History is irreversible

Yesterday’s New York Times suggests “Power Vacuum in Middle East Lifts Militants.”  US withdrawal is of course the cause of the power vacuum.  For years however we’ve been hearing that US presence in the Middle East is what generates militant reactions.  American bases in Saudi Arabia and the American occupation of Iraq are often cited as prime movers of Islamic militancy.

Similar contradictory statements appear often about Bashar al Asad.  The Western press is now full of claims that getting rid of him will leave Syria open to the possibility of a Sunni extremist takeover.  But his continued hold on power all too obviously also encourages radicalization of the opposition to his rule.

The simple fact is that we don’t know much about what feeds violent militancy.  While William Pape and James Feldman claim that suicide terrorism–certainly a salient characteristic of some contemporary Islamic extremists–is rooted in foreign occupation, there are ample reasons to believe that it doesn’t stop with American withdrawal.  It certainly did not in Iraq and likely won’t in Afghanistan either.

With respect to Asad’s impact on militancy, we know even less.  He has benefitted from, and even encouraged, violent resistance to his regime, which empowers him to respond violently.  But would violent resistance end if Bashar stepped aside in favor of a transitional government with full executive powers (as foreseen in the June 2012 UN communique)?  I doubt it.

The world does not run backwards.  Removing a cause, post facto, does not get you back to where you started.  Washington pulled the rug out from under Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 and helped to force his resignation, but that did not reverse the effect in Egyptian minds of decades of US support for military rule in Egypt.  An Israel/Palestine agreement now may be highly desirable, but it is unlikely to have the same impact it might have had in the 1990s.  There is just too much that has happened since and won’t be forgotten, on both sides.

Violence is particularly important in preventing history from running in reverse.  People won’t forget Bashar’s use of mass violence to compensate for his lack of legitimacy, protect Alawites and bolster territorial control.  Syria when I studied Arabic there in 2008 was peaceful and tolerant, even though repressed and authoritarian.  Ending Bashar’s rule will not take us back there.  Any future dictatorship in Syria will have to be much more brutal than Bashar’s was.  Any future democracy will face problems that a democracy emerging from a less violent transition would not have to face.

Where does this leave us with respect to US behavior?  We are clearly going to need to find indirect and less expensive ways to influence world events than the military interventions we used so boldly from 1995 to 2003.  Bosnia and Kosovo were relatively cheap and killed no Americans.  The legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan is a gigantic tab–on the order of $6 trillion I read somewhere this morning–plus thousands of dead, military and civilian.  I don’t agree with Mearsheimer’s notion that America is unhinged (and responsible for militancy in Syria) but clearly we are not going back to large-scale military interventions, even if economic and financial conditions improve.

What we need is to be much more proactive, preventing unhappy events before they happen.  We clearly failed at that in the Arab world, where we were caught unawares despite a large and well-established diplomatic presence.  But American diplomacy has a pretty good record in recent decades of nurturing, or at least permitting, nonviolent change in Latin America and Asia.  Let’s remember how to do it, because history is irreversible.