“Preparing for civil war may be the only remaining way to avert it.” So writes Princeton Professor Anne Marie Slaughter, who served in the Obama State Department, in The Atlantic. Slaughter believes in the Duty to Protect doctrine and urged American support of the Libyan rebels; she’s now arguing that the U.S. should prod non-government agencies to protect areas that can be controlled by the Free Syrian Army. I’m sympathetic to her position, but her argument leaves me a little queasy. Can we actually succeed in protecting rebels against the Assad regime? What are the chances of a good (from our point of view) successor government? Compared to Libya, Syria is a much tougher nut to crack. Libya has a population of 6 million, mostly spread into narrow strips of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the desert. Relatively few live within easy reach of its littoral neighbors Tunisia and Egypt. Syria has 21 million people, concentrated inland between mountains and desert, plus land borders with Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq. I’d love to think that Slaughter’s proposal would result in the downfall of the Assad regime, but I’m skeptical.
Here is a more realistic vision, I fear, of what will happen in Syria from the American Interest blog of the estimable and incredibly prolific Walter Russell Mead. “NATO intervened in Libya to stop a predicted but still hypothetical bloodbath and now can only wring its hands as a real slaughter continues in Syria. The Arab League can’t endorse two western invasions of Arab countries in one year; the vote to oust Qaddafi was de facto a vote to let Assad stay in place. The world protests the violence. Assad celebrates his license to kill.”
