If Assad is allowed to cross Obama’s red line without consequence, America is giving a green light to other evils
This article appeared as MPs were being recalled to Parliament following the Syrian government’s chemical weapons attack on its own citizens. Two days after it was published, MPs rejected the Government’s plan for a military response.
Let’s say that there is an epidemic of a disease that kills about ten of every 10,000 children. A vaccine is developed that eliminates the chance of getting the disease, but there is a problem. The vaccine kills. And five out of every 10,000 vaccinated children die as a result of receiving it. Would you vaccinate your child?
If your answer is that you would – after all, the vaccination halves the chance of death – you are relatively unusual. Most parents in a survey said they would not vaccinate. Because the vaccine kills.
This example is provided by Tobias Moskowitz and Jon Wertheim in their excellent sports book Scorecasting. The authors are investigating what psychologists call ‘omission bias’ – our tendency to judge harmful actions more harshly than equally, or even more, damaging inaction.
Basketball referees are taught that there are four types of calls – correct calls, incorrect calls, correct non-calls and incorrect non-calls. It is better to make a correct call than an incorrect one, obviously. And if you fail to call an infringement when you should, you will be criticised.
But every referee knows that it is far better to make such an omission than to make a call in the dying moments of a game and be wrong. So what happens? In sport after sport, the referees blow their whistles far more in the earlier parts of the game than in the closing stages, thus penalising those infringed against. Omission bias.
Yesterday morning the Conservative MP Adam Holloway, opposed to taking action in Syria, provided as his chief argument that the outcome of intervention was impossible to predict. And he is quite right. In fact, he pierced to the heart of almost every foreign policy dilemma. The outcome of action is always hard to predict.
When Winston Churchill prevailed in his War Cabinet and decided to press on with war against Germany, it was impossible to know what the result would be. Victory seemed quite unlikely. When John Kennedy exposed the Soviet missiles in Cuba, it might have ended in disaster. When Tony Blair put pressure on Bill Clinton to threaten escalation against the Serbs, he couldn’t be confident the Serbs would capitulate.
In each of these cases the decision to act could only be made if omission bias was overcome, if the consequences of action were compared with the consequences of inaction. And if the leaders were prepared to take risks that might turn out badly. As indeed later happened, in many critical respects, to Tony Blair in Iraq.
So the mistake the otherwise acute Mr Holloway was making was to fail to observe that while the outcome of intervention in Syria is impossible to predict, so is the outcome of not acting.
Syria is the Iraq of the non-interventionists. We did nothing and the situation got worse. And the worse the situation got, the more we used it as an excuse to do nothing.
Thus we are told that the opposition is now controlled by Islamic fundamentalists, while the liberal dissidents are nowhere. But this is hardly surprising when every force in Syria is being provided with support and weapons – except for the liberal dissidents. In Iraq we invaded to find no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction; in Syria we did nothing and it turns out they did have stockpiles of chemical weapons and they used them.
Non-intervention has been a disaster. An interesting illustration of omission bias is that no one will launch a public inquiry into it. Non-intervention was an incorrect non-call. And who cares about those, right?
It is true that to change this policy now, to do something rather than sit there, is risky. And we have let the situation deteriorate so badly that the risk is greater than it was at the beginning. But the risk of not doing something is great too.
The Syria that will emerge if Bashar Assad wins will be a profoundly dangerous place. The choice is not between secular, but comparatively safe, repression under his Baathists and the triumph of the friends of al-Qaeda. As the leading Syrian expert Andrew Tabler has explained in both his recent book and a series of papers, victory will cede Assad a rump country in Western Syria ruled by repression, with parts of the state run by other terrorist groups.
Assad will hold power only with the support of Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. They will be engaged in a running battle with Sunni insurgents who will turn to foreign allies to assist a jihadist struggle.
In addition to the hundreds of thousands who will die in Syria, the establishment of both an Iranian hold on Syria and a jihadist insurgency supported from Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, will spread through the region and fuel international terror.
As Tabler puts it: ‘Las Vegas rules do not apply to Syria: what happens there will not stay there.’
All this if we do nothing. But what reason is there to believe that acting might be any better? Is there anything we can do that has any point to it at all? Or are we being urged to act just for show?
The right place to start is with the Cold War. Much of what we did in the Cold War, and particularly much that America did, was just for show. It may not have achieved an immediate improvement in conditions on the ground, but it demonstrated that the Western allies were united and committed to resisting tyranny.
America took a decision it did not have to take – that it would engage with the world, spill blood and dollars to defend liberty against tyranny – and the results were hugely to the benefit of mankind. It got itself involved in an apparently irrelevant war in Korea, a place most Americans couldn’t care less about, that ended in stalemate and a country divided between two dictatorships. And the war was hugely unpopular at home, and nearly resulted in disastrous military defeat.
Yet the Korean War signalled to the Soviet Union that the United States would act if it pushed things too far. Something happening in Korea, miles and miles away, was a vital moment in the postwar history of Europe.
So if all we in the West now do is act for show it will still be worthwhile. If, having described the use of chemical weapons as a red line, we do nothing, what lesson will Iran learn, as it develops its nuclear programme? We could be paying the price of an incorrect non-call for years.
But this is to take the most pessimistic view and to advance the minimum case for action. Creating a safe zone, protected from the regime; meeting the secular and moderate opposition there and helping them with arms, advice and technology so that they have a stronger voice; forcing Assad to the negotiating table; all these are possible.
No one can be certain that acting will produce this outcome, or that the outcome will be desirable. No one can say for sure what the ‘end game’ is. Once we start, the whole thing is open-ended. But the point is that if we don’t start it is open-ended too and no one knows what the end game of inaction is either.
One of my favourite cartoons pictured a couple walking briskly down a street, with a cruise missile about to fall on the street next door. The caption read: ‘Come along, dear, don’t let’s get involved.’
Syria won’t go away just if we close our eyes.