An Iraq vet on why U.S. attacks on Syria threaten the possibility of a responsible withdrawal from Iraq.
On Monday, the US military announced that it conducted an air strike from Iraq into Syrian territory. The premise of this attack was that Syria’s inability or unwillingness to prevent terrorists from crossing into Iraq made it necessary for America to take matters into its own hands.
This is nothing new for American Foreign Policy post 9-11; the Bush Doctrine makes it quite clear that the USA will intervene to stop terrorism when other states cannot or will not do so. Even Senator Obama supports this nuance of President Bush’s otherwise lackluster strategy, stating that he would take matters into his own hands if Osama Bin Laden were found sheltered by the Pakistani government.
But Monday’s attack on Syrian soil highlights a deep problem that threatens the possibility of a responsible withdrawal. “The war in Iraq is not limited to Iraq,” begins a 2007 report (PDF) by Patricia Weiss Fagan of Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of International Migration. “[The Iraq War] has been exported in many forms and has profoundly affected dynamics throughout the Middle East region.” With a wistful notion of control on one side and a complete lack of control on the other, Washington and Damascus have transformed the Syrian border into an axis of regional instability.
The fact is that Syria made substantial efforts to check the flow of illicit traffic across its border. Sadly, this task has proven far too expensive and far too demanding for a country whose gross domestic product is less than a third of America’s annual Iraq-war budget. One could look at the proposed fence between Mexico and Texas to understand the enormous cost and challenges of securing a barren desert border; it’s impractical, even for a country as wealthy and powerful as the USA.
Last month, I travelled to Syria to visit my Iraqi friends who had recently fled their homes. The journey shattered my preconceptions about Syria and my ignorant notions about life as a refugee. There are no camps or tents or lines for food, just ghettos with apartments and shops where women covered in black shop for bras like everyone else. The situation seems strangely normal, except that a pervasive sense of hopelessness grips the community—nearly everyone is out of work. Above all, I was shocked when my Iraqi hosts chartered a taxi to a desert canyon village, where thousands of Syrian and Iraqi Christians celebrated the life of Saint Thecla with fireworks and whiskey (a lively combination to say the least!).
The Syrian economy is in shambles. But aside from the country’s obvious problem (cutting off its own invisible hand with isolationism), Syria also shoulders the burden of America’s war. Since the fighting began in 2003, roughly one million Iraqis have fled to Syria, most of whom have taken up residence in the ghettos of Damascus. To put things in perspective, if the USA were to absorb the same percentage of refugees that Syria has accommodated, then 17 million refugees would be eating, sleeping and competing for jobs in America!
The following photographs were taken during the author’s trip to Syria. "These snapshots revealed to me a human side of the Iraqi refugee problem that I never would have predicted from the reports of mainstream media,” Brownfield says. The journey shattered my preconceptions of what it means to live in Syria and to be a refugee from Iraq."
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Tracy Quan's latest novel is Diary of a Jetsetting Call Girl, set in Provence and praised in The Nation as a "deft account of occupational rigors and anxieties before the crash." Tracy's debut, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, and the sequel, Diary of a Married Call Girl, are international bestsellers. A regular columnist for The Guardian, she has written for many publications including Cosmopolitan, The Financial Times, and The New York Times.
Joe Mathews is a journalist, an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and a contributing writer at the Los Angeles Times. He previously served as Justice Department reporter for the Wall Street Journal and as a city desk reporter at the Baltimore Sun. He is the author of The People’s Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy.
Gerald Posner is the award-winning author of 10 investigative nonfiction bestsellers, ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism (www.posner.com). Posner lives in Miami Beach with his wife, the author Trisha Posner.
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Amanda Fortini has written for The New Yorker, Slate, Elle, and New York, among other publications. She lives in Los Angeles.
Christopher Brownfield drove nuclear submarines before volunteering for duty in Iraq. In Baghdad, he worked as a liaison between the State Department, coalition militaries, and the Iraqi government. He is studying international energy policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has written a book, My Nuclear Family: Growing up with Energy & Violence.
Christopher Brownfield drove nuclear submarines before volunteering for duty in Iraq. In Baghdad, he worked as a liaison between the State Department, coalition militaries, and the Iraqi government. He is studying international energy policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has written a book, My Nuclear Family: Growing up with Energy & Violence.
Christopher Brownfield drove nuclear submarines before volunteering for duty in Iraq. In Baghdad, he worked as a liaison between the State Department, coalition militaries, and the Iraqi government. He is studying international energy policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has written a book, My Nuclear Family: Growing up with Energy & Violence.
The saddest part of this story was reported by AP yesterday that 4 of the 8 dead were children. What price "victory"?
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