Thread by @RichardHanania

I have a new paper in @SurvivalEditors on the US intervention in Syria, and why it made the human rights situation worse. This thread explains how American involvement exacerbated and prolonged human suffering. 1/n tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

There's a story interventionists tell. They say the US got involved in Iraq and Libya, and the situation turned out bad. But the US "did nothing" in Syria, therefore inaction can have costs too. 2/n

This is a rewriting of history to cover up a terrible record. The US sanctioned the Syrian regime, tried to destroy its economy, and put $1.5 billion into arming and training rebels. In no way is this "doing nothing," even if it's less than what regime change advocates wanted 3/n

The idea behind this was that Assad is a bad guy, and so anything that hurts Assad must be good for the Syrian people. In reality, research on mass killing indicates that countries engage in atrocities when they are desperate and feeling threatened. 4/n

Dictatorship is common, but mass killing is rare. What distinguishes the dictatorships that commit widescale atrocities from the majority that don't? The main factor is the degree of threat a state faces, which is why civil war is the greatest predictor of mass killing. 5/n

Moreover, sanctions make a country poorer, which means it has to rely on the most crude methods to put down threats to its power. Hillary had a theory that sanctions would eventually cripple the regime so much it would be unable to commit atrocities, but this is folly. 6/n

Looking at the history of the Assad regime, and neighboring Iraq under Saddam, shows this to be the case. These governments have been most vicious when they have been most threatened. 7/n

In 2011, Obama declared "Assad must go," at a time when there were only about 2,000 deaths. Since then, more Syrians died in the years of the heaviest American involvement than during any other time. As Russia became more involved and the US role dwindled, deaths went down. 8/n

If your concern is human rights, the US should have done exactly the opposite of what it did. This means engaging in dialogue, avoiding sanctions, and communicating to the regime that it was not seeking a new govt. 9/n

Today, the pro-interventionist crowd is still seeking regime change. Their unwillingness to recognize they do not have the ability to impose new governments in places where a state already exists prolongs suffering. See my debate with Charles Lister the other day. 10/n

Their dreams of regime change are more absurd than they were in 2011. Now, the Assad regime has the military support of Iran and Russia, and is not nearly as threatened as it was in 2012 or 2013. It did not liquidate itself then, and it won't do so now. 11/n

This paper is important both for setting the record straight, and because Syria is used by interventionists such as Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton as an example of what happens when the US doesn't become involved. They are wrong, and we should learn from their mistakes. 12/n