Civil War Pros And Cons

“Here’s what we wrestle with: there are huge costs and unintended consequences that go with a military intervention that could last for many years.” So said Benjamin Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, in an interview with Dexter Filkins this spring about White House policy on Syria. At the end of last week, however, we learned that the wrestling match was over. On Thursday, Rhodes announced that we are increasing our assistance to the rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad. That assistance, other officials quickly declared, involves small arms and ammunition. It’s a military intervention: we just don’t know the costs or the consequences or the number of years.

Assad and his men and his militias shoot children, raze villages, and dump

Nonetheless, too much about this intervention seems perilous, uncertain, and imprudent. We are joining a Sunni-Shiite civil war, and on our side we find Al-Nusra, perhaps the strongest rebel faction and an affiliate of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Some of our weapons will likely end up in their hands. Meanwhile, the rebels we support appear to be splitting apart, not pulling together. By joining the fight this way, we take on the risks of a superpower—embassy attacks around the world, hostility, hatred—but enjoy none of the benefits. We are unlikely to win any time soon; it is not even clear what a win would look like. Obama wants to stop the slaughter and remove Assad, but there is no indication of a plan for an endgame, or even a next step—except, it seems, putting off any next step and any escalation. He may have a master plan that he hasn’t told us about. But one doubts it. The President didn’t even announce the news of our engagement; an aide did, which suggests that Obama wants to distance himself from his halfhearted

In it, he includes a marvellous image, though perhaps a paleontologically outdated one, that captures how this country responded to September 11th, and why, so often, our intervention goes awry: “I sometimes wonder whether in this respect a democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin: he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath—in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native