Cameron Abadi is a former Fox International Fellow from Yale University’s MacMillan Center where typical senior fellows include folks like former Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) chief Stanley McChrystal and the neo-conservative former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey. Fox fellows are supposed to go on to shape global affairs.
The Fox International Fellowship Program is a direct two-way student exchange partnership between Yale University and twelve of the world’s leading universities in Russia, England, Germany, China, Japan, France, India, Mexico, Turkey, Israel, Brazil, and South Africa. It was established to identify and support talented individuals who will be future leaders in their respective fields and who, by virtue of those leadership positions, will contribute to decisions affecting global policies and international relations.
In 2005, when Mr. Abadi accepted this fellowship, he intended to continue his “study of 20th century German intellectual history and political theory in graduate school and as a professor.” But he wound up writing for The New Republic instead.
I know this is going to shock you, but Mr. Abadi is criticizing the president for not wanting to get involved in Syria’s civil war and for not wanting to get sucked into getting involved, either.
Abadi’s essay is truly embarrassing. It fails on every level. His basic strategy is to pull at our liberal heartstrings, “but what about the refugees?”
Yes, there are a lot of refugees, and that is because Syria is no longer the country that it used to be. It is no longer a tolerant multi-denominational multi-ethnic society. That’s why this is false:
Besides, humanitarian assistance isn’t just a matter of charity; it’s a political struggle. The millions of Syrians currently displaced by war are eventually going to return to their homes, and will presumably play a role in determining the shape of a future Syrian state.
Unfortunately, many if not most of the soon-to-be million Syrian refugees will not be returning home precisely because their ethnic group or religious sect will lose out in the civil war and have no role in determining the shape of a future Syrian state. I am not saying this because I’m a pessimist. You know that I am generally an optimist. I am saying it because Syria has already fallen off the wall, and its pieces will not be put back together. Think of Lebanon in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, or think about Iraq right now.
Whatever tensions simmered below the surface before the onset of the civil war, the ruling Alawites were tolerated by the majority-Sunni population. But that Sunni population has been radicalized both by the repression of the Assad regime and its Iranian sponsors, and by the Saudi and Gulf State support they’ve received for their resistance. While it may be fairly simple to decide that our country has an interest in seeing the Iranian-backed side lose this struggle, figuring out who we want to win it is much harder. More than that, the winners (regardless of which side wins) are going to do mopping-up operations that are what most people call “ethnic cleansing” and others call “genocide.” So, we have more than one reason to want to keep our distance.
But, “wait,” you ask, “doesn’t the prospect of ethnic cleansing and genocide increase our responsibility to get embroiled in this religious and ethnic conflict?”
The answer is that the whole world has a responsibility for handling the refugee problem and working to prevent human rights violations, but that we can’t do that simply by walking in and fighting the war for one side. Our involvement has geopolitical consequences which should be obvious if we just imagine Russia or China deciding that they were going to waltz in and restore order.
With reports that someone, probably the Assad regime, has used sarin gas during the conflict, enormous pressure is being brought to bear for military intervention. But that’s not Mr. Abadi’s argument:
But, judging from the Obama administration’s reticence until Thursday, the absence of public leadership hardly seems an accident. One gets the sense that the White House’s main goal is not only to avoid military intervention, but to avoid steps that might have the marginal effect of making military intervention more likely. And it’s undeniable that humanitarian assistance will eventually run up against limits imposed by the security situation in and around Syria: There’s only so much you can do in a war zone before you need a military of your own to keep humanitarian organizations safe.
Still, the least that any policy deserves is to be treated on its own terms. The fact that humanitarian assistance might eventually imply the need for military assistance isn’t a reason to simply dismiss the former. And however practiced the arguments about the Iraq war may be, there’s no good reason that a policy of humanitarian leadership needs to be confused with a posture of crude militarism.
So there is something strangely willful about the White House silence on Syria’s refugee crisis—a sense not that a humanitarian intervention might be unwise, but that any intervention might simply be too much for the U.S. to bear. Prudence is worthy of praise when it’s a matter of empiricism, but it’s not worth much when it’s simply a reflexive cringe at complex problems. We’re getting to the point where one can’t help but wonder whether the ultimate effect of Obama’s “light footprint” doctrine isn’t simply to lighten the burden of America’s capacity to lead.
Never mind that the United States has committed more resources to the refugee crisis than any other nation, it is either in our national security interests to get involved on the ground in Syria or it is not. Frida Ghitis of the Miami Herald thinks failing to act would “legitimize the use of chemical weapons, letting regimes that hold power by force know that they can use the world’s most reviled weaponry to preserve their rule from internal challenges.” Of course, that ignores the fact that we cannot prove, yet, that the Assad regime is even responsible for the use of sarin gas. It’s true that Obama has previously said that we would not tolerate the use of chemical weapons. He said Assad would face “dire consequences” if he used them. Yet, we are not even sure he used them. Should the president succumb to this pressure and race to war without the facts? Look at this:
AMMAN, Jordan — About 300 Jordanians have demonstrated against the proposed deployment of 200 U.S. troops on their nation’s border with Syria.
Some protesters warned that the small force could be just the beginning of a process that leads to U.S. involvement in Syria’s civil war to secure its chemical weapons. Other demonstrators, backing the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, burned American flags.
At the Friday rally in Amman, leftists and independents chanted, “No to U.S. troops in Jordan. This is not in our national interest.” They said they do not want to see a U.S.-led invasion of Syria like the 2003 war in neighboring Iraq, based on faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction there.
Mr. Abadi is just one small cog in a giant machine that is pushing, pushing, pushing the president to war.
