A movie called "World War Z" is opening soon. The title is a play on "World War III" where the "Z" stands in for the "III" part and refers to zombies. The movie is no doubt designed to be escapist entertainment. In my case I am also doing a play on "World War III". But here the "S" stands for Syria and the subject is deadly serious. I am extremely concerned about the Syrian situation. What most concerns me is that I am seeing a pattern of spiraling escalation and I don't see any forces arrayed effectively to break the spiral. What's to stop Syria from growing bigger and bigger to the point where it actually does resemble a World War? As the hero opines in numerous action movies, "I've got a bad feeling about this".
Let me take a look at a classic "runaway" situation, one that resulted in an actual "World War", specifically World War I. The definitive work on the subject is the great book "The Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman. Stated most simply, World War I started because no one had the simultaneous will and ability to stop the war from starting. This was in spite of the fact that no one was specifically trying to start a war. Events just got out of control.
A large contributing factor was the general attitude of the eventual participants. Each participant believed that a "nice little war" would be a good thing. They all believed that a war could be fought for a reasonable cost and each country believed that the war would be beneficial for them. Finally, they all believed that the war could be controlled, its size could be kept manageable resulting in the cost being kept manageable. All these assumptions turned out to be catastrophically wrong.
Europe had hundreds of years of experience with war in the run up to WWI. I visited Poland in the early '70s. It was fascinating to get their perspective. It turns out that one of the tried and true strategies was to have the war in someone else's country. As the Poles saw it various European powers had been coming to Poland for centuries so that their nice little war would wreck Poland and not any place important. This was hard on Poland. But who cares? After all, it was only Poland.
Another recipient to a lesser extent of this strategy was what is now Germany. Other countries, especially France, had been going to Germany to fight wars, again for centuries. But in the 1800's something changed. Germany got united and militarily powerful. Once they were in a position to do so, the first thing they did was to put a stop to other countries going to Germany to have their war. But by the time this happened (late 1800's) the Germans had built up a great deal of resentment, particularly against France, for all the earlier wars. So Germany had a mad on for France and wanted payback.
By the early 1900's the Germans had the finest military machine in Europe. They were just looking for an excuse to have a nice little war so they beat the crap out of France. Meanwhile France had a glorious history (or so they told themselves) of beating the crap out of Germany. And they had a magic "secret weapon" over the Germans called "élan". They were just damn superior to the Germans so they would no doubt beat the crap out of them every time they got the chance. "The Germans were vastly overrated", they said to themselves. Other countries had other reasons. Let me mention two more.
Again for centuries, the British had been playing "power politics" on the continent of Europe. The idea was to come in on the right side of the many little "continental" wars so that the sides were pretty much evenly matched. This would result in both sides exhausting themselves leaving the British as the last major power standing. The British believed that another continental war would work out the same. France and Germany would beat the crap out of each other. The British would control the rest of the world via the British Empire and the Royal Navy. This would leave the British in a better position after the war.
Finally, there was Russia, "the sick man of Europe". Russia should theoretically been powerful. They had a giant land mass, far more territory than every one else. They had a large population and lots of resources like timber, coal, and steel. On paper they looked great. But they weren't and everyone knew it. They just never could get their act together. But hey, there's always next time. Maybe in the next war the Russians could finally leverage their advantages of large population and vast resources and show everyone else up. But to get a chance to show everyone else up they needed a nice convenient war.
It turns out everyone was delusional. The Germans did in fact have the finest military machine on the continent. But it wasn't superior enough to triumph over the combination of France, Britain, and Russia. France's vaunted "élan" advantage turned out to be so much smoke. The war ended up being so expensive that it effectively bankrupted Britain. And Russia still did not have their act together. In fact, the fact that the Russians did not have their act together turned out to be the single item most responsible for the war starting.
These forces I have outlined above had been in place and building up steam for a long time. In fact, there is a lot of scholarly research that supports the theory that the war should have started in 1912, two years before it actually started. The reasons why it did not start in 1912 and why it did start in 1914 are obscure and not worth going in to. So everyone ended up miscalculating going into the war. And that was not the greatest miscalculation.
As Tuchman so brilliantly documents the war was a war of movement, exactly as everyone had predicted and planned for, when it started. But by the end of six weeks, the point where Tuchman's book ends, the war had stalemated and turned into the beyond horrific "trench" war. This phase of the war gobbled up men by the hundreds of thousands and money and material by the millions and eventually billions of dollars. And for years neither side was able to gain a lasting advantage. By the end, WWI was a war of exhaustion. It simply became a matter of finding out which side would run out of the necessary amount of men and material to continue the war first. It turned out that although small, the U.S. contribution was critical because the U.S. provided the men and material that allowed the winning side to continue on to the end and outlast the losing side.
World War I is the classic example of war going horribly wrong. I see the seeds of the same thing happening in Syria. Many of the same forces are in play that were in play during the run up to and in the early phases of World War I. The last really big war was World War II. It was roughly 70 years ago. Since then we have had any number of wars but they have been limited wars. The poster child for limited war was the Korean War.
It represented a clash of the superpowers with the U.S. and its allies on one side and the U.S.S.R. (as Russia was known at the time) and its allies on the other side. But Truman, the U.S. President, was concerned from the beginning that the war not spiral out of control into a cycle of escalation that would eventually lead to a nuclear war. He formulated and implemented the doctrine of "limited war". That governed the U.S. strategy even when the Chinese, then seen as a puppet of the U.S.S.R., committed a large number of Chinese troops on the other side. Korea turned out to be another classic war of exhaustion. The "armistice" that ended active combat is still in place many decades later. There is no formal end to the conflict in sight and the battle lines ended up very close to where they were the day before the war started.
This "limited war" doctrine was applied to Vietnam a decade later. Gradually it came to be seen as the norm. It is now so much baked into everyone's thinking that almost no one spends any time worrying about nuclear war any more. Everyone assumes that all wars are automatically limited wars and that it is impossible (always a dangerous word when applied to human behavior) for one of these limited wars to escalate to become a "World War" and it is beyond impossible for it to "go nuclear". But just as in the case of World War I, where hundreds of years of European experience demonstrated that wars would always be limited wars for limited objectives, our current experience now tells us the same thing.
No two wars ever play out exactly the same. So Syria will not play out the same way that World War I did. But there are many other similarities. Another similarity is the attitude of the players. Take the Arab world in general, for instance. They now have almost a hundred years of experience with what they call "Crusader" wars. These are wars where one side is a western power (Iraq and Afghanistan are contemporary examples) or wars where western powers are supporting on one side of a nominally Arabs versus Arab war (the first Iraq war, for instance). Pretty much all the wars in the eastern and southern Mediterranean follow this pattern. I can think of no purely Arab versus Arab wars in the modern era since World War II. Generally the side backed by the west has triumphed. This has given Arabs an inferiority complex, like the one Russia had going into World War I. And generally the west has played the "British" role. The west comes in on one side or the other and in most cases the result is to keep all the Arab states weak and effectively leave the west in control.
And there are "élan" factions. The Arabs tell themselves that they have driven the U.S. out or Iraq and will soon drive them out of Afghanistan. They also drove the west out of Iran and the Israelis (a western proxy) out of the Gaza. There may be some wishful thinking going on here but it allows some segments of the Arab population to believe that "we have defeated the west so we have the élan to defeat our enemies, whoever they may be, because we are superior". The argument can be made that these characterizations are delusional but they do not have to be true to have the same effect delusions had on the actions of the various players in the run up to World War I.
And there is another great delusion that is affecting the actions of a major player in the Syrian conflict. Many in the U.S., both government officials and "opinion makers", believe that the U.S. can have an effective positive influence on events in Syria. There opinion of what constitutes the proper "positive influence" might differ but they all agree that "if the U.S. just does the right thing then a good outcome will be the result". This is in spite of a vast amount of evidence to the contrary that has come out of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, and other locations. Lots of events turn out the way they do not because of but in spite of U.S. efforts.
The events that touched off World War I happened quickly. Syria is playing out at a much slower pace. We are about two years into the war. It started out as yet another manifestation of the Arab Spring. People demonstrated their unhappiness with their government. The government cracked down. So far we are following the standard "Arab Spring" scenario. But in Syria things then started going their own way. And by that I mean that we has seen a gradual but steady set of escalations by both sides.
The government cracked down hard. The demonstrators went violent. The government started using the military. The opposition (no longer just "demonstrators") was able to secure permission to import weapons from outside. The government started importing bigger and better weapons itself. The opposition scored some impressive military successes. The government started importing fighters from Hezbollah in Lebanon and "freedom fighters" from Iraq. It also seems to have started using poison gas, of which the Syrian government has vast stockpiles and its the "good stuff" like Sarin. This has caused President Obama to signal that the U.S. will now start supplying arms to the Rebels. And. in response to something or other, the Russians recently announced that they will be providing top of the line air defense systems to the Syrian government.
And the Syrian conflict is showing signs of escalating to a regional conflict. It is spilling into Turkey, Lebanon, Jordon, and Iraq to some extent. It has also pulled in "second ring" countries, countries that do not directly border on Syria. These include Iran and Israel so far. And it has pulled in both former superpowers, the U.S. and Russia. Some amount of spill over is common. China got involved in Korea. Vietnam spilled over into Cambodia and Laos. Afghanistan can be seen more accurately as the "Afghanistan/Pakistan" war. But in these other cases there seemed to be an informal fire wall. In Korea the Chinese involvement was limited. The same was true with Cambodia and Laos in Vietnam. Pakistan is deeply involved in Afghanistan but no one else is likely to be pulled in.
There doesn't seem to be the same kind of fire wall operating in Syria. Hezbollah (nominally based in Lebanon) has recently become involved in fighting in Syria in a big way. Iraq started out only involved to the extent that it was looking the other way as Iran sent arms to the Syrian government. That is currently the limit of official government involvement. But unofficially a lot of fighters left over from the Iraq war have moved to Syria. Iran seem to be ratcheting up their involvement and it is hard to see how much support will turn out to be too much. The U.S. and Russia have been increasing their commitment and involvement too. As noted above, the most recent move on the Russian side has been to promise a top tier antiaircraft system. On the U.S. side, we have seen in the past few days that the U.S. is now committed to directly supplying arms. And people like Senator McCain want the U.S. to go much further.
From the U.S. side there has been a significant push for escalation based on the humanitarian problem. The best estimate is that just under a hundred thousand have been killed so far. The humanitarian faction believe that the U.S. can wave some kind of magic wand and cause the slaughter to stop. So Obama is being pushed from the left (oh the humanity) and the right (I never saw a war I couldn't support) to do more. Both sides want contradictory things. Both sides greatly exaggerate the ability of the U.S. to have a positive influence on the outcome. The only thing they agree on is that "the U.S. should do more" but that is enough to move events along. The Russians have their own reasons for escalating their support. But those reasons have been equally effective at greasing the skids for escalation. And its not just within the U.S and Russia that pressure has been building.
There is tremendous pressure in the Arab world. In concert with the pre-World War I European experience, the Arab world has experience dating back to the 1920's with limited wars for limited objectives. And they have lots of experience with "Crusader" wars where the west is heavily involved. Rightly or wrongly this has led to the broadly held belief in the Arab world that "its always the west's fault". This is frequently true. But it is NOT true in the case of Syria. Syria is not a Crusader war. It is a purely Arab on Arab war. The Arab world has no experience with pure Arab on Arab wars. And given this, both sides in Syria will justify anything that goes wrong as "the west's fault". This will allow them to justify almost anything, which in turn will allow them to do almost anything. There will continue to be pressures from multiple directions to continue escalating and no pressure from anyone to wind things down.
Then there is the population boom. There are large numbers of young Arab men all over the Arab world. And these young men live in countries with poorly run economies. So the unemployment rate is high. So there are literally millions of military age Arab men with poor prospects where they are and nothing better to do than go off to participate in a "lovely war" in Syria. And sending large numbers of military age young men off to Syria takes pressure off local governments all over the Arab world. A young man who is off fighting in Syria is not a young man standing around on a local street corner making trouble.
And then there is the fundamental rift of the Arab world, the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. They have been itching to get at each other for decades. If this sounds like the Germans and the French before World War I, it should. And theoretically they have butted heads before. The Iraq war is one of those times. The minority Sunnis were lording it over the majority Shiites. The U.S. invasion overturned that dynamic. But this example is polluted by the presence of the "Crusader" Americans. And, while Shiites are more populous in Iraq they are less populous in the Arab world as a whole. There have been other examples of Shiite/Sunni conflict before but they have always been polluted by the Crusader influence. So the two groups have not had any recent chance to go at it head to head.
And there has been a small development in Syria that I find very troubling. Historically the Assad family that has led the country has been referred to as being part of the Alawite minority. This made them appear to be neither part of the Sunni nor part of the Shiite factions. But the Alawites long ago split off from the Shiites. Recently Assad's association is being referred to as "Shiite" rather than "Alawite". This puts Assad firmly in the Shiite camp, the camp dominated by Iran. There is a general dislike of Iran in the Arab world because Iran is seen as Persian rather than Arab. But Shiite Arabs are definitely closer to Iran than Sunni Arabs. And Iran is seen as the protector of the minority Shiites against the majority Sunnis. And the Iranians have been strongly supportive of the Assad regime right along.
All this leads me to "be afraid - be very afraid". I think the Syrian war is a long way from being over. And I think it is going to get much bigger and much more ugly as time passes. The roughly hundred thousand fatalities we have seen so far are going to start looking like pocket change. And I would want to do something about this if I was convinced that there was something to do that would be effective. But, unfortunately, I think it's going to get a lot worse before there is a chance of it starting to get better. I think the U.S. is destined to be a peripheral player in all this. We have had too much involvement for too long in various "Crusader" activities to be able to do much good now or for some time in the future. So what should we do?
The good news, and this is definitely very small good news, is that Syria is going to overshadow a lot of other things like Afghanistan. I think Pakistan and the Taliban have booth been looking forward to making a lot of mischief directed at the U.S. as our intervention there winds down. If Syria is blowing as hot as I am concerned that it will be then a lot of energy that would have gone into Afghanistan will be redirected to Syria. This means that Afghanistan has a better chance of sorting itself out and ending up in a positive place than I had previously thought. So my first recommendation is that the U.S. continue to extract itself from Afghanistan.
The second thing I recommend is that we work through proxies with respect to Syria. Lots of people in the Arab world are going to want to point to the U.S. and say the "American Crusaders" are responsible for whatever goes wrong in Syria, and a lot is going to go wrong. The more distance we can put between ourselves and Syria the less effective will be these claims that "America did it". If we are going to arm the insurgents, and I presume we will, we should do it through Turkey or Saudi Arabia or Jordan or whoever. Let them be seen as being the ones providing the arms even if they are U.S. arms.
The third thing we should do is ramp up aid, especially humanitarian aid, to the peripheral countries, particularly Turkey and Jordan. Both counties are currently sheltering large numbers of refugees and neither country can afford it. Jordan has been particularly hard hit. They keep getting hit with large numbers of refugees going all the way back to the 1948 Israeli war of independence. They also got hit with a lot of refugees fleeing the recent Iraq war. They have a small economy and they have been one of our best allies in the Arab world. It is problematic trying to do something for refugees in Iraq or Lebanon so we shouldn't try very hard to help in those countries. Sometimes you really can't help. And the U.S., particularly the media and the public, is very bad at figuring out when we really can't help.
The fourth thing will be very hard to do. If I am right then the violence is going to go much higher than the current horrific level. Other than assisting refugees once they have made it out of the country we should not put much effort into trying to tamp down the war. To the extent we can, and our abilities will most likely be modest, we should try to tilt the outcome in a favorable direction but mostly we need to just let things play out.
Wars end in one of three ways: There can be a complete clean victory for one side. That's what happened in World War II. Second, the war can stumble to an end due to exhaustion. This is what happened in Korea, as I noted above. Finally, outside forces can intervene. This only works for relatively small wars. The classic example is the war between Israel and Egypt for control of the Suez canal in 1956. This was stopped almost single handedly by President Eisenhower.
This third way where someone (and usually people mean the U.S. when they say "someone") steps in, waves a magic wand, and stops a war is what people have wanted the U.S. to do in Syria over the last couple of years and on numerous occasions in the past. It is rarely possible. The U.S. has been trying to broker a peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians for decades and under the direction of numerous Presidents. We haven't succeeded in the Israeli/Palestinian war and we have rarely succeeded elsewhere. If you don't have the overwhelming leverage that Eisenhower did in 1956, it's not going to work. And the Israelis and Egyptians found a way to go to war anyhow in 1967, only 11 years later. So even when it works it often doesn't work very well. But this sorry history doesn't stop the media and "wise heads" agitating over and over for one Administration or another to wave their magic wand and make it stop. If the parties involved actually want to stop and are just looking for a mechanism, an uncommon scenario, then wand waving can work. The rest of the time it is bound to fail.
So the final thing the U.S. should do is prepare for a long and bloody war that is likely to get much bigger and much more ugly than it currently is. We should try as best we can to position ourselves to be in the best position possible when the whole thing eventually burns out. A long time ago (it now seems like a lifetime) there was a list that circulated among IT professionals. Here it is:
The six stages of a project:
- Wild enthusiasm
- Disillusionment as things start going wrong
- Panic and Hysteria about what to do to fix it
- The search for the guilty
- The punishment of the innocent
- The promotion of the uninvolved
I think Syria will follow this model. So our best strategy is to be widely seen as being as uninvolved as we can manage.
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