The Price of our Delusions

As we struggle with our confusion over what to do in Syria, doesn't it make sense to think about how we got here?

The distinction that some make between a realist, national security focused foreign policy, and a principled foreign policy built around protecting human rights is a false distinction. So many crises arise from authoritarian rulers - who have abused their citizens for years - amplifying their horror to hold on to power. Isn't that what we see in Syria?  Wouldn't global security be better served by a more consistent defense of human rights, accompanied by international organizations with the power to enforce sanctions? Without doubt, our hope that Bashar al-Assad was a reformer - less brutal, less totalitarian than his father - was a convenient delusion.  But now that Syrian citizens are paying a price for our delusion, and we are debating airstrikes that will certainly inflict more pain on civilians, we have to wonder, how convenient?

Maureen Dowd's column today raises a compelling question, reopening a conversation we seem to revisit over and over again.  How badly did the Bush years damage our country?  The key quote: "Once more, we see the magnitude of the tragedy of Iraq because the decision on Syria is so colored by the fact that an American president and vice president took us to war in the Middle East on false pretenses and juiced up intelligence, dragging the country into an emotionally and financially exhausting decade of war." Our foreign policy choices in the present are shaped by our choices in the past. Our humiliation in Somalia made Bill Clinton unwilling to lend aid in Rwanda.  Our exhausting war in Iraq makes us unwilling to feel out a role in shaping the chaos of the Arab Spring.  The lesson we learned in Iraq: we can't shape the outcome of events in the Arab world.  But surely that was the wrong lesson.  Earlier I have argued that America's role in the world after the Arab Spring should be a closer engagement with unfolding events.  Our response should be an international aid campaign, designed to build new political institutions, civility, and new expectations about what politics should aim to achieve.  Is this as much a delusion as our fantasy that Bashar al-Assad was an enlightened leader, laying a path forward for his people?  Perhaps.  It won't be easy.  But it is morally defensible.  

Update:  From a new essay in the New York Times magazine: An article on Paul Kagame, the Rwandan President, offers a fascinating glimpse into the problem we have disentangling "progress" and "reform" from the authoritarian politics they are embedded in.  The framing of the article - that we might prefer a dictator over the chaos and genocide of Rwanda's past - is right on target.  That his story begins with his role leading the forces that ended the Rwandan genocide gives Kagame credibility as a reformer. That he has brought objective improvements in the quality of life in Rwanda - improved health, reduced mortality, economic growth - makes it easier to look away from troubling evidence that he is building an authoritarian apparatus designed to keep him in power and silence opponents.   Maybe, we think, this is what Rwanda needs right now.  This is a policy choice we make all the time, and I suspect we made it in the case of Syria.  We prefer order over chaos, even if that order is bought at the price of genuine political reform.  I call it the Samuel Huntington calculation - that political order in changing societies is so important that we should be able to accept a little authoritarianism along the way.  But isn't that part of the delusion that brought us where we are with Syria?