If this seems prudent or sane to you, you are probably crazy. We all know better than to trust government estimates of the cost of military intervention, but let’s go with the $50 million/day to create a limited no-fly zone in southern Syria. How many days are we willing to pay that $50 million? Five hundred days? A thousand days? What was it in Iraq? Over three thousand days? Followed by trillions of dollars more for a full-on invasion and decade-long occupation?
Once we put our skin in the game and start incurring costs, there is no end game but victory, and there can be no victory without escalation. We will own an irreparably broken country. Again.
And the American people are not going to stand for it. Trust has been broken. This is a terrible idea.
That being said, if we are going to do this, Working with the Jordanians is by far our best option. There’s a huge refugee population to pool from. The Jordanians are more moderate, in general, than Saudis or folks from the Emirates. Turkey has the Ottoman legacy and Kurdish problem that makes them less than ideal interveners. And Iraq’s sympathies lie more with the Shiite/Alawite side of this sectarian battle.
Nonetheless, we should expect our foreign relations with Russia and Iraq to immediately go into the toilet and stay there. We should expect to become the target of Iranian/Hizbollah/Shiite-inspired terrorism attacks. We should even expect some Sunnis to attack us just for being in Jordan.
Moving along, assuming that our intervention succeeds in tilting the scales away from the Assad regime and eventually forces their abdication, where are the Alawites and the Shiites going to live? Because they aren’t going to be living in Syria. Will they all move to Iraq? To Iran? America?
According to the CIA Factbook, the Syrian population is currently 74% Sunni Muslim, 16% other Muslim (including Shiites, Alawites, and Druze) and 10% Christian. Once the Alawite regime falls, the majority Sunni population will annihilate them. We’ll have all that blood on our hands for the simple fact that we intentionally created the conditions that made it inevitable. And don’t think that Shiites in Iraq won’t erupt in reaction and resume butchering Sunnis in their country.
It’s been clear forever that the president doesn’t want to make this mistake, and it is now clear that he’s out of excuses for delay.
“Following a deliberative review, our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year,” the deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, said in a statement released by the White House on Thursday afternoon. “Our intelligence community has high confidence in that assessment given multiple, independent streams of information”
President Obama said in April that the United States had physiological evidence that the nerve gas sarin had been used in Syria but lacked proof of who used it and under what circumstances. Mr. Rhodes said that American intelligence officials now believed that 100 to 150 people had died from the attacks, and he said that the number “is likely incomplete.”
In his statement, Mr. Rhodes alluded to Mr. Obama’s position that the use of chemical weapons would be a red line for the United States. “The president has said that the use of chemical weapons would change his calculus, and it has,” he said.
The small-scale use of sarin would be an insufficient reason for our country to assume this degree of risk and cost. And literally no one will thank us for our efforts.
