If Jackson Diehl is a thoughtless warmonger, Richard Cohen is an indescribably stupid man. Everything I said about Diehl’s advocacy of war with Syria can be said six-fold about Cohen’s argument. I’m not even going to take it apart piece by piece because that would involve rewriting my article on Diehl. I’m just going to focus on one thing. Cohen wants Obama to do something about the civil war in Syria right now. Like Diehl, he wants the president to exercise more leadership and stop the growing civil war.
Time is not on the side of moderation or accommodation. The longer the killing goes on, the more radical and extreme the anti-Assad forces become. The intelligentsia that initially supported the movement will be marginalized by Islamic extremists — volunteers from nearby Arab countries who can’t abide Assad and his secularism.
Does Richard Cohen know how “radical and extreme” the anti-Assad forces are right now? Does he think they share Assad’s secularism?
The composition of the Syrian opposition is largely unknown (to quote Butch Cassidy: “Who are those guys?”).
If I didn’t know better, I’d think Cohen was urging us to help put down the insurgency. After all, if the problem is that there is a civil war and the opposition is filled with radicals and religious extremists, isn’t the best solution to help Assad crush them into submission?
That Cohen can make the argument he is making with no apparent cognitive dissonance is astounding.
Also, remember when Diehl said that the Turks could easily invade and occupy a big slice of Syria because they once mobilized their troops on the Syrian border? That’s pretty bad logic. But Cohen outdoes him by papering over all the difficulties of getting intimately involved in Syria’s civil war.
Still, none of this is insurmountable. Israel was able to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007 apparently without losing a single airplane — and whatever Israel can do, the United States can do as well. What’s missing at the moment is not the wherewithal to deal militarily with the Assad regime but the will to do so — and to do so expeditiously. This is a matter of leadership and, so far, Barack Obama has provided precious little.
This comes after Cohen recommend that we “bomb Syrian military installations and impose a no-fly zone.” Apparently, unlike Diehl, he doesn’t think we need to create a “humanitarian corridor.” We can settle this thing from the air.
Not every military action is a quagmire — and, anyway, quagmires can be avoided by using air power. The military interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Libya did not require boots on the ground. They ended when they were finished — a brilliant exit strategy.
Cohen lived through the Korean, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars and still he tells us that quagmires can be avoided by using airpower. We can stop all the killing in Syria simply by bombing stuff. Hey, it worked in Kosovo and (kind of, not really) in Libya, so why not Syria?
The only thing I can say in Cohen’s favor is that he, unlike Diehl, at least had the good taste to make his case as a pitch to save lives. But advocating war when you don’t even know who the opposition is or why they’re fighting or what would make them stop fighting or what they’d do if they won? Lazily advocating for American involvement in a conflict you don’t understand in the least?
I guess that is just what the Washington Post is for these days.
