Obama's Flawed Realism

by Roger Cohen

March 18, 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/19/opinion/obamas-flawed-realism.html?comments#permid=17937399

"It is possible to believe that the situation in Syria would be worse if Obama had followed through with punitive strikes?"

Conversely, Mr. Cohen, what evidence can you present, after Afghanistan and Iraq, that US intervention in Syria would have made ANY difference. It is now generally accepted that air power alone cannot make a decisive, lasting difference. The Russians are pulling out, not because they have "won", but because, they too, recognize the limitations of air power.

Unfortunately, since the end of the cold war, American "projection of power" has served to destabilize rather than stabilize.

The last time American intervention served to stabilize was in the Balkan war, but here the situation was dramatically different - a forcefully held-together multi-state nation was disintegrating along well established cultural and religious lines, and US/NATO airpower served to shorten the inevitable outcome and thus reduce the number of casualties.

We, the US and "the West", finally need to recognized that the artificial boundaries established in the dying days of the British and French empires, through ignorance and arrogance, cannot be sustained, because the people themselves do not "live" these boundaries in any cultural and/or religious sense. 

The "Kurdish state" is an example of what needs to be encouraged throughout the region to finally come to some semblance of peace. This involves carving up Iraq and Syria. It would also, admittedly, open a huge problem Turkey.

Two interesting links regarding Kurdish "states":

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/17/world/middleeast/syria-kurds.html?ref=middleeast

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/opinion/the-kurds-push-for-self-rule-in-syria.html?ref=international