A
must read op-ed contributed by Vali
Nasr to The New York Times. I
missed the piece when published
by the paper earlier this week. Here goes:
By Vali Nasr
President Obama has
doggedly resisted American involvement in Syria. The killing of over 70,000
people and the plight of over a million refugees have elicited sympathy from
the White House but not much more. That is because Syria challenges a central
aim of Obama’s foreign policy: shrinking the U.S. footprint in the Middle East
and downplaying the region’s importance to global politics. Doing more on Syria
would reverse the U.S. retreat from the region.
Since the beginning of
Obama’s first term, the administration’s stance as events unfolded in the
Middle East has been wholly reactive. This “lean back and wait” approach has
squandered precious opportunity to influence the course of events in the Middle
East. There has been no strategy for capitalizing on the opportunity that the
Arab Spring presented, or for containing its fallout — the Syrian crisis being
the worst case to date. The president rewarded Burmese generals with a six-hour
visit for their willingness to embrace reform, but he has not visited a single
Arab country that went through the Arab Spring.
Obama sees Syria as a
tragic humanitarian crisis without obvious strategic implications for the
United States. “How do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria
versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?” he
asked in a New Republic interview in January. When the president visited the
region last month he chose to focus on the Arab-Israeli peace process rather
than Syria. The peace process is now at the top of Secretary of State John
Kerry’s agenda.
The plight of
Palestinians is a perennial concern, but it is in Syria that the future of the
region hangs in the balance. Choosing the peace process over Syria underscores
not the administration’s interest in the Middle East but its determination to
look past it.
Washington has wasted
precious time in using diplomatic, economic and military levers to influence
the course of events in Syria. That neglect has allowed the conflagration to
rage at great human cost, radicalizing the opposition and putting at risk U.S.
allies across the region.
America cannot and
should not decide the fate of the Middle East, but it should be clear about its
stakes there, and not shy away from efforts to at least nudge events in more
favorable directions as this critical region faces momentous choices. A “lean
back and wait” posture toward unfolding events is dangerous.
The paroxysm of
violence in Syria is expected to kill tens of thousands more and produce as
many as three million refugees by the year’s end. That is a humanitarian
tragedy to be sure, but one with immediate strategic consequences. American
insouciance in the face of that devastation is fomenting anti-Americanism. The
waves of refugees will constitute an unstable population that will be a
breeding ground for extremism and in turn destabilize the countries where they
take refuge. Syria’s neighbors are not equipped to deal with a humanitarian
disaster on this scale.
The longer the
devastation goes on the more difficult it will be to put Syria back together,
and failing to do so will leave a dangerous morass in the heart of the Middle
East, a failed state at war with itself where extremism and instability will
fester and all manner of terrorists and Al Qaeda affiliates will find ample
space, resources and recruits to menace the region and world.
Worse yet, the conflict
in Syria could spill over its borders. Syria has become ground zero in a
broader conflict that pits Shiites against Sunnis and shapes the larger
regional competition for power between Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Syria’s
paroxysms if allowed to drag on could potentially spread far and wide and even
change the map of the region. America may think it does not have any interests
in Syria, but it has interests everywhere the Syrian conflict touches.
Lebanon and Iraq are
each deeply divided along sectarian lines, and both countries teeter on a
knife’s edge as tensions rise between their ascendant Shiite populations who
fear a setback if Bashar al-Assad falls, and the minority Sunnis in their own
countries who support Syria’s Sunni-led opposition. Sectarian tensions stretch
from Lebanon and Iraq through the Gulf countries of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and
Bahrain and on to Pakistan where sectarian violence has exploded into the open.
It is time America
takes the lead in organizing international assistance to refugees. America
should not hide behind the Russian veto. It should pursue a concerted
diplomatic strategy in support of arming the rebels and imposing a no-flight
zone over Syria. That would not only hamper Assad’s ability to fight, it would
allow refugees to remain within Syria’s borders, thus reducing pressure on
neighboring countries.
It is time the U.S.
took over from Qatar and Saudi Arabia in organizing the Syrian opposition into
a credible political force — failure to do that accounts for the chaos that has
paralyzed the group. There are powerful economic sanctions that the U.S. could
use to cripple the Assad regime.
Finally, America should
build ties with the Free Syrian Army with the goal of denying extremist groups
the ability to dominate the armed resistance and gaining influence with groups
that will dominate Syria’s future. It was failing to build those ties in
Afghanistan that allowed the resistance groups who opposed the Soviet Union to
disintegrate into the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
The Syrian crisis has
become a Gordian knot that cannot be easily disentangled. As daunting as the
crisis looks, there is a cost to inaction — in human suffering, regional
instability and damage to America’s global standing. And as the Syrian crisis
escalates, America and the world will only rediscover their stakes in the Middle
East. If Obama truly wants to pivot away from the Middle East then he has to
help end the bloodletting in Syria.
Vali
Nasr, dean of the School of Advanced International
Studies at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of the forthcoming book “The
Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat.”
