Hell's Gate: The Iraqi Blitzkrieg and the Cult of Violence

"This was a colossally irresponsible exercise in policymaking-by-wishful-thinking, for two reasons. First, outside support for opposition fighters -- a sizable percentage of whom are not even Syrian -- has taken what began as small-scale, indigenously generated protests over particular grievances and turned them into a heavily militarized insurgency that could sustain high levels of violence but could not actually win. The Obama administration prides itself on overthrowing Libya's Muammar al-Qadhafi in 2011 without putting U.S. boots on the ground (though the results are comparable to those in Iraq: the destruction of a functioning state and the arming of militias that kill with impunity -- including the U.S. ambassador in 2012). Assad is a vastly tougher target. Stepped up support for anti-Assad fighters will not accomplish anything positive strategically; it will, however, perpetuate conditions in which even more Syrians die.

"Second, it was utterly foreseeable that backing an armed challenge to Assad would worsen the threat of jihadi militancy -- in Syria, in neighboring countries like Iraq, and beyond. Well before March 2011, it was evident that, among Syria's Sunni Islamist constituencies, the Muslim Brotherhood -- whose Syrian branch was historically more radical than most Brotherhood cells -- was being displaced by more extreme, al Qaeda-like groups. External support for anti-Assad forces after March 2011 accelerated the trend and reinforced it with an infusion of foreign fighters, including organ-eating extremists. Many of these jihadis, according to the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, are now working not just to bring down Assad but also to mount attacks against the United States.

"The Obama administration's transformation of Syria into a magnet-cum-training ground for transnational jihadi fighters has directly fed the resurgence of jihadi extremism we are witnessing in Iraq. Three years ago, at the beginning of the Syrian conflict, the Islamic State of Iraq -- formed in 2006 from Abu Musab Az-Zarqawi's 'Al-Qaeda in Iraq' movement -- was on the ropes. Reinvigorated through the creation of an externally supported insurgency in Syria by the United States and America's European and regional partners, it rebranded itself in 2013 as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and, like the Taliban in Afghanistan before 9/11, has taken over swaths of both Syria and Iraq with lightning speed.

"Washington has only itself and its collaborators in the anti-Assad crusade to blame for such an outcome. As ISIS captures more cities and territory in Iraq, it is also capturing stockpiles of weapons and military equipment that America supplied to the post-Saddam government -- weapons and equipment that will enable further gains by ISIS fighters. Against this backdrop, calls to increase the flow of weapons into neighboring Syria are a case study in Einstein's (apocryphal) definition of insanity -- 'doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.' Calls for the United States to 'go back' to Iraq, to undo the horrific damage it has already done there, are equally delusional."