BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
The United States cannot be the policeman of the world.
We cannot hope to solve what President Barack Obama calls “sectarian complex problems.” Iraq and Afghanistan have proven that.
The United States will never fully understand or be able to orient itself to thousands of years of multi-faceted conflict in a region of the world where conflict is in the DNA.
We will never win an international war against Islamist extremism.
The United States should not engage militarily in Syria, particularly as a major stakeholder in a civil war over which we have no control.
The United States should not take sides in a conflict in which there are several factions and no clear outcome.
The United States does not have the resources or the national will to engage militarily in Syria.
Neither, can the U.S. act unilaterally in international conflicts when the United Nations is divided, impotent and unwilling to act, leaving ambiguous the international legal grounds on which any nation can or should engage there.
So, there are many good, intellectual, strategic, common sense, legal, economic and political reasons not to involve ourselves in the Syrian civil war.
Still, none of them matter, not in the aftermath of what was apparently a chemical weapons attack this week.
If the Syrian government released deadly chemical weapons over a Damascus suburb, killing hundreds of innocent civilians, mostly women and children, the rules change. And there isn’t much doubt about it. Experts told network correspondents it wasn’t a matter of whether it was done, it was determining what kind of chemicals were used.
There are 70,000 dead, 10 percent of them children. There are one million Syrian refugees in neighboring countries and another two million Syrians displaced in their homeland.
And now this, the likely prospect that for the second time, President Basher al-Assad has introduced deadly toxins into the war, toxins that don’t discriminate among their victims, toxins that change the morality of the war, toxins that cross the lines of humaneness, decency and civility, toxins that violate international law.
President Obama calls this likelihood “troublesome” and something that could be of “grave concern,” that could affect “some core national interests that the United States has.”
It is so much more than that. It is much more than troublesome and it affects more than national interests.
A year or so ago, the President declared the use of chemical weapons would draw “a red line” that if crossed by the Syrian government, would precipitate serious consequences. There was evidence of an incident in June. We said nothing. We did nothing.
Since then the members of the President’s national security team have been disagreeing among themselves about what to do. So, the U.S. has said little and done nothing. I should qualify that. Apparently, there’s been some serious Tweeting.
Our newly minted Ambassador to the United Nations, on the job less than a month, has already missed an emergency Security Council meeting to discuss that red line. Media reports had her off on personal leave time giving speeches.
President Obama is right when he says that our ability to enter into sectarian conflicts and solve them is “sometimes exaggerated.” No doubt. We have gone from being a super potent Brazilian coffee to a timid decaffeinated herbal tea in international affairs, and, maybe that is not all bad.
The Middle East presents special challenges. It always has. Ask Jimmy Carter.
Most of us don’t understand or identify with the history and cultural and religious complexities of the Middle East enough to say with any certainty what is the right course for we Westerners. We have been ignorant in our arrogance about other places and other cultures for a long time, in part because of our historical isolation from them, and in part because of our imperial sense that we are on the right course and others should follow us.
So we are left with doubts about what to do, particularly with our recent history of mucking it up, from Danang to Kanduhar. We seemed to have given President Obama a lot of slack, the benefit of the doubt in his indecision, in his reluctance to take a step in any direction.
But, again, there are times when the people of nations, great or not-so-great, must differentiate between what is of the political experience and what is of the human experience. President Clinton did that in Kosovo.
Great wars have been fought over politics. This is not political or at least no longer so. This is personal. This is of the human experience. It appears that Syria’s President Assad, through the use of chemical weapons, has imposed upon us an obligation to act, not for the sake of political expediency or the alignment of political interests, but in the name of humanity. This is not just a war over boundaries or power. This has become a war on humanity, a case of man’s inhumanity to man that no society, no nation, no people can tolerate if the march of civilization is to continue in a positive, upward direction.