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America Should Stay Out of the Looming Syria Quagmire: The regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria has fallen. Assad was a loathsome dictator with a long history of bloody repression. He did not care for his people nor make any effort to overcome the various sectarian and ethnic splits within his country’s borders. Instead, he led a brutal ethnocracy, playing groups against each other in a divide-and-rule strategy to ensure his own Alawite minority was dominant.

He leaves Syria just as divided – possibly more – as when his father took it over in 1971. 

Syria Will be Chaotic, Violent – and Beyond U.S. Control

Given this violent, divisive legacy over five decades, a peaceful transition to moderate government is almost impossible. Government repression breeds radicalized opposition, and that is what happened in Syria throughout its civil war. The 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ movement, which preceded the now-concluded civil war, produced a brief, moderate opposition. As in many other Arab dictatorships during the Arab Spring, citizens hit the streets in protest. Most of these were relatively peaceful, and the concessions sought by the protestors were generally liberal – elections, rule of law, lighter repression, and so on.

Some Arab states, most notably Tunisia, accommodated these protests and moderated. But Syria under Assad reacted harshly, perhaps the most violently of all the Arab states challenged. Assad used the military and police to attack and slaughter the protestors. He deemed them ‘terrorists’ and gave no ground. Unsurprisingly, the opposition eventually radicalized. Liberals and moderates were pushed aside as Sunni Salafists infiltrated the country to lead a violent opposition. In the place of protest, a full-fledged civil war broke out. Assad called in foreign support, used chemical weapons against his own people, and never negotiated with the opposition.

Thus, by this year, most opposition was similarly extreme or harsh. Most of the anti-regime groups were either openly secessionist, like the Kurds in the north, or Islamic fundamentalists, like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist group most immediately responsible for defeating Assad. There are so many jihadists in Syria now that the US was conducting airstrikes against them at the same time that HTS was winning the war.

No One Knows What US Interests Are in This Mess

The aftermath of all this will be violent, chaotic, and confusing. Assad was no friend of the US. He was anti-Israel and pro-Russian and facilitated traffic between Iran and Hezbollah, the anti-Israel Shiite guerilla movement in Lebanon. Severing the Syrian land bridge between Iran and Lebanon is an upside to Assad’s fall.

On the other hand, Assad was reasonably secular by Middle Eastern standards. He was not a theocratic fanatic and did not support jihad against the West. By contrast, the Sunni salafist groups moving into the Syrian power vacuum have a history of such rhetoric. HTS had links to al Qaeda in the past, which is a primary reason the US did not support it despite shared opposition to Assad. 

Assad of Syria with Putin. Image: Creative Commons.

HTS, if it manages to hang onto power, it will set up a theocracy similar to Talibanic Afghanistan. It is not obvious if that alternative is better for US interests than Assad’s rule or the stalemate of the civil war.

Indeed, the only apparent US interests in Syria’s future are 1) the expulsion of the Russians from their bases in western Syria and 2) peace with Israel. The former will almost certainly happen, given Russia’s active, cruel support for Assad, and the latter is likely because Israel is vastly stronger than whatever emerges in Syria.

In short, there is little reason for the US to be involved in Syria now. The country is not strategically important on the merits – those Russian bases probably will not last long. Syria is only a primary US interest if the US insists on continual intervention in the Middle East, which is itself a massive problem in US foreign policy. 

After decades of quagmires and unwinnable conflicts in that part of the world, it should be clear that the US cannot enforce its will on that region, and that it is not actually that important for Washington. 

The US has sought, at least since Barack Obama’s presidency, to fight less and commit less. The Middle East is the most apparent theater where we are overstretched and cannot ‘win’ in any recognizable military sense of that term. If we enter the Syrian quagmire, it is entirely predictable that we will wind up in yet another mess like Iraq or Afghanistan.

China, East Asia, Russia, and Eastern Europe are far more important to the US than other Middle Eastern civil wars in which US interests are unclear. 

If we ever reduce our overextension and prioritize competing claims on our foreign policy, Syria will be an easy test case for pulling back. We should not get involved.

About the Author: Dr. Robert E. Kelly 

Dr. Robert E. Kelly (@Robert_E_Kelly; RoberEdwinKelly.com) is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Pusan National University and a 19FortyFive Contributing Editor.