Angry Planet - How the US May Have Lost a War It Didn't Fight

Episode Date: August 6, 2018

When Syria was pulled apart seven years ago, the United States opted to stay on the sidelines. It was clear that President Bashar Al-Assad was a bad guy, but it was far less clear who the good guys were. Unfortunately, inaction has also had its price for the U.S., according to our guest Steven A. Cook, who is the Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The Gulf countries have a compelling economic interest in dealing with the Russians because the United States is now the world's largest producer of oil. So they want to kind of contain the United States in certain ways. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast,

that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. After more than seven years, the war in Syria may be reaching a conclusion. Dictator Bashar al-Assad has retaken much of the country. He didn't do it alone. Russia and Iran both played major roles.

So where does this leave the United States? Stephen A. Cook joins us to help us figure it all out. Cook is Enrico Matei Senior Fellow for Middle East and African Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations, which is very easy to say, by the way. He's also the author of False Dawn, Protest, Democracy, and Violence in the New Middle East. It was released in June. So thank you very much for joining us, Stephen. Alex, my pleasure. So I always like to start fairly close to the beginning.

And I just want to ask you about your premise for this fascinating article you wrote in foreign policy, which is that Assad has more or less won the Civil War, but the force that you put in opposition is the United States. And you say that the U.S. lost. So can you explain what you mean by that? Well, sure. It is, I think, now self-evident, of course, that the Assad regime will prevail in Syria. As I said in the peace, there's a lot of fighting to come. But where there has pockets of resistance, it's fairly clear that the Syrians, the Russians, and the Iranians are going to turn their guns until they can completely establish control completely over Syria.

And the reason why I say the United States has lost is not because the United States was so directly involved in the fight in Syria, but because that the show of force on behalf of Bashar al-Assad, by the Russians in particular, but of course by the Iranians as well, has made a profound impression on countries in the Middle East, including countries that are Washington's closest to allies. And what we've seen since the Russian intervention a number of years ago is that there's been a lot of hedging going on among those allies. And those allies include Egypt, the Gulf states, and even Israel, in which they understand that the Russians have established themselves as a power broker in the region. And the place in which they have demonstrated themselves to be competent leaders in the region. region is Syria and confident from the perspective of leaders in the Middle East. This is not to condone the fact that the Russians have abetted the murder of a half a million people in Syria. But this impression that the Russians can come in as non-ideological, as confident as leaders

to save an ally that is in crisis, it stands in contrast to the perception of Washington's major allies in the region that the United States is speckless. And their best example of that is how the United States turned, their perception that the United States turned on Hussein Mubarak during the January 25th uprising in Egypt in 2011. Which over here seemed like a burst of, well, I mean, the opposite of pragmatism. It was the burst of optimism, right, in the United States, the perception here? Well, I was I was in Top Rear Square for the beginning of the uprising in Egypt. And it had nothing whatsoever to do with the United States. And so I had the idea, and again, it's a strongly held perception in the Middle East that the United States

earned on Hussein Mubarak. But the idea that if President Obama had made some strong statement about his support for Hussein Mubarak, or had he also made a or had he made a strong statement saying that Hussein Mubarak must go, that that would have had an impact on how things unfolded in Egypt is really a man. I think that by the time that President Obama said that there needed to be a transition, the writing was clearly on the wall that Mubarak, that the military was planning on removing Mubarak from office. So, but in Abu Dhabi, in Riyadh, in Cairo, in Cairo, in Cairo, among the people who read the country right now, certainly in Jerusalem, the belief was that

President Obama essentially withdrew American support from Hussein Mubarak and he subsequently fell. And this is after Mubarak carried America's water in the Middle East for almost 30 years. But this overlooks a number of complexities, nuances and political dynamics in Egypt that had nothing whatsoever to do with the United States. Getting back to Syria, one thing that also stood out from your article in foreign policy was you make it out that Assad essentially made it impossible for the United States to pick good guys, right? I mean, in Egypt it somehow immediately looked like there were good guys, people looking for freedom. But in Syria, it sort of fell out differently. Can you explain that? Yeah, it did become very clear within six, seven months of the initial uprising in March 2011, that Bashar al-Assad was going to militarize the conflict.

I mean, he militarized the conflict almost from the beginning. One of the things that quite honestly irritates me looking back at the spring of 2011 was the idea that was popular in Washington at the time that Bashar al-Assad would fall. in relatively short period of time in the same way that bin ali had fallen in Tunisia, the way in which Mubarak, who fell in 18 days, had fallen in Egypt. And for anybody who knew anything and had looked closely at the way in which the Assad family had run the Syrian regime, it was clear that Assad was going to militarize the conflict. And that's what he did. And so this peaceful protest demanding change about who was the legitimate.

legitimate leader of Syria quickly became militarized. And there were people who remained committed to that peaceful protest. But in order to protect themselves, lots of people took up arms. And they courted different groups within the Middle East, whether it was in the Gulf or beyond, for money and arms. And these groups became co-opted by different countries, or representatives of different countries, whether it's the Kuparis, the Saudis, or others. And then, of course, you had the extremist phenomenon. So by, let's say, late 2012 or so, it was very hard to distinguish who the

United States was going to intervene on behalf. And there was this kind of half-hearted effort to vet rebels and establish them as the good guys. And those are the guys who are the guys who the United States would give money to. But it never worked. No one was really genuinely a good guy. And so it became very hard to understand what American interest was being served by the intervention in Syria.

Do you think personally that we should have intervened, that the U.S. should have intervened in Syria? Oh, my God. I am the world's leading flip-flopper on Syria. If you look at my past writings on Syria in early 2012, I made an argument in the Atlantic seeing that it was time to seriously consider intervention and that if we that no policy was

risk free but that if the United States did intervene in Syria, it served a number of strategic interests as well as would serve humanitarian goals. And the strategic interest was to essentially cut the Iranians down to size because even by then they were deeply involved in trying to save for Shah-Lasa. And that this would actually help us in negotiations over. Iran's nuclear program. And then at the time, quote unquote, only 5,000 people, I wrote that,

only 5,000 people had been killed. We had intervened. We might save the world from a humanitarian crisis that people couldn't even imagine at the time. And this again, it comes from the idea that Bashar al-Assad was going to militarize the conflict. His father and uncle had fought their way out of an uprising in 1982, killing 25,000 people,

that the similar kinds of things were going to happen in Syria. Of course, I was called a warmonger, all kinds of terrible things. And then by 2013, when the president promised, I think it was in the Secretary of State, he used this quote, John Kerry used this quote, he said, an incredibly small intervention in response to allegations that Assad had used chemical weapons, I said, well, what's the point at this point? especially if it's going to be incredibly small. And I've wavered between these two kind of polls in my thinking ever since. We should have intervened.

There was an opportunity. We missed it. Our interests are engaged here to what's the point unless we're going to march an army on Damascus? And no one wants to do that. No one wants to march an army into Damascus. They discipline the political arena and bring the war to an end. So we've essentially elected to the Russians and the Iranians. You've said a couple times now that Assad was going to militarize the conflict.

And I want to touch on something that I want the audience to understand here is how well-armed Syria really was, especially in terms of like tanks. Can you speak to that a little bit? Yeah. Look, I think that the Syrian military was one of these militaries that had been armed by the Soviet Union. had large stockpiles in its inventory, but quite obviously wasn't well-trained. After all, you know, this was an uprising that became militarized, and they had a hard time pacifying the country relatively quickly, and they needed Hezbollah and Iran and the Russians to help them do it. I think from the perspective of their prime adversary in the region,

the Israelis, what they will, what the Israelis worried most about when it came to, the Syrian threat was missile program, chemical and biological weapons, and interestingly, the Syrian Air Force, which is interesting because the Israelis had really mastered the skies over Lebanon and Syria for the better part of the last 40 years. But I think that the Syrians demonstrated how absolutely inept they were as a fighting force because they militarized the conflict. They started selling towns where the uprising was happening. Then kind of rag-tag groups of people, military officers who had defected, put together molasses with essentially light arms, and they were able to keep the Syrian military

at day for quite some time. So if we did intervene, this is a complete hypothetical. What could an intervention have looked like? Yeah, this is the subject of. of incredible debate in Washington, D.C., people who, and very often, it never got to the point where people would say, well, this is what it would look like if we did this. If you brought this up with people in the Pentagon or people close to the Pentagon, they'd say an intervention, well, this is what it would require.

And it would be, you know, the military always wants to bring everything plus three kitchen sinks with them in an intervention. And, you know, it kind of ranged, the debate ranged from denying Assad the use of his air forces to a kind of limited types of intervention in the sense that, you know, taking out important regime facilities to an actual invasion of the country. Of course, like I said, no one was really willing to contemplate these things in a serious way. somewhere in the Pentagon, there is war plans for Syria. But no one really, no one ever really wanted to discuss them in a serious kind of way. It strikes me that if you look at the Lebanese civil war, and that went on for quite some time, it wasn't until the Paiath agreement and essentially an Arab League sanctioned Syrian intervention and occupation of Lebanon that brought

that civil war to an end. And of course, it was an intervention and an occupation that was quite bloody until Lebanon was pacified. It strikes me that you would need something similar. You would need a large force to go in and pacify the country. And that's what the Pentagon was saying when they said, you know, we need hundreds of thousands of people. We could do it. We're going to get sucked into occupying yet another Middle East Spring country. And after the Iraq experience, nobody wanted to do that. And so by default, it's become the Russians who've done it. Now, they haven't marched large numbers of Russian soldiers into Syria, but they have used the assets that they have placed there, mostly kind of Air Force assets, to really obliterate the opposition and used Hezbollah, Syrian government forces and Iranian forces as the ground forces to take over the country that had fought. into the hands of rebels.

Sounds like our original model in Afghanistan, actually. You know, the Russians are hardly stupid. And in the years in which they were kind of downed out, there's no doubt in my mind that they were studying what the United States was doing militarily in various places. I think there's some things that they thought that we had done that was completely dad. But you can see that they have certainly learned from their experiences and American experiences. When they first intervened in Syria, people were saying they clearly have forgotten

Afghanistan. And they're going to get their comeuppance. They've been very, very careful not to do that. They've been careful to use, as you said, basically our model in Afghanistan. I think that they're likely to have a better outcome in Syria, better, scare quotes, better outcome in Syria than we've had in Afghanistan. Well, to that end, do you think that Russia is becoming a power in the Middle East and is the USA kind of ceding the position to them? I think it's undeniable that the Russians are becoming a regional power in the Middle East. And it's part of their broader strategy to reestablish Russia as a global power. And it's an obvious place, it's an obvious place for them to start.

If you look at Russia where it has intervened or where its influence has increased markedly over the course of the last three or four years, you start in Damascus, you move to the east, you look in the Kurdistan regional government, even Baghdad, and over into Iran, which has become a partner for the Russians in some places. That doesn't mean that they agree on absolutely everything, and there's ideas that they are at odds on the end game in Syria, but nevertheless, the Russians and the Iranians have partnered in this project to save Bashar al-Assadir and has drawn the two countries closer together. Then if you look to the west and the south, the Russians are clearly reestablishing a relationship with the Egyptians. They are clearly interested in Libya. And if you take a look at this kind of situation, they have influenced now in the Eastern Mediterranean, across the Levant, and through into the Gulf. You have the Emirati's, for example, saying, look, you know, the Russians are going to have to be at the table if this is the way things go. And interestingly, you know, the Gulf countries have a compelling economic interest in dealing with the Russians because the United States is now the world's largest producer of oil. So they want to kind of contain the United States in certain ways.

You look at the Russian presence in Egypt and in Libya. There's a reason why the United States invaded North Africa first in World War II, because the Mediterranean, that is kind of the soft underbelly of Europe. The Russians look at Libya, the country with the largest reserves of light, sweet crude in the world, and the fourth largest reserves of gas in Africa, and see that Libya is important to Europe in terms of the energy. So there is a strategy. There is a method behind interventions in the Middle East.

I think a lot of Russia experts have been surprised by this. They thought that his resources were limited. They are. But it's not just about kind of traditional metrics of power. As the United States has retrenched, and the last two presidents, their inclination, President Obama and now President Trump has been to retrench from the Middle East, as the United States has made a number of missteps in the region. As powers in the region perceive the United States as acting in ways counter to their interests, they've been looking for alternatives.

And as I said at the top of our conversation, the Russians have presented themselves as non-eological, as competent, and as capable of leadership. When you talk about the complexity, it does remind me that these allies in the Middle East were not always necessarily the best allies that the United States ever had. So this really does sound like, and I guess it's not a surprise, that this sounds like a lose-lose situation. The United States could invest blood and treasure, not that that's my favorite expression, with uncertain outcome. or, well, I mean, it almost sounds like, unfortunately, the world is called our bluff. And we were much better off when we were perceived as willing to intervene much more than actually being willing to intervene. Well, I think that's right.

And by the way, if you don't like blood and treasures, don't get me started on boots on the ground. That, oh, there's nothing that drops to me. In fact, I was the leading force at the Council on Foreign Relations to strike that from all Council on Farm Relations publications. We're not allowed to say boots on the ground. Anyway. I feel that the war colleges and anti-boots on the ground as a phrase. Yeah.

No doubt. In any of it, look, I think when you talk to officials in the Middle East over the course of the last, I don't know, four, five, six, seven years or so, ask them what surprises them most about the United States in the Middle East, and they say, you're total incompetence. They really thought we were better at this stuff than we really have proven ourselves today. I think that they were just, they were opposed to the invasion of Iraq, and then dumbfounded that we went in there with a certain set of beliefs that they knew not to be true. and that we screwed it up so royally in Iraq. And that really began to chip away at our credibility in the region.

And then comes President Obama, who, for obvious reasons and for good reasons and for good political reasons, he wants us to get out of Iraq. Iraq, for him, is the ultimate in doing stupid stuff, as he used to say, that actually sap the power of the United States and started talking about a pivot to Asia. Asia, which to the ears of Middle Eastern leaders, sounded like the United States was turning its back on the Middle East after we had created all of this chaos in the region. And then, of course, was his effort to get a deal with the Iranians on its nuclear program, which he did. But then to use that as a way of bringing more stability to the region by bringing Iran into the region, which many of the major countries in the region reacted quite poorly to it. And based on what, you know, they saw as a fundamental misunderstanding of Iran's intentions in the Middle East.

So they have just been absolutely, as I said, dumbfounded by our incompetence. And long comes the Russians who say, we think the United States was crazy too. They were infatuated with these uprisings, which they thought was, which the Americans thought we're going to bring democracy, which actually is only empowered Islamists. we will partner with you to crush these people. I think based on that, people are willing to overlook the Russian relationship with the Iranians. So it has been a decade or more in which this idea that the United States can drive events in the region has been shattered. It's interesting, though, there are some in the region who believe that this was all part of an American plan. the whole idea of creative destruction that was something that people talked about during the invasion of Iraq,

that that has lived on. But what I try to explain to people is that that may have been a thought in the minds of architects of the invasion of Iraq. You know, you shake things up a bit. You make Iraq, a shining example of democracy, and it totally transforms the region. But what we're looking at now really is incompetence and political paralysis at home. and dysfunction at home that makes it impossible to have a coherent strategy for the Middle East. So what is this abdication of power, if we want to call it that, going to mean going forward? Is this going to get much worse for the United States if we can figure out exactly how it is bad in the first place?

Well, I think that's an important issue. Do we care? Does it matter to us that the rush. and maybe sometime soon the Chinese are playing a more active role in the Middle East, in a place that is for at least the last 25 years since the end of Operation Desert Storm has been, the United States has been the predominant military power. Do we care that that is the case? And I think that that's a question that has not been settled in Washington.

I think in the world of think tanks, it's a debate that is happening. I think it's a robust debate. I think at an official level, in Congress, this is a debate that is not because everything is seen as a kind of as a lever for political advantage. And so the default in terms of policies to continue to do things in the way that we've always done and assume that we are still the big kid on the block. And we are in ways. You know, no one can touch us militarily, but that's big, dumb power.

That's not genuinely understanding the region. It's not reexamining our assumptions and putting together a strategy based on that going forward. Look, the Russians have been able to do a lot of things over the course of the last three or four years that the United States has not been able to do with far fewer resources than the United States. So I go back and forth whether this is a good thing or this is a bad thing

for the United States. Certainly, if you look at it and you accept my argument that the Middle East is the crucible of a Russian strategy that is more global than people initially assumed, then I think it's a bad thing. I always think it's a bad thing for the Iranians to win. So that I think that the United States does need to rethink, does need to recalibrate, does need to marshal the resources it has,

and figure out what is that's important to the United States in the Middle East. I keep coming back to things that have long been important to us, the free flow of energy resources out of the region, helping to ensure Israeli security, and helping ensure that the United States remains a dominant player in the Middle East for those two other interests. But, you know, there are other arguments to be made. And, you know, do we really have to worry about energy in the region?

We're the largest producer of oil in the world. Are there ways to help ensure Israeli security that are different from the ways in which we've been doing it before? Could we multilateralize security in the Gulf? I mean, these are ideas that are starting to bubble up. And I think they're born in the fact that we've been doing things the same way for a long period of time, and they seem to have come to, they seem not to be as effective as they once were and maybe it's time for some from new thinking and new strategies when it comes to

the Middle East. Do we have any cause to hope? Do I have any cause to hope in the Middle East? You know, it's very, very hard to find the silver linings in these clouds. I don't, in in the region specifically see a lot of good. I think at kind of that grassroots level, outside capitals, there are people who are struggling and trying to help each other. But when it comes to U.S. policy in the Middle East, I look at what's happening in the United States in Washington and the political paralysis, the political dysfunction.

I don't think I'm overstating it when I'm. I say that people are concerned about political instability in the United States. When I think about it in terms of that and the need for there to be a reevaluation and for us to think about and have a conversation about the resources that we want to expend as a country in the Middle East and what's important to the United States and the Middle East, I don't have a lot of hope that we can have that conversation, although I think it's important that we do have, we do have that conversation. I think Iraq laid bare the fact that Americans want to be a big power, want to be the great power,

but after it don't want to necessarily expend the kinds of resources, make the kinds of sacrifices that are necessary. So that leads me to question, and even on kind of basic issues, after Iraq, do they want to do it? So I wonder if the interest that we've always talked about really are America's interests because people aren't really willing to invest in them. They're willing to assign them importance, but then not necessarily invest in defending them. Stephen A. Cook, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, it was a great pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to this week's show.

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