A solution for Syria

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat from Hawaii, has broken ranks with the Obama administration and is making the case that America’s efforts to get rid of Assad, the current Syrian President, are illegal. She’s right … but she doesn’t go far enough. I’ll explain the next steps in a solution for Syria that actually could bring relative peace to at least this one trouble spot in the world.

An article about foreign affairs is literally a world away from the Springdale and Zion Canyon Corridor issues that I usually write about. After I describe a logical solution that I think would work in Syria, I’ll explain how it applies even here at home.

Gabbard makes these points:

Trying to overthrow the government of Syria—no matter how horrible it is—is an act of war

Only Congress can declare war, and Congress hasn’t done that. Gabbard says that what the Obama administration is doing is illegal. It’s no more illegal than the wars that both Democratic and Republican administrations have done for decades, but there’s no time like the present to get right with the Constitution.

We’ve done this before and it hasn’t worked

We removed a horrible regime in Afghanistan and it created a hell on Earth for the people. We removed a horrible regime in Iraq and it created a hell on Earth for the people. We removed a horrible regime in Libya and created a hell on Earth for the people. Can you see the pattern here?

Advocates of getting rid of Assad first point to his war against his own people and then bring in Kissinger-style “Realpolitik” to point out that leaving Assad in place will allow our once and future enemy, Russia, to establish a new base of operations in Syria. They say that Assad’s cynical strategy has always been to make sure that keeping him in power was better than the alternative—Muslim extremists like ISIS. We would be letting evil triumph by letting Assad stay in power.

Both sides are correct. But Gabbard’s argument has obvious truths that should overrule the objections of the Obama administration. Pointing out that the Bush neocons were the original architects of the mess in the Middle East doesn’t do anything to solve the problem either. That was then and this is now.

What the world needs—not necessarily what the U.S. needs—is a credible alternative to both Assad and ISIS. The problem is that there isn’t one inside Syria. The puny forces that the U.S. has been propping up are rapidly being wiped out by the Russians with Assad’s vultures cleaning up the remains.

But there is a credible alternative outside Syria. Turkey hates Assad. So do the Kurds. So does Jordan. So does at least part of Lebanon. The corrupt oligarchs in Iraq don’t hate him, but they love power and money. Here’s a solution that would work (except for one thing that I’ll explain).

The goal of the conference would be to divide up Syria. Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, the Kurds, and Jordan would get nearly all of it. The Russians could be allocated a Kalingrad size chunk around their base at Tartus.

Neither ISIS nor Assad would last more than a month if all these powers were actually serious about wiping them out, which they aren’t now. Who can forget those Turkish tanks watching from a ridge line for months while the Kurds and U.S. jets painfully took apart the Syrian border town of Kobani brick by brick. The Turks could have done it in a few days, but it didn’t serve their interests.

Wiping out failed nations and starting over has been done before. The U.S., Britain, and Russia redrew the map of Europe at the Yalta Conference while World War II was still being fought. Germany was partitioned into four mini-states for years. The seeds of the current mess in the Middle East were planted when European powers half a world away drew artificial lines across the desert and created the modern states of Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Turkey after defeating the Germans and their ally, the Ottoman Empire, in World War I.

So why doesn’t the world simply do away with Syria and give the land to neighbors? Why is nobody even talking about it?

Greed, envy, distrust … and nationalism. Especially nationalism.

A few countries have been able to redraw borders, but only because they could grab territory that wasn’t theirs, are the Russians in Ukraine; the Chinese in Tibet, and the Zionists in Palestine. Redrawing borders where it rights a historic wrong—like the Kurds being shut out of a homeland for a century or separating the Shia from the Sunni in Iraq to stop them from fighting their religious war for another century—is simply not done today. National borders have become the most sacred thing on the planet. The destruction of religious sites is proving that national borders trump religion by a long shot. We’re fully able to protect most national borders. We feel bad when Palmyra or the Buddhas of Bamiyan are blown to bits, but we don’t do anything about it.

What all this proves is that we, the human race, are still just a bunch of tribes with flags. Doing something because everybody needs it runs a sorry second to doing something for ourselves. In particular, the U.S. won’t suggest partitioning Syria because there’s nothing in it for us. There would be something in it for the Russians and other middle eastern nations, but not enough to make it happen.

John Bolton, one of the neo-con architects of the total blunder of Iraq, wrote an op-ed to the New York Times advocating something similar to this proposal. The difference is that Bolton advocated a new Sunni state, not the extension of the territory of Iraq and also wanted to eliminate the influence of Russia. In other words, Bolton viewed this as an opportunity to expand the interests of the United States.

Humans have been dramatically successful in learning how to exploit their environment to maximize their success as a species. We have not learned that there is a limit to this success. In the Middle East as well as here at home, our laws and our culture emphasize individual ownership. It is amazing to me that the major sticking point in Syria is one man: Assad. His “ownership” of Syria is something that the whole world can’t get past.

The same thing happens as close as my own back yard in Springdale. It would be good for everybody, developers included, if we could keep the charm that attracts tourists to Springdale now, but what’s good for everybody can be overruled by the profit of a single individual if that person “owns” property. There are at least three big developments happening right now that are destroying more of Springdale. It’s easy to see how the whole place will look like West Yellowstone in a few years.

Professor Garrett Hardin popularized the term “The Tragedy of the Commons” to describe this failure of people to do something when individual profit overrules the common benefit for everybody. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.