Beating the drum for Syrian intervention . . . and lessons from the Spanish Civil War.

I need to get back to the main historical them of this blog, which is beginning to get a bit too far ranging, but I can't help but note the current drum beat for intervention in the Syrian civil war and feel the need to be a pundit, even though there's nothing "historical" about this current event.  

Well, maybe that does actually have some things that are useful for a blog on historical topics. . . 

Anyhow, to start off with, the press, and some politicians, are really ramping up on the US intervening in the Syrian civil war.  It's famously noted that those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it, but it's amazing, in our new 24 hour news cycle, how quickly we do that.  The press was excited about getting into Iraq too, only to be opposed to it just seconds after the conventional war became a guerrilla war (really a second war, but an inevitable one).  Now we're doing that with Syria.  Maybe we ought to look a bit more closely at that, and realistically, and . . .take a less from the Spanish Civil War.

Ever since 1939, or at least 1941, historians have liked to look at the Spanish Civil War as World War Two light.  Indeed, some in the US were naively casting the Republicans as democrats right from the onset, so there's an element of miscasting the characters in the war just as we're now doing with the Syrian civil war.  Indeed,  part of the problem with books on the Spanish civil war is that they look at it through the lens of WWII, which is a mistake.   

Democracy was dead in Spain before the first shot was fired.  It had been given a mortal wound in the last election they'd had.  After that, it was going to become a Communist country, the question was just when and how extreme it was going to get.  The evidence is pretty good that it was going to get pretty extreme pretty quickly.  The days of Spanish democracy were failing fast.  For the anti-Communist, or just folks who weren't Communist, the only choice was to look towards somebody to rise up against the inevitable, and the army did that.  It wasn't democratic either, it was monarchist, but the monarchs were no more.

People like to look at it as the democrats vs. the fascists, but it simply isn't true.  It was really the Communist vs the Army.  Everyone else had to fit into that contest somehow, or hope to sit it out and live through it, a very difficult thing to do in a country torn by extremes and fighting a civil war.  If you were a democrat who figured that Communist values were better than monarchical ones, you went with the Communists.  If you were a democrat who figured that the Communist were worse than the Army, you went with the Army. Socialists and Anarchists went with the Communists, for which quite a few were killed by Communists, as Communism everywhere killed off close competitors first.   Fascists and Monarchist went with the Army.  The Basque, as usual, tried to go it alone.

That is the model for Syria.  There are no democrats.  If you are an Islamist, you want the Baath party out and an Islamic republic a la Iran, or pre 2001 Afghanistan, in.  If you are not an Alawite and you are a Moslem you want the government out also, even if you probably don't have any desire for a theocracy to replace the Baath dictatorship.  If you are an Alawite or a Christian, you probably want the Baath Party in, not because it likes everyone, but because it's a secular party that's equal or equally crappy to everyone.  There's not a lot of social melting that goes on in the Middle East, and for the minority groups that threw their lot in with the Baath Party, not out of love, but because it would give them more or less an equal deal, this has to be a nightmare of epic proportions.

The really disturbing thing is that the Press and U.S. interventionist seem wholly ignorant of all of this.  They want us to overthrow the rotten secular quasi fascist Baathists in order to put the rotten crappy really dangerous Islamist in.  We do not stand to benefit from replacing one crappy government with another.  Indeed, as horrible as the Syrian dictatorship is, there's no reason to believe that the replacement Syrian government wouldn't be much worse. 

Christianity was the majority religion in the Middle East up until the Crusader Kingdoms fell in the Islamic invasions in the Middle East (it happened, by the way, that way, and not the other way around).  Even after that, Christian communities hung on for centuries and centuries.  Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine and Iraq proved to be the resilient reservoirs of the Faith.  I note this as our current actions are having the collateral impact of wiping out these ancient regional cultures, which predate the ones we seem so inclined to assist, only to our regret.  Our efforts in Iraq had the collateral impact of really weakening the remaining Christian communities there.  Aiding Al Queda overthrow the Baath regime, which is basically what we're going to end up doing, will be extremely detrimental to a culture so old that the New Testament informs us that St. Paul had his conversion on the road to Damascus.

My point here is not to argue that we need to do one thing or another for religious reasons.  Nor am I suggesting that we need to back the Baath government in any fashion.  We do not.  But we're fooling ourselves if we think that there's any Western democrats in this war.  And unless we're willing to actually go in, control the results, and govern Syria until it can govern itself in the same fashion that France governs itself, we are making a big mistake.