The conflict in Syria has ground on for roughly five years now, claiming some 400,000 lives, leading almost five million Syrians to seek refuge in neighboring countries, and displacing nearly seven million internally. The recent collapse of the U.S.-Russian brokered ceasefire has been followed by some of the most intense aerial bombardment of the war. This has led to international condemnations of Russia’s role in the war, attempts to renew the ceasefire, and in some corners, calls for more direct American action. But is more international intervention really the right response to Syria’s cycle of violence or broadly speaking, to any conflict? To find out, The Cipher Brief spoke with Edward Luttwak, CSIS Senior Associate and renowned author of “Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace.“
The Cipher Brief: In 1999, you wrote a much-discussed article in Foreign Affairs titled, “Give War a Chance,” in which you argued that peace efforts – ceasefires, negotiations, peacekeeping operations – often prolong the length and severity of civil conflicts, rather than end the suffering. Can you explain that idea a little further, and do you think the conflict in Syria fits that mold?
Edward Luttwak: That article was inspired by the Bosnian intervention because the war in Yugoslavia was interrupted repeatedly by outside intervention, and eventually an imposed settlement. What you’ve had in this region ever since is not peace, where people start repairing their homes and their lives, and making adjustments to the new territorial order left by the war. Instead, you have a situation of frozen war. If you look at the city of Sarajevo for example, you will see many buildings built with some European Union funding for some purpose or other, mostly useless, and you will not see the organic revival of life.
Throughout Europe, you do not have Sarajevos. All the wars of the past resulted in an outcome – nice or not so nice – that led to the resumption of life. People repaired their houses, mended themselves, reconstituted new families, and proceeded on. So you have this phenomenon. Give War a Chance is an article that says, we are littering the world with unresolved conflicts, not peace but frozen war.
The Palestinians are the ultimate case. You have the great grandchildren of people still living in refugee camps, still eating out of the trough of the UN Work and Relief Agency (UNWRA), instead of becoming Syrians or Jordanians, or emigrating to New Zealand. If there had been a UNWRA equivalent in Europe, you would not have London, Paris, Milan, Rome, or Prague. You would have large camps for stranded Visigoths, distressed Vandals, and Roman refugees.
This is a disastrous procedure. If you look at Africa for example, one outcome of the massacres in Rwanda was that Hutu refugee camps formed in eastern Congo. Once that happened, a plague of NGOs immediately descended, started handing out food, and therefore prevented an organic process whereby refugees could find new homes, new identities, emerge into new nationalities, and eventually lead new lives. Instead, the Hutus stuck around. They never went home except, of course, to go back and raid Rwanda. For many years, they would rest and recuperate in the camps east of Goma (in the Democratic Republic of Congo) and then, after resting, they would go back and kill a few more Tutsis. This went on until, of course, the Rwandans were effectively forced to go and attack eastern Congo to kill, or at least drive away, these Hutu militants.
You prevent the organic reintegration of a population through this kind of artificial intervention, and by the belief that the proper recourse when fighting begins is to impose a ceasefire. Because of this, we have littered the world with 65 million forcibly displaced people, around 21 million of them refugees. These are tens of millions of people who are being fed by NGOs, by the United Nations, and by other misguided, though well-intentioned entities, and they are prevented from reemerging as Tazmanians, or Belgians, or Turks, or whatever. After 1945, we never reach peace anymore; we only have protracted conflicts that are unresolved. Some of these conflicts are very violent, others are not. In the Bosnian case, there is no violence, but there is also no return of the historic communities, which had previously gone through dozens of wars in their history, only to reemerge and rebuild their lives.
To bring this back to the Syrian case, what you have is not really a civil war. It began as a civil war, but right away you had the Iranian intervention by proxy through Hezbollah, then you had the intervention of actual Iranian militias, and then the Russian air force intervened. This series of interventions led to a protracted conflict, rather than a civil war allowed to end definitively.
Then there is the role of the United States, and its incapacity to distinguish between friends and enemies. Take the Islamic State. The enemies of the Islamic State are the Shi’a, and the Shi’a state of Iran. Iran is not a friend to the United States, it is an enemy. Iran has commissioned Taliban attacks against Americans, even as Taliban kill other Shi’a in Afghanistan. During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, it was the Iranians who funded the Mahdi militia, dedicated to attacking Americans while American troops were protecting them from the Sunnis. So, in Iraq, when the Americans intervened to protect Shi’a populations from Sunni militias, the Shi’a would attack them in the back, which was only fair, because when American troops protected Sunnis, the Sunnis also attacked them in the back.
And yet, today, the United States provides military knowhow, equipment, and support to Shi’a militias attacking the Sunnis of the Islamic State. The United States is helping the Shi’a attack the Islamic State, and at the same time, the Shi’a are attacking the Sunnis in Aleppo. The United States is supporting Sunnis in Aleppo indirectly by supporting the Kurds. So the United States is now arming the Shi’a in ways that are then used by the Shi’a to attack American associates. In other words, America is arming its enemies to fight its friends, and also trying to find friends to attack its enemies. This essential inability to tell friends from enemies is a result of the false categories that we have created to define friends and enemies.
At its heart, this is a phenomenon of countries that are engaged in peripheral conflicts, not organic to their own interests, which take place at great geographic distance in a fundamentally frivolous attitude. When you hear somebody like Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, or Samantha Power talking about Libya, for instance, they are essentially provincial minds speculating about a country far away, of which they know little.
For example, they intervened in Libya to remove Muammar Gaddafi, who had developed a system to govern his geographic space, but they removed him without providing any alternative. If they had done their research, they would know that Libya does not exist, that Libya has never existed in history. Even in ancient times, there was Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, Cyrenaica spoke Greek, Tripolitania Latin. The modern artificial entity of Libya was only kept together by Muammar Gaddafi, and when you remove Gaddafi, you have to promptly occupy Libya with an army of 100,000, stay there for 50 years, and then maybe something will emerge.
Here we actually have three phenomena, all of them derived from the same thing. We have intervention at long range, in countries about which you know little and which you can’t be bothered to study. Otherwise, how would you explain the fact that in 2003 the United States intervened in Iraq thinking that if you remove Saddam Hussein, Iraqi democracy would emerge? The falsest category possible is that of an Iraqi; there never have been Iraqis. There are Sunni and Shi’a, Arabs and Turkmen, Turkmen and Kurds, Kurds and Yezidism. All these groups are there, and their numbers ensured that nothing would come from American intervention other than civil war. So, we have this long-range ignorance, and the most amazing thing is that there is no learning process.
Finally, the whole thing is sustained, maintained, and encouraged by the media, which is always ready to take photographs of a child killed in a bombing, but is not willing to produce photographs of all the other children that will die because of the well-meaning intervention that is launched to protect this child, which is already dead. This kind of sentimental reaction to the killing of children and others, who are already dead has caused the deaths of many more children.
TCB: To bring it to Syria specifically, let’s say that you didn’t have intervention, at least western intervention in the country, could you play that scenario out to its logical conclusion?
EL: In Syria, the logical conclusion is that, while everybody was willing to complain and cry, nobody was willing to send an army. The United States had no ally in Syria. You cannot intervene in a war if nobody is on your side. Syrian President Bashar al Assad quickly became an Iranian agent, so he could not be on the U.S. side; Jabhat al Nusra – a local Al Qaeda affiliate – could not be an ally of the United States; the Islamic State (IS) could not be an ally of the United States. Therefore, the only way that the U.S. could intervene would have been to deploy its own ally, namely a large army.
The Obama Administration was willing to do the normal verbal activism against atrocities, but they were not willing to send the U.S. army to Syria. There was no party the United States could support so they could not intervene. In the absence of a real party, the U.S. came up with a quarter party, which is the Kurds living on the edge of Syria, who had not previously been involved in the civil war because Assad very carefully stayed out of Kurdish territories. The U.S. subsequently embraced the Kurds and acquired a party in the war, albeit in a very narrow part of Syria. in so doing, the U.S. acquired the means of intervening but only in a peripheral part of Syria.
This should have allowed the United States to make a reasoned intervention in that peripheral area and stick to it. After that, the U.S. might have carved out a little principality, which Washington could support and protect. This would make a lot of sense if it were U.S. policy to bring about the emergence of Kurdistan in Iraq and Turkey. Syrian Kurdistan would have been a logical complement to that. Otherwise, it’s irrelevant because Assad wasn’t active in Kurdish territory. The Islamic State was active, but the Kurds pushed them back with relatively little help when they entered eastern Kurdistan, so there was no need for an army to keep out the Islamic State.
TCB: If you were advising the next President, how would you tell them to remedy this situation?
EL: Remedy this by maintaining a very heavy presumption against intervention, and an understanding that wars have a purpose, and the purpose of wars is to bring about peace. There may even be an argument for intensifying wars, a case in which the United States would intervene on the winning side to accelerate the victory. This would be a way of minimizing human death and destruction, but it is not politically or psychologically plausible. So, given that interventions have failed again, again, and again, it would be appropriate to learn from this.
TCB: And specifically in the case of Syria, what would you advise the next president?
EL: I would let the Russians get on with it. Nonintervention means nonintervention, it doesn’t mean intervention here and there. Let the Russians get on with it, let the Russians be the protagonists of the victory of Assad, instead of the Iranians. Because a Russian victory is much less costly to the United States than an Iranian victory.
