The Overlooked Obvious in the Syrian Crisis

Many argue that ignoring Assad’s massacring Syrian people was a good idea, that intervention in civil wars never lead to anything good. My goal with this short essay is to point out the obvious that went overlooked in this matter.

One idea I want to communicate is this: Stopping bloodshed is always better if the end goal is peace.

When your parents fight, intervening often worsens the fight. That’s because the intervention does not solve the real issues over which your parents fight and your parents might become even more angry given a new problem to solve: you. So even if they stop fighting they will fight again and you will have to intervene again and soon you will find yourself locked in a deadly cycle of having to intervene for nothing. A better way is to give them guidelines that can help them reach peaceful resolution.

But when your dad takes out a chainsaw with full intent to shred your mom to pieces, and your much weaker mom has only a pocket knife and you yourself are armed with an iron man suit, you stop your dad right away. You prevent the bloodshed. You constrain his ability to inflict harm. Then you provide your dad with psychological help to cure his twisted mind. You turn him toward seeing bloodshed as wrong and peaceful resolution as right. Then you bring your parents together in a room where you are present and help them discuss their issues and agree on an actionable solution. Even divorce, but a peaceful one. Once decided, you help them keep it at nights and over weekends since you are busy working at your job full-time. Once they seem stabilized and mature again, you leave them be and from time to time check in.

Syrian Refugee Crisis is the consequence of this scenario gone terribly wrong. “Wait, the case in Syria is about a real government and real military stuff, it’s far more complicated than the mom and dad case you made there,” you say? Imagine you are a Syrian. And your dad works at the army and your mom at home. Assad just ordered your dad to bomb the village you and your mom live. That’s as accurate as it gets to what happened in Syria.

When we see the world through jargon made up by political scientists and politicians and etc., who were no smarter than us, it is easy to harden our hearts and ignore the simplest truths existing in reality. In Syria’s case, that was a lot of defenseless people including babies dying, sometimes from chemical weapons.

“Let’s take our military and solve everything is too simple an approach for such complex situation,” you say? Execution matters. In Libya they screwed up the execution by having too many participants with terrible coordination. Even the best strategy can be derailed by terrible tactics and executions. History is full of such examples. Watching American football gives us a bit of the sense of it as well. And how simpler a response to people dying can get than doing nothing? Two words. Which side is oversimplifying things?

Right strategy for Syria was never even formed, by the way (e.g. No-fly zone, without ground troops, in right place to shelter Syrian people and prevent them from becoming refugees and enable ready food-medicine aid while using the zone area to fill the vacuum that IS later filled). People were too afraid of becoming Bush junior.

Syrian rebels were bunch of farmers and mom and pop store owners armed with little more than handguns and never really had any chance. The U.S. didn’t even arm them until later, and even then not enough to defeat Assad. (although arming them is equivalent to giving your mom a longer knife and will continue the bloodshed). Obama himself said, “When you have a professional army, that is well armed and sponsored by two large states” — Iran and Russia — “who have huge stakes in this, and they are fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict … The notion that we could have — in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces — changed the equation on the ground there was never true.” They were truly moms with pocket knives facing military-trained dads with chainsaws.

What happened in Syria is a tragic failure by powerful democratic countries to stop their dad from killing their mom. And our younger siblings are scattered all around, hungry, cold, sad, hopeless, abused, dying.