America won't protect Syrian civilians because it can't admit defeat

Defeat is never easy, but acknowledging it is often even harder.

Such is the situation confronting the Obama administration in the twilight of its eight-year era at the helm of the free world. Few could have thought not too long ago that Syria's ruthless hereditary dictator, the erstwhile London ophthalmologist Bashar al-Assad, would not only still be in power in Damascus as Obama was leaving, but that his position in the nearly six-year-long civil war would be steadily improving.

Despite all the media complaints today that America's not doing enough to protect Syrian civilians or punish the Syrian regime, the fact is that Washington has waged a proxy war against Damascus since at least 2012, and in this effort it has manifestly been defeated. One can even argue that while the US hasn't done nearly enough to topple the Assad government, it's actually done more than enough to give it a pretext to slaughter its opposition as treacherous pawns of a Western imperialist plot.

The latest slaughter in the besieged rebel stronghold of Aleppo fits this pattern: the ferocious Russian and Syrian regime air assault on the city was triggered by an accidental US coalition airstrike against Syrian troops in the eastern stronghold of Deir ez-Zor on September 17; from the very moment this happened, the already fragile ceasefire brokered by Washington and Moscow a week earlier was doomed.

It hardly mattered that coalition forces didn't intend to attack Assad's men, or that this was obviously a lapse of Russian intelligence and coordination with the Syrian military; all that counted to Damascus (and even Moscow) was that this was a strike carried out by an illegal foreign contingent which had no invitation to bomb anyone on sovereign Syrian territory. It was the perfect propaganda coup for Russian and Syrian state media: just the kind of story they could spin ad nauseam to their traditionally cynical and conspiracy theory-prone public.

The Americans had to pay for this intolerable transgression, and so of course, Washington's despised rebel proxies and their civilian support communities had to be blasted to ribbons. Just to drive home the message of how displeased they were, on September 19 the Syrian regime seems to have deliberately misled a UN convoy manned by rebel sympathizers into thinking they were allowed to deliver aid supplies into the insurgent enclave of eastern Aleppo, only to then attack it in a signature "double-tap" airstrike which made a point of drawing out first responders to the initial raid so they'd be sitting ducks for follow-ups. That same day, Damascus declared the ceasefire dead, but in fact its warplanes had already commenced a savage new wave of "barrel bomb" attacks against civilians in Aleppo a day earlier in apparent retaliation for the Deir ez-Zor incident. Rather, the official end of the ceasefire gave the green light to the Russians to rejoin the hostilities as well: by the end of the week they were terrorizing previously well-protected Aleppo noncombatants huddled in underground shelters with their massive "bunker buster" munitions designed to take out hardened military installations.

As images of children being pulled from piles of rubble in Aleppo flashed across the globe, there's little doubt that these brazen escalations were undertaken by Assad and Putin with a specific intent to show the international community that no man, woman, or child anywhere in Aleppo was still either off limits or unreachable to the brutality of the renewed violence; in fact they probably wanted to elicit just the shock and horror that American and Western governments and media exhibited, so as to more deeply impress on them - before the whole world - their impotence and fecklessness (while of course conveniently continuing to insist that they're only targeting militants and terrorists).

For Putin and his Russian nationalist base especially, this was the sweet revenge they'd craved ever since the humiliating nineties, when they watched helplessly as NATO encroached on their frontiers and bombed to submission their strategic ally and cultural kindred Serbia over its savage conduct in the sectarian warfare of the former Yugoslavia: "We can kill whoever we please whenever we please - especially anyone you Americans are dumb enough to presume to shield from our power."

So there really was little to surprise about this whole descent into deeper and darker cruelty in Syria; since all war is cruelty anyway, the Kremlin decided that it was time to teach those juvenile Americans a lesson as to what they really signed up for - and what they're still barely halfheartedly engaged in in their now unfathomably idiotic quest to dislodge Assad.

Hope has long since become the de facto American strategy in Syria: a hope that Assad is too weak and his regime too thinly stretched and exhausted to plausibly win a war of attrition that could still drag on for years; a hope that Moscow would be too fearful of some Afghanistan-style quagmire in an Islamic country to shun a quick diplomatic resolution; a hope that the Shiite fundamentalist regime of Iran would somehow value its quick reinstatement into the global economy via the nuclear deal more highly than its costly gambit to save its sectarian ally on the Mediterranean.

But hope is obviously not a war strategy - not even a proxy war strategy. Wars are about violence and threats of violence escalation. America has lost its proxy war with Russia in Syria, and its Sunni regional allies have concomitantly lost their proxy war with the Shiite axis led by Iran, for the simple fact that this war wasn't fought as an existential struggle that must be won even at any price - or at least a higher price than the other side is willing to pay.

The West is thus reduced to diplomatic grandstanding about "moral values" and the supposed imperative to protect civilians, as if it has never itself targeted hostile civilians in wars of total victory it felt it had to win.

In fact, if only Washington would actually give up the lost cause of its proxy war, it could readily reduce the suffering of the Syrian people whose welfare it purports to prioritize. It could easily set up "safe zones" in the far north below the Turkish border - ideally in the buffer zone that the Turks have now set up with their "Euphrates shield" incursion spearheaded by moderate rebels - that neither Assad nor the Russians are likely to have any particular interest in threatening for quite some time. Into such a tacit "no-fly" sanctuary sector can stream many of the remaining 250,000 residents of rebel-held Aleppo who are now being bombed and starved out; whilst the remaining thousands of insurgent and jihadist fighters have already been offered safe passage to another front of their own choice, in line with now well-established Syrian government precedent.

But clearly the US still won't concede defeat in its proxy war, which relinquishing the Aleppo pocket would essentially be. If Russia and the Syrian regime can't be punished for having the gall to try to win what was supposed to be an unwinnable conflict, at least they must pay dearly for actually winning it. More Syrian civilian collateral damage be damned.

Maybe with Hillary in power come January 20, the US will actually resolve to win for a change, rather than merely stave off the creeping and agonizing appearance of defeat. If you can't admit to being beaten, it becomes very tempting to try to change your fortunes; whether that can actually translate into a plausible game plan is another matter entirely.