Who Should Do the Dirty Work?

The new Iraqi-Syrian war that the United States and its allies have entered could cause serious collateral damage and destabilize the Middle East, which is already beset by serious religious and territorial conflicts. Who knows? In a few years, this offensive could be seen as a huge mistake, like the previous incursions on Muslim soil, like the former President Bush’s cowboy-esque Iraq offensive, the absurd destruction of Libya or the mire in Afghanistan.

People might say that the Arab-Muslim governments — they have their own reasons to fear the rise of Islamic State, are rolling in dough, and certainly are not militarily helpless — should have done the dirty work, instead of resending American and French pilots to bomb Daesh [the Arabic word for Islamic State] installations, potentially causing thousands of civilian deaths, and arousing even more hostility toward the West.

For now anyway, Arab participation, which the U.S. president brags about in his commendable effort to make his troops seem like part of a multilateral coalition, seems rather feeble. As far as we know, even Saudi Arabia, the most vocal of the five Sunni monarchies that support the anti-Daesh offensive, has only played a minor role in the recent strikes on Syria.

With this chain of events being over and backing out now being impossible, shouldn’t President Obama at least take real measures to finish off Daesh?

To do this, the president should surround himself with advisers who are well-informed about what is happening on the ground rather than listen to Samantha Power, his former adviser and now ambassador to the United Nations. Along with Hillary Clinton and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, she was the main proponent of the disastrous intervention in Libya, which she justified using the idealistic “responsibility to protect” principle, a responsibility that morally obliges democracies to overthrow dictators who abuse their people — and whose foolishness we saw in Iraq, Libya and Egypt, where people are suffering more than they did under Hussein, Gadhafi and Mubarak respectively.

This time, Power is justifying the American intervention in Syria by claiming that the Syrian regime “cannot confront these safe-havens effectively itself” — a ridiculous claim. The Syrian army, which has been combating them for three years, is actually the only force capable of fighting a ground war against Daesh in concert with American air strikes.

The New York Times recently published an informative article by Ahmad Samih Khalidi, a former Palestinian negotiator who now teaches at Oxford. He explained that the “moderate Syrian rebels” that the Americans chose to support on the ground are neither “moderate” — if they were they wouldn’t have taken up arms — nor are they capable of becoming a serious alternative to Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Like other Arabic-speaking experts, he believes that the Syrian army and its local allies, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, are the only ones capable of fighting Daesh.

“Despite its oppressive and brutal history, Mr. Assad’s regime … poses no discernible threat to the West or its interests,” he wrote. “It would seem to be the height of strategic folly to initiate a military campaign on Syrian soil that is bound to result in a serious confrontation with Mr. Assad’s forces, and possibly Iran and Russia as well …” Khalidi asserted that if the fight against Daesh is a priority, it is better to ally with Shiite forces than with Saudi Arabia, a sponsor of Sunni terrorism. Now, there’s some advice inspired by “realpolitik” rather than do-gooders.