What the commentators said
The lesson that regional autocrats will learn from the fall of Aleppo, said Maged Mandour on Open-democracy, is that “the use of severe repression is effective” in the current international climate. No longer need despots worry about foreign intervention. They can now use the fear of refugees and Islamist terrorism as tools to “blackmail Western powers into silence or tacit support”. The other baleful lesson people will take from this episode, said Patrick Cockburn in The Independent, is that it pays “to deter foreign journalists, who might report objectively”. No foreign reporters dared enter besieged Aleppo, because they knew they would be kidnapped or killed. As a result, news organisations ended up being “spoon-fed” a highly partisan version of events by “jihadis and their sympathisers”.
In his valedictory press conference last Friday, Barack Obama defended his policy on Syria, said Muhammad Idrees Ahmad in The Observer, but it’s likely to be remembered as the biggest failure of his presidency. He cited the presence of Russia and Iran in Syria as a reason for not intervening, but those countries only entered Syria after his fateful decision, in 2013, not to punish Assad for using chemical weapons. The president also cited the disunity of the rebels, but that, likewise, was a product of the lack of meaningful support. The reality is that Obama ducked this challenge, fearful of doing anything to upset his Iran nuclear deal – a deal he hoped would secure his legacy and distinguish him from his “belligerent and quixotic predecessor”.
Enough “hand-wringing” about Aleppo, said Emile Simpson on Foreignpolicy.com. It’s true the West had a chance to topple Assad in 2011 “by backing a rebellion not yet contaminated by radical Islamists. What is more dubious is that such a military victory would have put Syria on a path to democracy, stability or peace.” More likely, it would have led to fragmentation, chaos and the rise of radical Islamists, as happened in Libya after the West’s intervention there. Syria might have stood a chance if we’d sent a large ground force to the country and settled in for a long counter-insurgency campaign – but the public would never have backed that. There are only two options in these circumstances. “Act decisively. Or stay out.”