opposition complaints of an absence of rationale for supporting American strikes against IS and the Al Qaeda affiliate known as al-Nusra. Yet the problem for Americans is the lack of a rationale from the Syrian opposition for supporting them or for supporting them in the way that the Syrian opposition would like – specifically by making war on the Assad regime. In other words the Syrian criticism of Obama Administration anti-IS policy mirrors the foundation of that policy as implemented: The unclarity of the Syrian opposition’s larger aims – or the question whether it is unified enough to have a set of aims beyond the removal of Assad, and, if so, whether those are supportable aims – has resulted in the appearance of unclear US aims.
Americans recognize IS as an enemy among others, or as one constituent part of a larger enemy. Syrian rebels recognize Assad as the enemy. Among the Syrian rebels are apparently many who view America as another enemy or likely future enemy, and those rebels are included among those others whose destruction America already seeks. To state the obvious, an alliance between enemies is a contradiction in terms.
As Hassan explains, the mirroring even refracts down to reasonable Syrian civilian concerns about oil prices – although it must be added that for Syrians these effects may be matters of life and death, for Americans generally a matter of mere convenience, and not, at this particular moment in the international oil market, of any actual salience. On the more significant, morally constitutional question of war, a question of entry onto a path of inherently unpredictable hazards in matters of life and death, Americans are, as virtually all people are, because they must be, precisely as selfish as Syrians: We would like the Syrians to do our bloody and hazardous work for us, just as the Syrians would like us to do their work for them, but, at present, in a deep-going way that is continually underestimated by analysts, Americans and Syrians do not see and therefore do not face the same enemy. Assad may be an enemy of humankind, but he is not specifically a demonstrated American enemy. The presence in the Syrian opposition of enemies of humankind who also happen to be demonstrated enemies of America overbalances the more abstract cause of war against Assad – the “should” that the President recognized a year ago when arguing for air strikes after the mass atrocity in East Ghouta, but that Americans and the American political system found inadequate to justify even an “incredibly small” intervention.
A Syrian opposition that tolerates enemies of humankind, or leaves dealing with them to some unspecifiable future time and process, in order to focus on its also just but more immediate, selfish objective, is no worse or better on that level than an American administration that does the same. As with the oil market, the difference might be that the Syrian opposition sees itself in an extreme situation, while it should, or so it seems, be easy for comfortably secure and powerful Americans to lend a hand, but the other difference is that the Syrian opposition is seeking American support in a matter of war. Why, exactly, should Americans support the Syrian opposition? What should move Americans not just emotionally but practically, to the point of taking responsibility for life and death in Syria?
Americans seem to have concluded or may be presumed already to know, whether by intuition or well-informed reasons, that they, or we, have the power to decide the Syrian civil war militarily, but that we do not have the ability to ensure a good outcome. The good outcome from the American perspective would be a Syria moving consequentially in the direction of liberal-democratic self-determination, with an acceptance of international pluralism as the critical first step, but the Syrian opposition in its leading elements seems intent upon moving in another, mutually exclusive direction pointing either to a terror state or “Islamic state,” or to a failed state, or to some combination still very bad for the Syrians, potentially as bad as or worse than the current situation for others including ourselves. In the meantime, to make war on Assad in the absence of a democratically validated decision for war and in the absence of an international legal justification for war would further undermine foundational American premises. Achieving both would not be impossible, but the Heaven and Earth-moving effort is not something that the United States of America or its President is presently likely to attempt on behalf of the united friends of Al Qaeda.
If it is, for us, just a question of defeating the monster Assad, there are other monsters in the world, and ones less well-protected by the united friends of the monsters of the world, and, even as guarantors of the post-WWII order, we still would not go abroad seeking monsters to destroy. Syrians may be forgiven for viewing their monster as a worst monster, as a monster that must be destroyed, but forgiving the Syrians and sympathizing with them, and wishing them well, even trying to find ways to aid them on the margins, are not the same as making war with and for them. If the Syrian rebels want American support in war as true allies rather than as occasional allies of tactical convenience, they will have to persuade us or at least show a consequential will to persuade us that they are our friends, that they are morally already with us, that their victory will or can also be our victory, that to deny or betray them would be to deny or betray ourselves. A distancing from our enemies seems to us indispensable to such a case. That the Syrian rebels generally seem to lack any idea of the necessity, or that they reject it to whatever extent they acknowledge it, reinforces our pessimism about them.
If a few years ago such an identification with their cause seemed possible for Americans, the moment may simply have passed, if it was not illusory. As for now, US aims at present are in fact quite clear, if not to very many pundits and area experts. Those aims do not and cannot principally concern “a Syrian endgame,” or the fate of a rebel movement whose aims and potentials are at best unclear to us, and seem at worst all too clear.
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That the interests of the American politeia and those of the Syrian insurrectionists don’t really coincide is a point well taken. It would of course be controversial to assert that issues like the civil war in Syria are best viewed through an illiberal or “realist” perspective, but even according to an assessment that stems from political liberalism and utilitarianism–which supposes that “good” or “bad” outcomes in the sociopolitical domain can largely be evaluated according to a calculus of the (mostly physical) pleasure or pain which they entail–the order that existed in Syria prior to the revolt was infinitely preferable to the current situation and so ought to have been sustained rather than destroyed.
The original post makes repeated use of a peculiar expression: the “enemy of humankind”. To describe Bashar Assad–or even Islamic State–as the enemy of humankind would seem to be an exaggeration. Dismissing out of hand the notion that Assad is obliged to be a pacifist, it is imperative that he defend the politeia of which he is the representative head from those who would seek to destroy it. One might disapprove of that politeia without supposing Assad (or his regime-type) to be the metaphysical enemy of all humanity–assuming, that is, that one doesn’t simply equate humanity with the liberal politeia.
The Islamic State is clearly the enemy of the liberal politeia. Unlike the liberal regime, which upholds itself as the only way of life whereby the humanity of men and women may be fully achieved and safeguarded, the Islamic State contends that Islam (or a “strict version” of Islam, as they say) is the only path whereon men and women attain to the complete and abiding realization of their humanity. It is certainly a different conception of human self-realization than the liberal one; but that just means that it is the enemy of the liberal political order, not the enemy of humanity as such–unless, of course, the liberal political order is synonymous with humanity itself.