CIA aiding Syria rebels: Usually, that's just the beginning

The US is wading into ever murkier waters in Syria with unpredictable consequences.

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Micah Zenko at the Council on Foreign Relations wrote an overview of the United State's last military confrontation with Syria – in Lebanon in 1982 – earlier this year that shows how limited interventions can end with disastrous and unpredictable consequences. The fight was in Lebanon, where Israel had invaded the south to try to wipe out the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Syria had vast influence in the north. Zenko writes:

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In the aftermath of the full-scale Israeli invasion months earlier in 1982, which sought to drive out the PLO and install a friendly regime in power, Lebanon had become a war zone. The Lebanese military and various militias were receiving weapons, military training, operational guidance, and money from a number of countries, including Israel, Syria, the Soviet Union, Iran, and the United States....

While the United States was supposed to have been a neutral entity in Lebanon as part of the MNF, by summer 1983 it had openly sided with the pro-Israeli Lebanese government. To support the Lebanese military, the U.S.S. New Jersey was authorized to shell the Druze militia and Syrian military forces in the mountains surrounding Beirut. As Colin Powell later described the response: “When the shells started falling on the Shiites, they assumed the American ‘referee’ had taken sides against them. And since they could not reach the battleship, they found a more vulnerable target: the exposed Marines at the airport.”

The October 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut claimed 241 US lives and later came to be blamed on the militant group Hezbollah, a Shiite organization radicalized by the Israeli invasion and the war in Lebanon that was in its formative stages in 1983. Hezbollah has long been a client of Iran and Syria, and today is a stronger military force than at any time in its history. Russia remains close to Assad, just as it was to his father, Hafez, in 1983, and the politics of the region remain as explosive and byzantine as they were a generation ago.

The US must tread carefully.

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