A fifty-year veteran of American intelligence recently told me how once, as a young officer, he had blurted out that a situation he had been reporting on was so bad that it could hardly get any worse. One of his mentors quietly stared at him and then observed, "It can always get worse."
My friend has always remembered that moment and recalled it this past week when he and I were talking about Syria, which we now agreed resembled one of Dante's circles of Hell.
Today's Syrian crisis began as a late chapter in the Arab Awakening with the youth in Deraa protesting Assad's autocracy and the government responding with a predictably heavy hand. Demonstrations and the government's harsh tactics spread and soon there was a full-fledged insurgency underway, largely pitting the country's Sunni majority against its Alawite-dominated security forces.
The battlefield was bloody, but not especially fast moving, as Syria's other minorities—Druze, Christians, Kurds—stayed on the sidelines. This was going to be a long slog, and long slog insurgencies never break to the moderate middle. The longer they go on, the more they break to the committed, willing-to-kill and willing-to-die extremes.
Despite that, it appears that the American intelligence community was slow off the mark in alerting policy makers to the emerging Sunni killing machine, ISIS. I chalked that up to a near laser-like focus on dealing with the terrorists we knew in Yemen and along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. "We were concentrating so much on chopping down those trees," I observed, "that we weren't alert to a second growth forest popping up over here." Of course, the reference was to ISIS regenerating out of the ashes of al-Qa'ida in Iraq.
If American intelligence was slow to recognize the ISIS danger, American policymakers were downright glacial. That was apparent in the Presidential dismissal of the threat in metaphorical references to JV teams not being Kobe Bryant a scant few months before the seizure of much of Syria and Iraq and the fall of Iraq's second largest city to the alleged JV team.
Then, even with policymakers alerted, no one could ever accuse the American response of being robust. The effort in Iraq seems to have some coherence, but it is under-resourced (about 3500 Americans) and over-regulated (tight rules of engagement for airstrikes; tight limits on where American personnel can go).
In Syria we seem to be able to punish ISIS, but not roll it back. I once said that, at best, "We were mowing the grass, rarely doing any weeding, and we had not even begun to think about landscaping."
To be fair, Syria is a wicked problem. Answers aren't easy. Dealing with one aspect of the issue seems to make other aspects worse since there are multiple conflicts going on.
This all began, like most of the Arab Awakening, as a struggle between autocrats and democrats with the people in the street demanding things we view as inherent goods, things like responsive and responsible government.
A humanitarian crisis was also quickly apparent. Urban warfare creates that even when the combatants are conscientious about the laws of armed conflict and these combatants were decidedly not conscientious.
As the war dragged on, it also became more and more about the global jihad as ISIS radicalized the opposition, created a caliphate and served as a magnet for violent Islamic extremists. The whole process breathed new life into a movement that the President had assured us was on the run and near defeat.
But there was more. Assad's and the Alawite's longstanding relationship with Shia Iran almost guaranteed that, given enough time, the conflict would become part of the historic (and recently heating up) Sunni-Shia struggle. It did. Iran deployed arms and advisors from its vaunted Quds force and Hezbollah sent thousands of shock troops to shore up the flagging Assad regime.
And then, in a curious way, Syria's civil war seemed to awaken some ghosts from the Cold War as Russia defied the United States, stood by its old ally, continued to deliver arms and blocked any United Nations action by threatening to use its veto in New York.
So there are at least five ways of looking at this. It could be about democracy. Or human suffering. Or the growth of terrorism. Or Iranian hegemony. Or a reborn East-West competition.
Pick your lens. You would think that any one of the five would constitute a case for American involvement. That they have not suggests that American policy has been driven by other factors. At best we seem to have decided on a level-of-effort approach. We will do x, and only x, seemingly indifferent to x's effect (or lack thereof) on any of the conflict's dimensions.
The results have been predictable. The democrats are dead or gone. Syria is the worst humanitarian crisis of the century. A terrorist state the size of Connecticut straddles and controls the ancient trade routes of the Middle East. Iran's hegemonic ambitions have been nourished at the expense of America's Sunni allies. And Moscow has its first substantial military presence in the Middle East in 42 years.
I'm tempted to say that it couldn't get any worse. But then I remember what my friend told me.
Maybe we should think about a change of direction. Or prayer.
General Hayden is a retired four-star General in the United States Air Force; he was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006-2009 and the Director of the National Security Agency from 1999-2005.
