I spent all last week at Ft. Benning learning how to be a RANGERRRR. So any change in tone or profanity should be thusly attributed.
Some lame motivational speaker said that Einstein said that someone once said that if you had an hour to save the world, they would spend 59 minutes defining the problem. Sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me.
Well I've heard that Einstein once said that some other dude said that I originally said that asking the right question is the quickest way to the right answer. Put that in your pipe and smoke it Dan Brown fans.
So how does this help you figure out what the fuck is your Syria policy going to be?* First I guess you'd have to ask what is happening in Syria? Why is this happening? Are there theories that help explain what's happening? Do events on the ground align around these theories? Where do events on the ground diverge from what the theory says about civil war conflict dynamics? What is the nature of the conflict in Syria?
It's difficult to imagine how any US policy towards Syria absent answers to these questions could have a high likelihood of having predictable or desirable outcomes. Is this too high a bar to set for US foreign policy planing? When you're in the hot seat in the DOD or the White Houses is there ever enough time or information available to craft a policy informed by answers to these questions? Would a quick drive down to Arlington Cemetery help clarify that last answer? Yes, it's hard, but it's also very important.
Correlates of War Database that looks post Napoleonic era conflict says at 83% of all conflicts are not interstate wars but are civil wars and insurgencies. RAND looked at 89 insurgencies and found their average length is about 10 years. So we had better get a little more comfortable asking those hard questions before we decide what the fuck we're gonna do out there in the big bad world.
All sources from Dr. Andrew Exum
*Note: A Syria policy doesn't have to be proactive. Your Syria policy might be to do nothing and to watch on CNN. Abstaining from action is a policy whether you like the outcomes or not. Doesn't mean it's all your fault. It just means you chose not to act for various good or bad reasons.
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