Opinion Donald Trump’s unguided missiles

Now, a third United States President has gone back to doing what President Clinton tried: providing a distant enemy an education in the dangers of defying a red line drawn by the United States. The thinking behind President Donald Trump’s strike on Syria is clear enough. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians, though contributing an insignificant percentage of combat fatalities, provides grist to the jihadist propaganda mill. If the United States doesn’t act, it’s seen as endorsing Syrian government atrocities.

Tidy plans drawn up in well-appointed Washington DC lounges,  though, quite often elide over the muddy realities of warfare—and the thinking that seems to have driven Friday’s missile strikes seems to suffer from the same kinds of magical thinking that have often led United States interventions to unhappy ends.

FIRST, strikes aren’t likely to achieve much. The residents of Syria’s cities care very little whether they die from sarin, or shards of hot metal tearing apart their limbs: deaths from conventional munitions in Syria, as in every other conflict where chemical weapons have been used, far exceed the more-hyped toll of gas. Though Friday’sstrikes may deter the Syrian government from using gas, at least for a time, it’s profoundly unlikely to stop the use of other lethal munitions in populated civilian areas—something all parties to this conflict, as others, are guilty of.

From footage released today on the television station Rossiya24, moreover, it’s clear the cruise missiles had only minimum to moderate impact on the base, where combat jets are housed in some 50 bunkers hardened, since 2013, to protect against just such an attack.

President Trump can indeed step up the heat on Syria—but only at the cost of coming into frontal conflict with Russia, and handing a military victory to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. Neither of these, for obvious reasons, would be ends that serve United States interests.

Secondly, the strikes do nothing to serve United States policy in Syria. Like Russia, the United States seeks to defeat the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. The difference is that while Russia believes President al-Assad’s government is part of the solution, the United States thinks its authoritarianism is the problem. The ground reality, though, is that al-Assad, and Kurdish forces in parts of northern Syria, are the only entities who can deliver some semblance of secular governance—authoritarian or otherwise. For the most parts, the United States’ liberal opposition proxies are surviving sheltered under the jihadist umbrella.

The sensible course of action is for the United States is to push its proxies to arrive at a power-sharing agreement with the government, but the strikes are likely to have the paradoxical outcome of emboldening them to hold out for a better deal. This will drag out the war.

Finally, the strikes do nothing to address the ideological mania that caused the crisis in the first place. In 2011, when the so-called Arab Spring broke out, western Liberals hoped to extend their cherished ideals of human rights to West Asia—much as Neo-Conservatives had sought to remake Iraq in the wake of 9/11. This Liberal project gave a moral impetus to the destruction of the Libyan government, and continues to drive efforts to undermine the state in Syria. 

Liberals interventionists, however, fail to comprehend that the international human rights law they venerate—in ways that only the truly pious can grasp—isn’t a free-standing institution towering majestically above the chaos of human conflict. 

The failed and fractured states emerging from efforts at regime change simply cannot enforce any rights, even the rudimentary rights that might exist under authoritarian despotisms. Libya today is proufoundly less free than it was under even the odious regime of Muammar Gaddafi, having disintegrated into a patchwork of criminal  empires and and jihadist tyrannies.  Yemen is no different—and Syria is headed the same way.

For any sensible person, the real red line must be that a war drags on which has claimed the lives of 500,000 people, and displaced another 11.5 million. That chemical weapons have been used in the war, grim as it might sound, is at most a footnote to the many savageries this conflict has witnessed; it is not, moreover, a barbarism unique to President al-Assad’s government. 

Ending this savagery needs the abandonment of human rights theology—including the hand-of-god punishment President Trump doled out on Friday—and a turn to politics: politics being the business of engaging with actors who are, necessarily, fallible, compromised, and murderous.

Is this likely? For the moment, no. President Trump will walk away from these strikes having shown his backers he is more macho than his predecessor, President Barack Obama, who walked away from strikes on Syria after the chemical weapons attacks in 2013—to the dismay of his Liberal friends—precisely because they would have achieved nothing.

President Vladimir Putin, for his part, will also benefit among Russian hawks, for whom will be further evidence that their country is waging a long war against jihadists secretly supported by the West.

For all the high-pitched commentary Friday’s strikes have evoked, they are punctuation, not a new phase. The meat grinder that Syria has been will continue to roll on at an even pace as it has these five years, uninterrupted.