France Can Lead Europe and Save Syria's Kurds
Originally published in The Wall Street Journal (archive)
Bernard Henri Lévy
Article Outline
- America has abandoned Syrian Kurdistan, but that doesn't mean that Europe has to abandon it as well
- Is Europe really so weak that it can't replace 2000 American peacekeepers with a force of its own?
- Europe shares responsibility with the US for the fate of the Kurds
- Europe is more affected than the US by this "strategic and moral disaster"
- Proposal made in January after the first attempt at withdrawal by President Trump in December 2018
- Pan-European military unit made up of a coalition of European countries who are willing to recognize the Kurds
- France already has 200 special forces in the area
- Europe should be able to come up with 1800 soldiers from elsewhere
- There is a precedent for this: Bosnia
- UN peacekeepers were hobbled by too-restrictive rules of engagement
- US was uninterested in intervening — still licking its wounds from the Somalia debacle
- French President Jacques Chirac presents the idea of forming a force outside the existing NATO and EU bureaucracies to respond to the Bosnian ethnic cleansing
- French and British soldiers intervene in Bosnia (with transport provided by the Germans)
- Although the force remains under the nominal command of the UN, it has much looser rules of engagement, and is more effective in stopping the Serbs
- The force successfully lifts the seige of Sarajevo and begins a virtuous cycle that leads to the Dayton Peace Accords
- Why can't the same group of countries that intervened in Bosnia intervene in Syria?
- If the British and French could put 4500 soldiers into a hostile battlefield in Bosnia, why can't they put 2000 soldiers on the border of a nominally allied country: Turkey
- Emmanuel Macron, in an interview with The Economist, pronounced NATO "brain dead"
- The Syria situation provides Macron with a perfect opportunity to back up his words with deeds by leading a European coalition to stop the occupation of Kurdish territory
My thoughts
- What the article misses is the Russia factor
- In 1995, the Russian military was at its lowest ebb
- Putin regards the European intervention Bosnia and the NATO intervention in Kosovo as strategic embarrassments
- At the time, all Russia could do to stop the West was lodge ineffectual protests with the UN Security Council
- The Russian military is far more powerful today, and Putin is far more willing to both oppose a European military intervention directly and reinforce Turkish and Iranian opposition to a military intervention
