The scene...a war torn Syrian village in tatters. Thousands of people dead or dying in the streets, many of them women and children being brutalized by militant forces. Splinter groups fighting to save themselves and their families in the name of freedom. Sectarian violence running rampant. Horrific images being broadcast on social media. Is all of this happening right now?
Some say yes. And if you were referring to the events of the past summer, this would definitely be true.
But actually I'm describing the actions of the Assad regime in Syria a year ago. With the level of violence being aimed at its own citizens escalating by the day, the drumbeat of war was reaching a fever pitch inside the Beltway. The White House put itself in a precarious position by promising to combat any slaughter of innocent women and children with a military response. And after Assad used chemical weapons on his own citizens, President Obama threatened to launch air strikes against the Assad regime. While his actions were measured and careful, the GOP, right wing pundits, and an all too compliant mainstream media were practically bending over backwards to suggest we heavily arm the rebels fighting the Assad regime. Most of this was led by John McCain, who doesn't seem to suggest solving any foreign crisis without military intervention, Lindsey Graham, and most of the Beltway neo-con bloviators who were so spectacularly wrong on Iraq yet felt no shame proclaiming the same failed policies.
Fortunately, we were bailed out by the Russians in this episode and even got Syria to disarm itself of chemical weapons. But let's surmise for an instance that we listened to the right wing and armed the Syrian rebels. Among the various rebel groups fighting the Assad regime was a formerly Al Qaeda-affiliated group called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Let's say that we gave them a ton of military hardware to topple Assad. Where would the middle east be right now? Let's think about this beyond the squiggly orange border.
One of the many challenges facing the White House has to be in dealing with crises, whether foreign or domestic, economic, political, or military, in a media-saturated environment, much of which travels in seconds and is disseminated in minutes, with people offering commentary not very long afterwards. With the rise of social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter that can break news almost instantly, and the proliferation of news media online and on TV, it seems that anyone and everyone expects our leaders to react to events instantly, yet some of these very events require longer term solutions; solutions that may take weeks, months, or even years to sort themselves out. The civil war in Syria has been going on since 2011, and the events of last year, while brutal and atrocious, were not exactly new to anyone who was following events in the region.
But that didn't stop the Republicans in Congress for criticizing the President for not acting sooner to take military action in Syria, even though most of America was already tired of fighting two wars and wanted no further military intervention. Of course, Fox News piled on the criticism and called out President weak, and the rest of the mainstream media was quick to resort to Beltway punditry and polling instead of actually investigating the complex issues going on in the middle east.
This wasn't just limited to Syria, though. When separatist factions in the Crimean area of Ukraine loyal to Russia threatened to break away from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, and also got assistance from Russian forces, right wing pundits were quick to call the President spineless, weak, and cowardly for not intervening militarily in Crimea or offering military assistance to the Ukrainian government. Perhaps not listening the the right wing pundits or maybe trying to avoid a restart of the Cold War, President Obama instead relied on diplomacy and sanctions to deal with the issue.
However, there was one issue that did involve foreigners invading American borders. Unfortunately, these invaders were young children from Central America who were fleeing violence and destitution in their home countries and wanted to seek asylum here in the USA. Did we treat them with open arms?
Not exactly. We sent them to detention centers while they awaited hearings on whether they would deported back to their home countries. Granted, the U.S. Border Patrol was stuck in a bind and did what they could to assist the children while trying to uphold the law at the same time, but if you had listed to the right wing you would think these children were Al Qaeda sleeper cells that needed to be deported right away. In fact, these children were allowed to be detained for asylum hearings due to an anti-sex trafficking law passed by then-President George W. Bush that would guarantee their safety while awaiting hearings. But instead of seeing this as the humanitarian crisis that it was (and still is), the GOP wanted to send the National Guard to the border to...presumably send the children back? The White House asked for over a billion dollars to deal with this crisis, yet the hapless Republicans in Congress sat on this for weeks, and just before their summer vacation proposed spending only a tiny fraction of the money requested by the White House, with most of it going to bolster the number of police agents at the border.
So what if we had listened to the right wing? We probably would have armed ISIS to the gills and would most likely found ourselves back at war in Iraq after ISIS toppled Baghdad and in an increasingly heated confrontation with Russia had we sent arms to Ukraine. Not to mention thousands of Central American children would probably be dead now by the hands of drug runners and gangs in their home countries.
Now I'm not saying that ISIS is not a threat at all to American interests or that Russia's intervention in Ukraine isn't destabilizing eastern Europe. But these are crises that deserve a thoughtful and measured response by us, and they may take months or years to play out. For all we know, ISIS could be taken down by other groups sick of their brutal tactics, or they may turn against each other. And as far as Ukraine is concerned, the Russian intervention could have devastating consequences to the Russian economy, thereby angering Russian citizens enough to throw Putin out of office and pull out of the region. Whatever happens, we need to make sure our foreign policy isn't dictated by the 24-hour news cycle.