The Syria Disaster, Seven Years In

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No one really knows exactly how many civilians have died in the seven-year war in Syria.

The United States of America will not allow the Assad regime to continue to use chemical weapons.

My fellow Americans,

a short time ago, I ordered the United States Armed Forces to launch precision strikes on targets associated with the chemical weapons capabilities of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

After seven years of cruelty and catastrophe in Syria, the UN has stopped trying to count the dead.

13 million Syrians need humanitarian assistance.

The tendrils of the disaster have spread across the world.

How did it come to this?

And what can be salvaged?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

With me here in DC is our international editor, Kathy Gilson.

And Kathy, welcome.

Thanks.

Hi, Matt.

Hi.

And also joining us, although not in the room, is Andrew Tabler, a scholar at the Washington Institute and, in a former life, the co-founder of Syria Today.

Andrew, so glad that you could join us.

Welcome.

Pleasure to be with you.

We're here today to talk about the situation in Syria.

And Kathy, I want you to, if you would, catch us up on the news.

What has happened in Syria in recent days?

So in recent days, last Friday more specifically, the United States once again launched an attack on regime assets within Syria.

These were specifically three sites associated with the Syrian regime's chemical weapons program.

This is only the second time the U.S.

has struck at the regime directly in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack.

The last time was last April.

And the events leading up to that strike surrounded an offensive that the regime had launched against one of the last major rebel-held enclaves outside Damascus, this place called Eastern Ghouta, which by the time the alleged chemical attack occurred had already killed more than a thousand people.

But in any case, in recent weeks, evidence came out that many dozens of civilians seem to have choked to death in their homes in a suspected chlorine attack.

And as a result, the United States and its allies struck back.

Andrew, you've been covering Syria for many years, and you lived there for 14 years.

Is that right?

I lived there for seven.

I was in the Middle East for 14.

But yes,

a long time.

And you lived, yeah.

Wow.

You co-founded also the country's first English language magazine, and now you study the region as a scholar.

With all our talk of U.S.

policy in the region, Russia, the Assad regime, it's easy to forget about the tiny origin story of this disaster.

Can you take us back to the point where this catastrophe arguably began and then walk us through how we got to this point?

Sure.

So it's a long and pretty tragic story, but it all starts out with a little graffiti on a school wall in the southern Syrian town of Dera.

Four children scrolled on a wall.

It's your turn, doctor.

And

this was sort of a message to Dr.

Bashar Lassad, who is a British-trained ophthalmologist, who had been promising reforms to everyone,

Syrians, foreign dignitaries, John Kerry very famously, and others.

And of course, these children

had found his reforms lacking.

And I think found inspiration from the fall of the Mubarak regimes in Egypt, the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, and then, of course, Libya was on the way.

So they were essentially saying it's, you know, the people want the fall of the regime.

Anyways, the Secret Service.

In Syria, the security services, which is as if sort of the mafia created a Stasi.

They run a series of informers.

They found out that the children had authored this statement, and they arrested them and took them away for questioning and didn't tell their parents where they were.

It was

a stupid move for a number of reasons.

One, it's bad enough to arrest children

over some graffiti, but

that particular area of Syria, which is overwhelmingly Sunni and from the majority Sunni population in Syria, were traditionally loyal to the Assad regime, which is a minority-based regime around Alawites, a heterodox Shia offshoot.

So that was, it was strange to crack down so hard on an area that was not traditionally anti-regime.

Of course, the second issue is that people from that area are famously hot-blooded.

They just don't take things lying down, and they didn't.

And so they waited about a little over a week.

After that, they started protesting.

The regime came out, opened up with live gunfire.

With every death came another funeral.

With every funeral came another opportunity for a protest.

Another protest,

you had more repression and death.

And

it's quickly spread all over southern Syria and then up through Damascus, Holmes, and throughout Syria.

And suddenly, the Syrian uprising was in full swing.

And it has been in a state of civil war ever since.

Why do you think that the uprising didn't go the way of the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia?

What was it about the Assad regime?

I mean, there was a moment back a couple years ago when we thought, you know, we thought Assad's fall was imminent.

Obama, as you write in your recent piece, was saying things like Assad needs to step aside without really apparently thinking that it would be difficult in any way.

What happened?

Aaron Powell, sure.

So popular resistance, which is what is known in the West, in Western literature, or as the Russian government calls it, color revolutions after Ukraine and the protests there.

They work particularly well on majoritarian systems.

So if the leadership of a country comes from the majority either sect or ethnicity, then

that leadership has the military and the security services usually gathered around them.

So suddenly when there are protests,

they are placed in a dilemma whether to shoot protesters or not.

And in a majoritarian system, the military has to shoot their brethren from their fellow sect or ethnicity.

In the case of Egypt and Tunisia, these majoritarian systems, the military split.

They instead turned on the leader, and they were ousted in pretty short order with relatively little mess.

The case of Syria, it's a minority-dominated regime.

The Assad family comes from the Alawite sect.

a heterodox offshoot of Shia Islam.

The rough equivalent is in how Alawites are regarded throughout the region is similar to that of Mormons in Christianity.

So, for example, maybe those more conservative Christians wouldn't regard Mormons as Christians, but maybe mainline Protestants would or general Christians would.

In any case, many Sunni Muslims considered Alawites apostates.

And so, the Alawites who are gathered around the Assad regime feel historical animosity towards the majority Sunni population and don't feel at all accountable to them.

So, when the protests broke out and they called the military and the security services out into the streets, those officers were not placed in any dilemma because they didn't feel that their kinship ties and other ties were that close to the protesters.

And they simply opened fire, first with snipers and other gunfire, then

rotary-wing aircraft, fixed-wing aircraft, surface-to-surface missiles, and then unfortunately poison gas.

And that's and they moved up the escalation chain and they've been doing it ever since.

Aaron Ross Powell, Assad felt secure.

He had his people all around him to a certain extent.

What did Assad do next?

So

he looked very closely at what was happening elsewhere in the region, and he didn't want that to happen to him, which was very understandable.

So at first, there was an announcement coming out of Damascus that President Assad was going to launch some sort of reform package or revolution that would usher us away from this.

It turned out to be a complete farce.

He actually was more hardline than ever.

He moved up the military escalation chain and using live fire and other weapons on the opposition.

And they began pounding the protesters.

Those protesters then called to the international community to intervene against the Assad regime.

And

it was the aftermath of Libya where things were not going as planned.

And

those cries fell on deaf ears, unfortunately.

And

so then Syrians, not seeing an alternative, picked up weapons and began fighting back against the Assad regime.

And that was called the Free Syrian Army.

It still is.

And at that time, it was localized and nationalist-based.

But over time,

has become crowded out by other groups operating alongside the opposition.

Aaron Powell:

What would you say,

what drew this into a larger conflict, not just within Syria, but among a host of nations?

Aaron Trevor Barrett, so generally what happened is that very few international powers chose to intervene in Syria, quite famously the United States.

And I think this is something for your readers and listeners.

They know quite well about President Obama's decision-making on Syria,

which is probably the most controversial issue of his presidency, or certainly in terms of foreign policy, I would say.

So basically, the regional countries looked at the situation in Syria and began to carve out their different spheres of influence.

So Iran, which backs the Assad regime, began sending militiamen and sending Hezbollah over the border from Lebanon, which Iran supports, in to support Assad regime forces, which were quickly being depleted by a halt in conscription, generally because of the uprising and because of defections from the military.

And so Iran moved into place, but other countries, neighboring countries, such as Jordan, Israel, and Turkey in particular, also carved out de facto spheres of of influence inside of the country, first through proxies, mostly by backing different groups in those areas.

And then later on, as we've seen most recently, and particularly in the Northwest, Turkey has actually directly intervened in Syria.

And in doing so, Syria became a regionalized proxy war in which the interests of competing parties, particularly Iran, which was in negotiations with the Obama administration over the nuclear agreement,

versus Arab Gulf countries, Israel and Turkey.

And these different competing interests tried to carve out different areas inside of Syria, and they have fueled the fight ever since.

So the Syrian civil war, in a way, turned into the Syrian war and continues to evolve in that direction.

So, Kathy, I want to turn to you at this point.

We, as Andrew mentioned, have done a ton of coverage over the decision-making within first the Obama administration and now the Trump administration administration here in D.C.

about how to respond as what was first a civil war was escalating.

How now, from the vantage point of 2018 with the chaos and catastrophe that's happened over the past seven years in Syria,

how now is Obama's decision-making thought of at that time?

I want to ask you about the Trump administration.

Well, I think a lot of

what Obama might derisively call the D.C.

establishment, and Trump himself for that matter, might call the DC establishment.

And I also think, honestly, a lot of former Obama officials that I've spoken to were highly critical of his decision to first

seemingly off the cuff, set a red line against chemical weapons use in Syria in 2012, and then when it was crossed in 2013, step right up to the verge of enforcing it and actually state publicly his preference for military action in Syria, but then kick it over to Congress, which, you know, in retrospect, looked as if

it was punting, given that it was a Republican-controlled Congress that wasn't likely to approve strikes at all.

You know, Obama took a lot of criticism also in the aftermath of that for having tried to forge a deal with the Russians and the Syrians to get the chemical weapons that were in the country out of the country.

So it's not quite accurate to say, as many right now do, that Obama did nothing in response to the chemical weapons attacks that took place then.

And those were sarin gas attacks that killed over a thousand people.

Andrew might know the figures better than I do on that one.

So the achievement of the chemical weapons deal was that it got Assad to declare his chemical weapons stockpiles, which he had not before,

and to ship most of them out of the country.

Now, the key problem there,

as we learned tragically later, was that, and as Obama officials made clear publicly at the time, was that he did not, in fact, declare all of his chemical weapons stockpiles and that the deal did not include chemicals such as chlorine, which have legitimate civilian uses and have been used multiple times in attacks since then and seem to have been implicated in the current attack.

So

in retrospect, I still think, Andrew, you might and probably would disagree with me there.

I think

it was a really complicated decision at the time.

I think if you look at where public opinion was and where Obama's head was in terms of looking at Libya and thinking of that as sort of the biggest foreign policy mistake of his presidency, you can see some of the calculations that went into that decision.

But I imagine, Andrew, you might think that

he should have traveled the road that he did not.

Not to put words in your mouth.

Yeah.

So, yeah,

I disagreed.

I didn't, in the sense that I think you're right in that it was a complicated situation.

I don't discount that.

And that's something I knew from my time living in Syria or dealing with Syria subsequently, particularly dealing with Bashar al-Assad and his psychology, which is quite different than his father's and quite

unruly, let's put it this way, and cyclical or unstable in a way.

But I think there were a number of mistakes that were made, and these are not, I think, at all controversial.

The first

came in the summer of 2012 when we all could see that the Syrian war was, the Syrian civil war was kicking off, that international intervention was not happening.

And there was a plan by the entire cabinet recommended to Obama, very famously, including Hillary Clinton and General David Petraeus and Leon Panetta, to arm and support and organize the Syrian, Free Syrian army, the nationalist opposition.

And

so there were a number of reasons for that.

One is to push Assad out of power.

The other was to keep a number of Salafist and jihadist organizations, which had popped up inside of Syria, from spreading and sort of crowding them out using the nationalist forces, so to speak.

President Obama decided to veto that plan.

So he went against his entire cabinet.

So in a way, he was a bit like President Trump has been in that, you know, being skeptical of overall recommendations coming to him.

Instead, he decided not to arm the Syrian opposition, but instead allowed our regional allies to do so in our place.

And that was enormously disastrous because arms went to Salafis and Jihadists, mostly indirectly, but also in some cases directly.

Can I ask you one quick question on that before you move on to the other mistakes?

I'm interested in probing each one of these individually.

Because as I recall the debate at the time, and I think this was Obama's position at the time,

it's sort of a catch-22 in retrospect because he didn't want to arm the opposition out of fear that the weapons would get into the hands of jihadists.

But then the argument now is that not arming the opposition also

led to weapons getting into the hands of jihadists.

Can you unpack that for me a little bit?

Well, I mean, I think the thing to, it is a chicken or egg conversation.

However, what was clear was that Syria was melting down.

It was clear to anybody who was analytically involved in Syria.

And it was very clear that this was going to happen whether the United States got involved or not.

So when such a thing occurs, you have to determine whether you can shape it or not.

And could we have shaped the outcome of

the composition

of the Free Syrian army and other elements by providing weapons and other assistance?

Yes, probably.

Would there still be jihadists and Salafists inside of Syria?

Yes, but would they have taken over eventually, as ISIS did, over half of Syrian territory?

Probably not.

From my time in Syria, I found most Syrians to be amenable to monetary and other inducements, not to religious ideology.

They're famously not that sectarian or

not that religious.

Some parts of the country are an exception.

But in general,

there was something to play there.

Now, the related issue, which happened at the same time, was because the outside regime was contracting and because the opposition was making advances, they were overtaking the country's largest city, Aleppo, in July of 2012, the regime began to dust off its chemical weapons stockpile.

And the United States knew that.

And President Obama famously drew the red line in the summer of 2012.

So, very soon after he decided not to arm the opposition and allow others to do so, he then drew a line, interestingly, on the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian conflict.

And it didn't take but a couple of months before President Assad decided to test where that red line really was.

And he began using those weapons in November of 2012.

And he used them on multiple occasions so many times that by the spring of 2013,

when the country was fully in civil war, Ben Rhodes very famously went out and admitted that the red line was crossed.

What then happened is a bit of a mystery.

We're not exactly sure.

But for some reason, President Obama did not prepare the American public for the fact that the red line had been crossed and that there would be a U.S.

response.

So Assad, not seeing the signal, I suppose, or anyone else, continued to use these these weapons until he used them in full concentration in the Ghota in August of 2013, crossing the red line and setting off the crisis, which we all know now as the Red Line Crisis, which ended up with President Obama not striking and striking a deal instead with Russia to supposedly rid Syria, as Kathy said, of their chemical weapons stockpile.

I want to

ask about the Trump administration's response.

One of the things that you said, Andrew, that's interesting is that in some ways, Obama's position vis-à-vis his cabinet and the advice that he was getting from Washington at the time was almost sort of Trumpian.

He was

declining or he was ignoring in some ways or just dismissing, considering, and deciding in another direction against the advice of many of his advisors, which we've seen President Trump do on a number of issues.

Is it fair to say that on Syria in particular, that the Trump administration has been more reflective of the Washington establishment's preferred approach to these matters?

Yeah, it's a very good question.

So until now, I would say that the involvement in the overall Syrian war, I think any American president is reticent to do that because of the lessons of the Iraq war, which I think were,

particularly for President Obama, were learned or maybe even over-learned, but also just the reticence of the American public to send troops to places like Syria.

So that's one thing.

But where he has listened to the foreign policy establishment is on the chemical weapons red line.

President Trump

on Syria, while he might want to withdraw some forces or is considering that, we're not sure,

he has been adamant that he wanted to maintain this red line and has backed this up through a number of strikes, at least on two occasions, on their chemical weapons delivery and production facilities,

most recently,

and has ordered other strikes in the country in defense of U.S.

forces.

So it is closer to the foreign policy establishment.

I think the reason why the foreign policy establishment advocates for strikes is because many of them have experiences in other areas, and they see that such things as enforcing a red line that's been outlined by the United States is important both in Syria and the Middle East and in terms of our global reputation in terms of supporting allies.

And I think they also see it for other reasons in terms of not leaving allies abandoned.

Aaron Powell, Jr.:

On the other side of the red line, my question is, what are the risks in not just not enforcing a red line after it's drawn, but in drawing it at all?

Because it seems to me to be the case, and we've observed this both under Obama and

under Trump now, that saying, okay, only this specific thing is forbidden.

Feel free to kill as many of your citizens as you want to, as long as you don't use this specific type of weapon.

So if our interest there is legitimately civilian protection rather than simply reinforcing America's credibility overseas, one would think that that would be an odd place to draw the enforcement line, given that most Syrians in the conflict have been killed by conventional weapons.

Correct.

So humanitarian protection is a goal of the United States, but it's not something that we're globally committed to.

And as you point out, most Syrians perish as a result of the use of conventional weapons, not

such weapons as chemical agents

and so on.

So in that case, drawing the red line first and foremost is to enforce a norm, which is not a law, but just short of that, so to speak.

I think there's also the fact that since the 2013 chemical weapons deal, remember, Syria signed the chemical weapons convention.

So they had to declare their stockpile and sign the CWC.

So actually the more recent violations are violations of the CWC, and it's its biggest test in the 20-year history of the convention itself.

And the Chemical Weapons Convention is designed to enforce that norm, so to speak, globally and to keep the use of these weapons from being

used on civilians.

And I think there are a lot of parties in the region that are worried about this,

not just in syria but also neighboring israel um and to a lesser extent turkey is worried about the use of these weapons in the future um particularly by the assad regime so there's that and i think that's a real that's a real risk um but the red line was what i think what never made sense about the obama red line was it wasn't like it was a red line that was drawn by someone else he drew it and then just didn't enforce it and that

got us into a difficult situation because suddenly the United States reputation was on the line in terms of our commitment to allies.

You remember when Jeffrey Goldberg published the Obama Doctrine?

Oh, do we?

Oh, well, you know where I was?

I was in Japan at the invitation of the Japanese government.

All of a sudden, my phone, which was on silence, started vibrating by these emails coming in, and I thought there had been a terrorist attack.

So

I logged on.

And it was Jeffrey Goldberg's article.

And I read that entire interview on my my iPhone with one eye at three o'clock in the morning, Tokyo time.

And what was interesting was that at that time, President Obama was sure that this was his moment of liberation, that it wasn't going to have any reverberations.

What was interesting was I was at the conclusion of that trip to Japan, and in every ministry, in every meeting, the Japanese explained to us how much that red line incident and walking back from it freaked them out.

Yeah.

Because they felt that we were were not committed to our security obligations with Japan vis-a-vis North Korea, China, and others.

And I thought that was very interesting and quite ironic in a lesson about how what happens in Syria unfortunately doesn't stay in Syria.

Yeah.

Stick with us.

In a moment, we'll finish off our conversation about American foreign policy and turn back to the experiences of everyday Syrians.

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I want to shift this into a phase of the conversation where we look at today and come back to the individuals on the ground being affected by this discussion for the last part of the conversation.

But Kathy, you spend all day in the midst of the foreign policy establishment here in DC.

Hi, Andrew.

Yeah,

famously called famously called by Ben Rhodes the blog.

Yeah.

Nice to see you again here in the establishment.

Here in the establishment.

Exactly.

Yeah.

You've been publishing a number of, you have as editor of the international section of the Atlantic overseen a number of different analyses of the situation today looking ahead in Syria.

You published one piece by our editor Segal Samuel asking a tragic, somewhat provocative question.

What if there is no ethical way to act in Syria now?

What is the calculus around action today?

We face this very murky situation.

How do we think about action at this moment?

Aaron Powell, right.

I think with the omni caveat that Syrians themselves would be impatient with this kind of analysis, I think that the

moral question about what America's real responsibility is felt like an urgent one to us as we were discussing this story.

And so

Segal consulted with a lot of moral philosophers about just how you decide what is the moral course of action in a place like this, especially when things have gone so far and it doesn't seem as if any particular limited action of the kind the United States is likely to be taking given the political environment and the risks involved

is likely to make the situation better.

So theorists in this regard tend to draw on just war theory, which poses a series of questions about when action is justified.

And one is that the intervention has a reasonable chance of success.

And so in this case, we, I think, would define success not as ending the war entirely, but as stopping the use of chemical weapons.

Another would be, will it cause more damage and suffering in doing the action than it would in doing the inaction?

And this is where, I think this is where the moral question of what the United States' current role in Syria and what its past role in Syria should have been gets really complicated, because I think Obama's argument for a lot of the time had been, you know, if we intervene, we'll make things worse.

And now it looks like not intervening also made things worse.

And so

there are various steps in the analysis like that.

I think that in the case of this particular strike, my question,

arguably because Trump tweeted about it ahead of time, there was a lot of advance warning to people on the ground to sort of move their assets.

And so I believe, Andrew, you might be more up to date on this, but I believe there were no actual casualties from those American strikes.

They were mostly hitting empty buildings, right?

Well, so they haven't announced

casualty figures yet.

Those facilities

that were identified were those of, they were production facilities,

some of which were known, some of which were not known.

So

it was a narrow strike, not as narrow as the previous April, April 2017, which just hit an airbase that was delivering these weapons.

So this did,

I think it is safe to assume that this severely knocked out their ability to produce more weapons.

I think also

one of the risks, you know, back to that question of do you do more harm than good by intervening, one of the ways we could have done significantly more harm than good would have been by somehow

escalating to a confrontation with the Russians, with the Iranians that could lead to a much bigger war, which turns out not to have happened in this case.

I think

Trump's advisors very deliberately tried to tailor the strike to avoid that.

So I think in this case, if you look at it retrospectively with all those questions in mind, conditional on the idea, which may be arguable, that this can inhibit Assad's ability to use chemical weapons, this might have been the moral thing to do.

What do you think, Andrew?

I think it was the moral thing to do.

I mean, I think there are a couple of things.

One is we were already kind of on the hook because of the chemical weapons red line anyway in the deal.

I mean, look,

Syria is not supposed to use chemical weapons as a result of the Chemical Weapons Convention and Security Council Resolution 2118.

And so

I think there is the issue of

not enforcing it would just send a signal to the Assad regime that it could continue using it

without punishment.

Do you think he'll stop now, given that he wasn't deterred by the last strike?

That's a good question.

Usually, these things have a shelf life, so it works for a while until it doesn't work.

So, Assad's personality is

a bit

bipolar or, I don't know, borderline personality disorder.

There are different theories on this, but he goes from times when he's very rational to when he's completely irrational, both diplomatically and in terms of military decisions.

So,

the secret to the Syrian war is that President Assad's regime of old is not coming back over Syrian territory.

It has actually incredibly depleted manpower, between 10 and 20,000 deployable forces that can go on the offensive in the country only.

The reason why it has been able to take over about 60% of the country

is because of massive Iranian and Russian military assistance.

In the case of Iran, militia and other organized divisions.

In the case of Russia, mostly air power and other assistance.

So

this is sort of missing from

the overall discussion.

And what has happened is that because Assad is so weakened, he continues to rely on these strategic weapons like chemical agents to project his power.

And this is a situation that threatens to go on for some time.

and in the process kick off a larger regional war, especially with neighboring Israel, which sees growing Iranian influence in Syria as unacceptable and is reportedly weighing its options.

Aaron Trevor Aaron Trevor Aaron Ross Powell, what would it mean to overlearn the lessons of the past seven years in Syria?

Given that we have at various points in this conversation

talked about the way that Obama, for example, may have arguably overlearned the lesson of Libya in the decisions that he made around Syria itself.

What in the middle of this moment, and Andrew, I'm curious about your thoughts on this particularly, what would it mean to overlearn the lessons of this disaster?

And what would it mean to not learn enough?

I think to overlearn it would be to strike too freely inside of Syria.

I don't think there's going to be any larger American military presence there other than special forces and others in eastern Syria, you know, supporting the overall fight against ISIS.

So I think in the case of

over-learning it, there's the threat that you intervene too easily.

I think this administration is pretty reticent to do that

for a variety of reasons.

Not learning enough from this, I think the thing I learned from this was that

when you do have an opportunity to use military force

and the United States does have the capability and opportunity to do that without committing troops on the ground in significant numbers, it has to be tied to political outcomes.

And we don't do that.

The Russians do that.

They do it very well.

They bomb strategically and take other measures inside of Syria to drive the political process and the overall civil war in a direction that will perpetuate Assad's grip on power and Iran's influence inside of Syria.

The United States has seen these, the political process.

in Syria in terms of trying to get it bring about a transition away from Assad and such military strikes as separate issues.

I think they continue to see it that way.

But unless you link those two things together, it's going to be very difficult to have a satisfactory outcome to the Syrian civil war in terms of U.S.

interests.

Instead, you're going to have an outcome which is

against U.S.

interests, particularly the threat of a larger regional war with countries such as Israel and

the Northwest and the Northeast, Turkey, vis-à-vis the Kurds.

Aaron Powell, but do you think the Russians had a built-in advantage in terms of having a political outcome?

I mean, they picked a side in a way, and the United States and its allies sort of had to.

Well, I'm interested in your take on this.

It seems from the outside as if the United States and its allies sort of had to invent a side, that there wasn't, you know, you would always read that there wasn't the opposition was fractured and not unified and

wouldn't have stood up to form a government in Assad's place.

But you have actually talked to people people in the opposition.

You know these people.

What do you make of that line of analysis?

Aaron Ross Powell, I think it's correct in that the Russians have the advantage of backing Assad, which is one entity, the regime, and it also has the legal trappings of the state, even though it doesn't control all of its territory and can't enforce its treaty obligations.

So they have that advantage.

I think the Russians,

their strategy in Syria, while it was

held up as that they were going to get bogged down and there were all these other criticisms and so on.

I think they've stayed longer than they wanted to.

But you know, you can agree or disagree with the Russians, but they

have a strategy at least and they're implementing it.

And their goal is to keep President Assad in power because they know it frustrates us.

It allows them to project their power into the Middle East with the Iranians and confound U.S.

allies such as Israel.

Turkey and the Arab Gulf countries.

And they're doing a very good job of it.

And

those of us in Washington and the blob are all trying to come up with

policies that can help reverse that.

Because I think, you know, no matter what side of the political aisle you're on, greater Russian influence in the world is something that we don't need more of.

We need a greater American role, a lesser role for Russia, especially given what we've learned from them and their activities over the last few years.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: I want to turn at the close of this conversation to

the question of your experience, Andrew, as someone who has friends in Syria, someone who spent seven years living there.

We keep saying these words humanitarian disaster, and it is worth just

reckoning with the scale of this crisis.

As many as half a million deaths, the UN has now stopped counting, 13 million people who require humanitarian assistance.

Now, there has been a lot of great great reporting and storytelling about this wrenching toll.

But the way that we talk about this conflict is easy to talk about government leaders proving things to one another.

I read this quote the other day in a story from an activist in Damascus.

Quote, the U.S.

and most of the world don't actually care about the Syrian people.

All they care about is political interests.

We, the Syrian people, have been attacked by all kinds of weapons, including chemical weapons.

The missile attack on Saturday was only a way for the U.S.

to save base.

Andrew, how are the people that you know who've been directly affected by this processing it?

So they see,

first of all, what's interesting about the Syrian uprising is that now there are no secrets in Syria.

Assyrians will very readily tell you what they think on Twitter, on Skype, on a variety of mediums.

I think that overall,

they,

because of the war, they want something which punishes the Assad regime for the use of chemical weapons.

They all agree on that.

But they want something more substantial that helps them in bringing about a diplomatic outcome to the war.

Again, tying it to a strategy.

And they didn't see it with this strike

because it was, and there's been a lot in the press about the different arguments in the administration, it was particularly narrow on chemical weapons production facilities.

It didn't punish the regime's other conventional forces.

And therefore, they see it as too little and too late.

And I think this feeds into the narrative, the abandonment narrative that we've seen, particularly since the 2013 red line incident.

I want to ask you another unusual question, but I've never been to Syria.

You spent seven years there.

What from your time in the country is something that you did, a memory that you have, a place that you went that is now no longer possible to do or to go?

In my living room is a mosaic that I purchased the last time I was in Aleppo, a bust of Hercules that my father and I made into a table.

And I look at it every day when I'm having coffee, and I remember that the section of the city that I purchased that, in which I purchased that mosaic, is now rubble, completely leveled to the ground.

The mosques that we would visit there are completely leveled.

I think that the thing that we don't understand, and various stories have used aerial photography to depict this, is just the level of destruction inside of Syria.

And it's really haunting.

Many have argued that the

funneling and provision of this reconstruction money into Syria can help manipulate or push the process one way or the other politically in terms of a post-war scenario.

But I think for the moment, Syrians are just suffering.

And

while we hope that many refugees will go home,

I seriously doubt that most of them will because of the level of destruction, their homes have been destroyed, and just fear of being arrested and disappeared, if not worse.

With that sobering thought, I want to bring this conversation to an end and play a keeper, the first of our keepers, in which I ask our listeners the question, what do we not want to forget?

What have you heard, seen, watched, read, listened to, experienced recently that you want to remember and hold on to?

And the keeper that we're going to play comes from Matt.

Here you go.

Currently, I'm a medical student doing my labor and delivery

obstetrics rotation.

And one thing that I really want to remember is just the repetitive awe and wonder at the fact that I get to be present while a woman and her family, or mostly the woman, I should say, is going through one of the most difficult experiences of her life

and then see that transition

from that awful experience of pain and maybe confusion and

into

the most beautiful heartwarming and transition away from the pain into having a child born into the world.

That transition is such an amazing thing.

And so I really want to remember that.

Thank you, Matt, for that reminder.

Andrew,

you, I imagine, have had a lot on your mind in recent days.

What is it that you want to hold on to?

I think that the

images that stuck with me the most were the photographs and video of U.S.

Tomahawk and other missiles flying over Damascus to hit their sites and

they were streaking across the sky.

And that was that, of course, if you were sitting in Damascus, I can imagine sitting on my on my porch there looking out and seeing that and the impact of that.

I think

what was

particularly stuck in my mind was that immediately after that, Israel's been striking various Iranian-backed air bases and other forces inside of Syria very heavily.

And they have done so throughout the war, but they are doing so in the wake of our attack.

And

in the more recent article that I wrote for The Atlantic, I speculated about that unfolding war that could spread, particularly bringing Israel in and a direct confrontation between Israel and Iran.

And I think those images helped me realize that we're closer to that than I first thought and that we're going to have to be very careful about our next steps in Syria and in the Middle East to keep this regional war from kicking off.

Thank you for that.

Kathy, what have you heard, read, watched, experienced recently that you don't want to forget?

Well, so I think

this is on a similar theme, even though it might not sound like it's on a similar theme.

We've talked a lot about government inaction and

the bumbling and our inability to really do anything.

I have been recently re-watching Parks and Recreation, which is a show that

centers on a local government.

And what strikes me about it is that actually a friend of mine was pointing this out, that most of the time these people are

well-intentioned and bumbling, and mostly they're able to check each other.

And that it's one of the most hopeful depictions of government that you can actually see on television.

So may we all be as Leslie nope as we can be.

May we be as Leslie nope as we can be.

That's a good benediction, Kathy.

For my keeper this week, I have been recently revisiting the poetry of Max Ehrman.

Ehrman

was an early 20th century poet, best known for the poem Desidorata, which was kind of well circulated, especially in the 70s.

There are a lot of kind of gauzy photographs with the Desidorata's words printed on them.

But there happens to be a book of Max Ehrman's poetry available for free on Google Books, and I will drop the notes in the show notes.

And the other morning, I happened to get lost into a fog of Max Ehrman poetry.

And one of the poems,

the thing about these poems is they are declarative,

they are earnest in a way that I am, and I appreciate.

And

for whatever reason, I valued that earnestness in this.

So I'm going to read you one one of the poems called Ships Returning Home.

We are all ships returning home, laden with life's experience, memories of work, good times and sorrows, each with his especial cargo.

And it is our common lot to show the marks of the voyage, here a shattered prow, there a patched rigging, every hulk turned black by the unceasing batter of the restless wave.

May we be thankful for fair weather and smooth seas, and in times of storm have the courage and patience that mark every good mariner.

And overall, may we have the cheering hope of joyful meetings as our ship at last drops anchor in the still water of the eternal harbor.

Ships Returning Home, Max Ehrman.

I'll drop the link to all of his poems, which also make very good prayers, in the show notes.

Indeed.

Andrew, thank you so much for joining us.

It's my pleasure.

And thanks for putting this together.

And Kathy, thank you, as always.

Thanks, Miat.

For gracing our table.

Till next time.

This week's Radio Atlantic was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau.

Catherine Wells is our executive producer of Atlantic Podcasts.

Thanks again to our colleague Kathy Gilsonen and Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute.

My esteemed co-host Jeffrey Goldberg will be back with us next week, along with a very special guest and Atlantic cover story author, Don't Miss It.

What is your keeper?

Leave us a voicemail and tell us what you want to remember at the number 202-266-7600.

In the spirit of not forgetting, don't forget your contact information and feel free to tell us how we're doing.

If you like what you're hearing, one, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts.

Two, subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Three, check us out at facebook.com slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

And four, read the episode description, which features links mentioned in this conversation.

As always, thank you for listening.

May you be thankful for fair weather and smooth seas and endure times of storm with courage and patience.

We'll see you next week.