Stop the Hand-Wringing About Aleppo | Foreign Policy
▻http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/12/19/stop-the-hand-wringing-about-aleppo
What’s happening in Syria is a tragedy – but nobody has ever been willing to do what’s necessary to stop it.
Political leaders across the West piously lined up last week to identify the fall of Aleppo as a stain on our collective conscience. The West, they have said, should have done more to stop the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Syria.
At a purely humanitarian level, this is obviously true. States can always do more to deliver humanitarian aid to people on the ground. But in a military sense, the notion that the West should have “done more” is fantastical and learns exactly the wrong lesson from this carnival of carnage.
If there is a lesson for the West from the post-Cold War era of liberal interventionism, it is this: Either intervene decisively and be invested for the long term — or stay out.
It’s true that in 2011 the West had a military opportunity to topple Bashar al-Assad’s regime by backing a rebellion not yet contaminated by radical Islamists. What is more dubious is that such a military victory would have put Syria on a path to democracy, stability, or peace. If only things were that easy.
In reality, in the absence of Western ground forces to keep the peace, a 2011 rebel victory in Syria would likely have turned out like the botched intervention in Libya the same year. After the initial euphoria, the country would have become fragmented, as various militias sprang up and took control of their local areas.
This would have opened the door to radical Islamists, as it did in Libya. The West would then have had to accept chaos and increasing Islamist influence in another failed state.
Conversely, if the West had hypothetically deployed its own forces on the ground in Syria in 2011, it is likely that our forces would have soon faced an Islamist insurgency, if Afghanistan and Iraq are anything to go by. And this would have been a long haul: Look no further than Afghanistan, where Western forces still haven’t left, or Iraq, where they had to return to avert state collapse.
About Emile Simpson
Emile Simpson is a research fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He was formerly a British Army officer.