Syria and Shedding Pop-tarts

As with any post, it would be great to have discussion about the points I’ll raise below. They’re still unrefined, but I hope there is some truth in them. I react to three fallacious soundbites that seek to detract from doing more to help Syrians remove the Assad regime. I call these cheap pop-tarts, which we can buy easily, but really don’t have much substance at all.

1. “Syria’s opposition is too disorganized to merit more help.”

In the Warsaw Rising and the German-Russian museums I visited recently in Warsaw and Berlin, respectively (the latter on the Nazi-Soviet theater of WWII), I felt I was encountering an obvious but important theme: the sheer messiness of war. I read about the Nazi and Soviet armies, ethnic Ukrainian fascists collaborating with the former, both nationalist and communist Polish partisans, the Polish government-in-exile, Jewish partisans taking to the forests… terror tactics everywhere, rape, plundering, propaganda, and reprisal attacks everywhere. I could feel my head spinning.

But all this made me think about the current Syrian civil war, too. That is, how can we expect the Syrian people to be so self-organized before aiding and arming them more meaningfully, when war is never between two well-organized armies to begin with? This pop-tart is a convenient, bite-size excuse to switch the channel or altogether turn off the TV, scroll away, close the tab. And then not pay any attention for another three weeks.

2. “Many fighters opposing the Assad regime are jihadists affiliated with Al-Qaeda.” 

This is another harp that conforms with the rampant worldview that the Middle East is beyond helping. We shouldn’t forget that a worldview is inherently, well, just a worldview. It’s a rough sketch of what we think we see, and perhaps ours is still too clouded by the horrors of 9/11. If we seek to finally rein in such words as “Islamist,” “jihadist,” and “terrorist” that have taken on lives of their own, perhaps we’ll be better poised to consider more ways to help end the Syrian civil war.

It’s hard, but if we try, we might be able to discern that some religiously informed fighters are still worthy of more international help. Afraid the weapons we send will fall into “jihadist” hands that will end up hurting us down the line? According to Christoph Reuter in Der Spiegel, there’s reason to surmise that many fighters join “jihadist” elements because they’re often the only ones with arms, sent from Arab Gulf countries. Our trauma from 9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan continues to distort our vision. If we step back a little and try to fix our flawed field-of-view, we might be better suited to doing more for Syria. Not to start another war in the Muslim world, but at least help ourselves do more than let Syria go deep into its fourth year of bloodshed and into even more decades of setbacks to its economic and human development.

3. “Let the war run its course” and “May the best man win.”

If it’s too convoluted a war, then simply let the strongest win? I also don’t believe we should subscribe to such thinking. I’ve encountered views about other contexts, such as “if it weren’t for a broad coalition, Nazi Germany would’ve won” or “if it weren’t for international help, Serbians would’ve been victors in the Bosnian War.” I think we mustn’t forget that war is not just a struggle of fighting strength and acumen like in the boxing ring. It’s also a moral struggle, where the brutal and cruel and inhuman lose out to the relative victims to whose aid strategic and moral supporters gather. Now, in the Syrian context, it’s also a matter of when we’ll decide to better help the comparative victims, who have endured a lack of adequate weapons and attacks of poison gas.

If we simply let the Assad regime re-consolidate its hold on power, other dictators will rest assured that we’ll again fall for those cheap pop-tart excuses, giving them free reign to brutalize, gas children, and shamelessly wage asymmetrical war. They’ll again watch us waver until an “it’s too messy” and “but all parties are being savage” mentality sets in.

We need a way to self-punish when we procrastinate with spurious arguments that can be molded to fit any war context. Through institutions, cut back the rewards and concretize the penalties of doing nothing.