Presidential Power Principles In Syria

Jeffrey Goldberg argues that UN Ambassador Samantha Power's award-winning book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, is the map for the coming US intervention in Syria.

I pulled the book off the shelf last night, and was reminded that it is brilliant, a carefully written, deeply researched indictment of American indifference in the face of atrocity. And I realized that the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria must be driving Power mad with frustration -- frustration, of course, with Bashar al-Assad's killer regime and frustration with the international community (so-called), in particular the Russians, who will do almost anything to protect the regime from censure, but also frustration with those in the administration who have spent the past two years looking for ways to distance the U.S. from the horror.

One caveat: The 100,000 dead in Syria do not count -- at least not yet -- as victims of genocide, as the word is traditionally understood, although I think a careful analysis of the civil war shows that Assad’s minority Alawite regime has directed its criminal violence almost exclusively against members of Syria’s Sunni Muslim population.

So I have a sense that Power would believe that the following statement, which she made in her book’s concluding chapter, would apply to Syria: “When innocent life is being taken on such a scale and the United States has the power to stop the killing at reasonable risk, it has a duty to act.”

Power is right here.  The problem is that applied to Syria, the United States doesn't have the power to stop the killing at reasonable risk.  We never did.  The Syrian military is substantial.  This would not be another ho-hum air power act like in Libya or even a shock and awe, six-week special like in Iraq in 1990.  It would be an actual war, and an ugly one.  Bush and Cheney put us into a pair of decade-long wars that cost us trillions.  President Obama wisely has kept us out of a third Middle Eastern war by comparison.  There's not going to be a couple of air strikes, and then the game's over, folks.

We're talking a guaranteed quagmire, if not a huge regional conflict, with the UK, France, and us on one side and quite possibly Russia and China on the other.  That's not one of those good things.

In her conclusion, Power asks, “Why does the United States stand so idly by?” in the face of mass killing. And she explains the traditional behavior of Western leaders when confronted with proof of large-scale atrocities: “Western governments have generally tried to contain genocide by appeasing its architects. But the sad record of the last century shows that the walls the United States tries to build around genocidal societies almost inevitably shatter. States that murder and torment their own citizens target citizens elsewhere. Their appetites become insatiable.”

Her argument for intervention in cases of large-scale violence against civilians is not motivated merely by moral interests: “Citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbors, as their thirst for vengeance, their irredentism and their acceptance of violence as a means of generating change can turn them into future threats.” Two years of Western inaction in Syria, of course, have helped turn what began as a nonviolent citizens’ rebellion into an al-Qaeda-dominated campaign of anti-regime violence.

And no, Syria is not a good neighbor.  But unless we're willing to remove Assad and the Syrian military from power permanently, which will require a lengthy ground invasion, anything we do will not be enough.