Inappropriate happy talk for Syria

Donald Trump, at a loss for something to say as Aleppo fell to Syrian government, Iranian and Russian forces, renewed his call yesterday for safe zones in Syria:

We’re going to try and patch that up and we’re going to try and help people…We’re going to build safe zones…We’re going to get the Gulf States to pay for the safe zones.

What’s wrong with that?

Building a safe zone is not like building a Trump condo. What it requires is US willingness to protect the people concentrated in a particular area. We did this successfully in northern Iraq for many years, with the US patrolling the skies and Kurdish forces keeping Saddam Hussein’s army at bay. It was tried unsuccessfully in Bosnia, because no one was willing to to put their own forces in harm’s way. The result was a slippery slope to on-the-ground intervention.

I might have liked to see “safe zones” once upon a time in Syria, or at least US willingness to destroy the aircraft that attack civilians, including in Aleppo. But the deployment of Russian air forces and defenses more than a year ago precludes the kind of patrolling required for safe zones in western Syria and makes attacks on Syrian aircraft problematic. There are two problems:

1. The risk to US aircraft enforcing a safe zone;
2. The risk that US bombing of miscreants might kill Russians.

“So what?” some will say with regard to 2, but I think it fair to say that most of America doesn’t think Syria is a good reason for the US to go to war with Russia. Certainly Trump wouldn’t, as he is planning to ally with Russia against terrorists.

As for the Gulf States paying for safe zones, I suppose they might in principle be prepared to contribute, if only to protect fellow Sunnis (and keep them from seeking asylum in the Gulf). This is not the wall the Mexicans aren’t going to pay for, but the Gulf States don’t have the deep pockets they once had either. Trump may get more out of them than Obama has, but it won’t be much.

Trump’s bombast about safe zones is far from today’s reality and his own priorities. If he wants to make common cause with Russia, he is going to have to cut off aid to the relatively moderate Syrian opposition fighters the CIA has been cultivating for years. Assad would then be able to end resistance to his rule in the remaining parts of western Syria (especially Idlib), as well as in the south. The Turks would continue to control both the northern border of Syria and some its territory west of the Euphrates, where there is already a kind of informal no-fly zone.

The big question mark remains Raqqa in the east, where the Islamic State still holds court. There the Americans need to decide if Turkey and allied Arabs, currently investing Al Bab farther west, will be permitted to do the honors, or if the Defense Department-backed Kurds and allied Arabs will get the prize.

An American-sponsored safe zone in eastern Syria, first at Raqqa and later at Deir Azour, is possible. The Russians haven’t deployed air defenses there. Neither they nor the Syrians fly there often even now. But do the Americans really want to create and protect a kind of Sunnistan in eastern Syria where at least some people would want to think about combining their territory with contiguous Anbar and part of Ninewa in Iraq? We could end up destroying the Syria/Iraq border that the Islamic State was so anxious to erase and creating a Sunni state they would find appetizing in whatever their next incarnation is to be.

There are not a lot of good options left in Syria. Happy talk from the president-elect won’t change that. And it is insulting to the Syrians who have fought so hard and been so badly disappointed.