ON 17 DECEMBER 1983, A FRENCH NEWS cameraman burst into the bar of Beirut’s Commodore Hotel, where his colleagues gathered most evenings. “At last,” he shouted, cupping both hands upwards, “someone with balls!” French warplanes had just bombed the town of Baalbek, site of magnificent Roman ruins but also of a Shiite Muslim militant barracks. This was France’s revenge for the killing of 58 French troops by a suicide bomber four weeks earlier. On the same morning the French died, the United States had lost 241 American service personnel, most of them US Marines, to another suicide bomber. So far, Washington had not responded. We learned later that Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who was against sending Marines to Lebanon in the first place, had dissuaded President Ronald Reagan from bombing Lebanon until there was evidence to prove who had done it.
France’s bombardment satisfied one French cameraman. It changed nothing, except for the civilians and militants who died in Baalbek. When the US finally bombed eastern Lebanon in December, Syrian air defenses downed a Navy A-6 Intruder. The pilot, Lieutenant Mark Lange, died when his parachute malfunctioned. The navigator-bombardier, Lieutenant Robert O. Goodman, became a prisoner for 31 days until the Syrians released him to Reverend Jesse Jackson. And that was that.
In February 1984, the French and American forces of the ill-advised Multinational Force left Lebanon. French President François Mitterrand’s promise to remain in defiance of those who had murdered his soldiers was forgotten, as was President Reagan’s commitment to peace in Lebanon. The civil war, already in its eighth year, did not end until 1990. The parties behind the bombing of the French and American troops, the Hezbollah militia and its backers, Iran and Syria, emerged more or less victorious. In fact, Syria had proven itself so powerful in Lebanon that the US approved its military occupation to keep order. Syria went too far by assassinating former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in February 2005, and its troops were forced to evacuate the country two months later.
In 2015, in the aftermath of the November attacks in Paris, supporters of American, French and British bombing in Syria exulted that these western powers were showing their muscles, but there is every probability that they will balls it up. They have so far made a mess of Syria since they involved themselves in the vain attempt to bring down President Bashar al-Assad in 2011. Instead Islamic State fanatics emerged as the dominant power within the anti-Assad forces. They are not anti-dictatorship so much as anti-minority, particularly the ruling quasi-Shiite Alawite minority. The Western powers tolerated IS crimes, until IS turned from its bases in Syria and seized about a third of the American protectorate of Iraq. It was then that the US, to save the Kurdish capital at Erbil and the national capital of Baghdad, first bombed IS positions. Since then, other countries, including the Russians, who sought to save their Syrian protectorate, have joined the crusade against IS.
IS has turned around and murdered people from most of the countries that have challenged it: Shiite civilians in Iraq and Syria; Kurdish and leftwing Turkish peace demonstrators in Ankara; passengers on a Russian airliner over Egypt; Shiites, because of Hezbollah’s involvement, in Beirut; and more than 120 innocents in Paris.
These international attacks, as well as the oppression and terror that IS has inflicted on large parts of Syria and Iraq, do not call for a response. They do not call for revenge. They do not call for gestures of the kind that British Prime Minister David Cameron succeeded in ramming through the UK Parliament in Westminster in early December. They do not call for Europe and the US to deny shelter to refugees who are fleeing from IS terror that the world ignored when it was confined to Syria. They do not call for further erosion of privacy and other rights closer to home.
The Islamic State’s international attacks call for a strategy. If the goal is to eliminate IS from the territory it rules in Iraq and Syria, and from which it plots murder elsewhere, the forces opposed to it must come together. It took more than 100 dead in Paris and 224 passengers on a Russian airliner for France and Russia to coordinate their air strikes in Syria. What will it take for the US to do the same?
Air strikes, however, do not win wars. Warplanes drop bombs, meaning they function as airborne artillery. No military doctrine holds that artillery alone can conquer territory. That takes forces on the ground. The ground forces exist in both Syria and Iraq, and they are not from the western world. The Syrian Army, though odious to many Syrians and to the western powers, is the strongest of these and has weathered four and a half years of war without breaking up. It lost territory to IS in northeast Syria and at Palmyra, and it has reclaimed some of it with Russian air support. The Kurds of Iraq, supported by Kurds from Turkey and Syria and by US air strikes, have clawed back most of the territory that IS seized from them last year. The Shiite militias in southern Iraq, which filled the vacuum left by mass desertions from the US-created Iraqi Army, with Iranian support and American air cover saved Baghdad from IS conquest and regained lost ground. The war requires infantry, but not American, British and French troops. Nothing would turn Iraqis and Syrians to the jihadists more quickly than a western invasion.
Those of us who witnessed the Iraqi uprising of 1991, when Kurds and Shiites used the demoralization of Saddam Hussein’s army in Kuwait to liberate 14 of Iraq’s 18 provinces, know that it had more potential to save the country than the American-led invasion of 2003 did. The US pulled the plug on that rebellion in March 1991, and it launched its own bid to control Iraq in 2003, one that it is still paying for.
One step would not involve any combat at all: sever the supply route between IS and the outside world through Turkey. Turkey is an ally, but no friend. Its open border with Syria is the jihadis’ lifeline. Without it, the weapons and ammunition the jihadis seized from the Iraqi Army last year would not have been enough for them to defend all their territory. Without it, jihadis trained in Syria would not have passed easily into Europe to murder civilians. Without it, the local forces whose shared hatred of the jihadis—who include the Syrian Army, the Kurds and all of Syria’s and Iraq’s other minorities, Iraq’s majority Shiite population, secular Sunnis in Syria and Iraq and Lebanon’s Hezbollah—would have stood a better chance of defeating them.
Diplomacy is better than war, and the outside powers that have been using Syria to fight their proxy wars must agree in Geneva or Vienna that enough is enough. The US, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have all played their parts in destroying Syria. It is up to them to end this war that has cost as many as 310,000 lives. No one is winning. No one can win. They provide their clients with the means to fight the war. And they can cut them off.
Since March 2011, when the first protests began in Syria, the question has been what is to be done with President Bashar al-Assad. The reason the West, Saudi Arabia and Israel wanted to dispose of him had nothing to do with dictatorship or repression. Nearly all Arab governments are repressive dictatorships, but only Syria was not a US satellite. Only Syria had a strategic alliance with Iran, dating to Hafez al-Assad’s decision to support Iran against Saddam Hussein in 1980, long before the West declared him a pariah. Syria supported Hezbollah in Lebanon, where it repelled Israel’s invasion in 2006. And the US still had a score to settle with Hezbollah, which turned out to have staged the bombing of the marines in October 1983, as well as of the US Embassy the previous April, and to have kidnapped American citizens like myself in the years that followed.
Thus Assad had to go. The price was a conflagration that pits the world’s two superpowers against each other in Syria’s skies, and at the same time provides the landscape for Iran and Saudi Arabia to force their competing fantasies of “true” Islam on recalcitrant Syrians. This in turn has sent innocent refugees and guilty suicide bombers to every corner of the world. The wars in Iraq and Syria are destroying both countries, and the outside powers are escalating their armed involvement rather than finding a diplomatic settlement that grows more elusive with each day’s delay. “During the Cold War, almost 20 million people died in Third World conflicts fueled largely by U.S.-Soviet competition,” wrote Cato Institute visiting research fellow Brad Stapleton in October 2015. “That dismal history of proxy warfare suggests that more arms is not the answer in Syria.” Yet more arms are what the US, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran are providing.
In July of 2015, four months before IS bombs and bullets massacred innocent civilians in Beirut and Paris, I wrote on The Intercept website,
A friend of mine in Aleppo, who refuses to leave despite the battles in his once beautiful city, told me over the telephone, “You have sent hell to us.” That is, he blames me as a Westerner for putting the jihadis in his midst. The day cannot be far off when the jihadi militants, like the poor refugees whom they and the regime have displaced, will bring that hell back to us.
And so the jihadis did on a Russian airliner over the Sinai, in a Shiite suburb of Beirut and on the streets of Paris.
And so the jihadis will again, until peace is restored to Iraq and Syria. Peace, not war, will be the downfall of the Islamic State.