Syria and the Tragic Flaw in American Foreign Policy

Once again, with the United States on the brink of war with Syria, we are arguing about the wrong issues. The problem is not that these issues are irrelevant or unimportant, but rather that they leave out something absolutely essential: the continuing urgent need for a peaceful and just resolution of the Syrian Civil War. We know that a U.S. military strike against Syria cannot be justified unless it is a last resort. The tragic flaw in American foreign policy is that we go to war repeatedly without having made serious efforts to resolve conflicts peacefully.

The issues currently dominating discussion in Congress, the news media, and the streets leave us caught between two apparent alternatives: punish the Assad regime for using chemical weapons or “do nothing.” But there is another alternative: convene a peace conference, as the Russians have suggested, make sure that all the conflicting parties participate, and conduct the conference according to conflict resolution principles, and not as a typical Versailles-style exercise in hard bargaining and power politics.

I will describe these principles further in a moment. First, though, it is worth noting how inconclusive the debate has been over the three issues most often discussed: who used chemical weapons, the scope and consequences of intervention, and the question of legal and moral norms.

#1: Who used chemical weapons? The administration maintains that Syria’s Assad regime launched rockets containing poison gas against civilians in the suburbs of Damascus, killing several hundred people (Obama spokespeople claim more than 1400 deaths). Skeptical critics maintain that the case against Syria is not convincing and that anti-Assad rebels may have used these weapons themselves, as they seem to have done in March, in an attempt to provoke the Americans and French to attack the regime directly. The U.S. intelligence information summarized for Congress has been classified so that nobody (including Congressional reps) knows exactly what it says.

#2: The scope and consequences of intervention. Some commentators believe that an American attack against Syria can be precise, short-lived, and limited to making it more difficult for Bashar al-Assad to use chemical weapons against his enemies. Others are fairly sure that patterns of “mission creep” and escalation associated with previous U.S. military adventures will be repeated in Syria. The first group doesn’t expect that there will be effective retaliation against America or its allies; the second worries about a possible overflow of violence throughout the region and against U.S. installations worldwide. Everyone is basically guessing.

#3: Legal norms and deterrence. Certain analysts argue that, assuming that Syria has committed a war crime, a military response is needed to vindicate the international norm against the use of weapons of mass destruction, and to deter the future use of such weapons. Others feel that an attack without U.N. approval it itself illegal, and that punishing Syria selectively will neither strengthen the norm (since the U.S., France, and others have used chemical weapons themselves or supplied allies like Saddam Hussein with them) nor deter their future use. They argue that the parties to intensely violent conflict will use whatever weapons are available when the incentive to do so is high enough, as it was when the U.S. dropped two atomic weapons on defenseless Japanese cities in August 1945.

In all this argument and counter-argument, the issue that is NOT being discussed (except by the Russians, Germans, Brazilians, South Africans, and others willing to defy the Obama administration) is peaceful conflict resolution. Why not? Because the “realists” in Washington consider the idea utopian. Max Fisher of the Washington Post recently summarized their position by noting, “There’s no indication that either side is interested in [peace talks] or that there’s even a viable unified rebel movement with which to negotiate” (Wash. Post, 8/29/13).

Conflict resolution professionals are all too familiar with this sort of glib pessimism. Upon arriving in Northern Ireland, mediator George Mitchell was informed by all parties, Catholic and Protestant alike, that he was wasting his time because (1) too much blood had been shed, and (2) the parties were too disunited to participate in negotiations. Max Fisher’s reasons for declaring a Syrian peace conference impossible are equally spurious.

Neither side is willing to talk? Even before its recent military successes (which some analysts consider the real reason for America’s turn toward direct intervention) the Syrian regime declared its willingness to enter into negotiations with the rebel leaders. Clearly, if the Russians and Americans agree to make peace talks happen, the Assad government will have no choice but to participate. Last year, one greatly respected opposition figure also agreed to attend a peace conference, but he was repudiated by competitive leaders. Did the U.S. then use its vast power to persuade its clients to pursue a diplomatic solution to the conflict? Or did it look aside with mock disengagement while its Saudi, Qatari, and Emirati allies poured billions in money and weapons into the rebel coffers?

You know the answer to that one.

Of course, administration officials are quite right to note that the rebel movement is not unified. But we also understand that when parties to conflict insist that they have no “partner for peace,” this generally means that they are uninterested in peacemaking! Disunity is clearly not an insuperable obstacle to peace talks. If it were, there would have been no Northern Irish or South African negotiations, since both sides in those conflicts were riven by deep internal differences, nor would Secretary John Kerry’s current attempt to re-start Palestinian-Israeli talks have the slightest chance of succeeding.

In fact, engaging in processes of conflict resolution sometimes helps to create a unity that seemed illusory before talks started. The IRA long declared its passionate opposition to Northern Irish peace talks, finally joining in when it became clear that they would otherwise lose their chance to help shape the new Northern Ireland. In Syria, some militant Islamists may also be induced to participate, as the Taliban is now preparing to do in Afghanistan and, possibly, in Pakistan.

What accounts for the current opposition among Syrian rebels to joining in peace negotiations? Three related reasons seem germane. First, the anti-Assad forces are losing the war and are fearful that any peace agreement will ratify the status quo on the battlefield. Second, they believe that they can depend on the Americans and their allies to keep them alive, despite military reversals, because they would rather see Syria bleed to death (as one Israeli figure recently put it) than abandon their hope for regime change. Third, they do not understand that, unlike traditional negotiations “from strength,” conflict resolution does not mean ratifying the military status quo. It means exposing and solving the underlying problems generating the civil conflict.

This is a crucially important point. What happens in a conflict resolution process – and often not in traditional diplomacy – is that experienced, independent facilitators assist the warring parties to confront and deal with the social-constitutional questions that are tearing their country apart. Without this kind of discussion (as we now see in Iraq) power-based diplomacy only sets the stage for future conflict. In the case of Syria, these social-constitutional issues include not only governmental forms and behaviors, citizen rights, abuses of power, and the like, but also the need to reorganize and stabilize relations between Sunni and non-Sunni communities; the best and most acceptable methods of regulating the oil industry and distributing its vast revenues; rethinking Syria’s relationships with neighboring powers and the need for a regional confederation; rebuilding the nation’s ruined agricultural economy; reintegrating returning refugees, and more.

Because conflict resolution means attending to such underlying issues, not merely imposing somc outsider’s “peace plan” on the parties, it is important to engage the Russians, as well as the Europeans, Americans, and Syrians, in discussions of what a multilateral peace conference would entail. Among the many horrible examples of conferences that ended up producing even worse conflicts, one recalls the Versailles Conference following World War I, in which traditional power-based diplomacy actually exacerbated the conditions that would end a few decades later by killing more than 60 million people, most of them civilians.

Peace is the goal in Syria, which, heaven knows, deserves security, prosperity, and freedom after losing more than 100,000 of its people in an atrocious civil conflict. Peace is not an impossible dream, if all parties concerned determine that serious peace talks must be attempted before any new attacks on the Syrian regime are launched. We can still remedy the tragic flaw in American foreign policy by insisting that peace is the means as well as the end, and that no military action can ever be considered a last resort without going all out for conflict resolution.