More Aid to the Syrian Rebels Would Not Have Stopped ISIS

The if-only-we’d-intervened-more crowd has a new
argument: If Washington had shipped arms to the rebels in
Syria—more arms, that is, than it
already gave—it might have stopped the rise of ISIS. Marc
Lynch, a political scientist at George Washington
University, disagrees:

In general,
external support for rebels almost always make wars longer,
bloodier and harder to resolve (for more on this, see the
proceedings of this Project on Middle East Political Science

symposium in the free PDF
download). Worse, as the University of Maryland’s David
Cunningham has shown, Syria
had most of the characteristics of the type of civil war in which
external support for rebels is least effective. The
University of Colorado’s Aysegul Aydin and Binghamton University’s
Patrick Regan have suggested
that external support for a rebel group could help when all the
external powers backing a rebel group are on the same page and
effectively cooperate in directing resources to a common end.
Unfortunately, Syria was never that type of civil war.

Syria’s combination of a weak, fragmented collage of rebel
organizations with a divided, competitive array of external
sponsors was therefore the worst profile possible for effective
external support….An effective strategy of arming the Syrian
rebels would never have been easy, but to have any chance at all it
would have required a unified approach by the rebels’ external
backers, and a unified rebel organization to receive the aid. That
would have meant
staunching financial flows from its Gulf partners, or at least
directing them in a coordinated fashion. Otherwise, U.S. aid to the
FSA would be just another bucket of water in an ocean of cash and
guns pouring into the conflict.

Lynch goes on to explain why that sort of coordination would
have been just about impossible at the time; to read the rest of
his post, go here.
Then read
this piece by Hisham Safi, which describes how Western
assistance to the rebel councils in areas taken from Bashar
Al-Assad’s control went awry, with the would-be rulers spending
more time angling for aid dollars than building institutions
that were responsive to local needs and able to withstand
ISIS’ assaults. And then go here
for a reminder that ISIS is “fighting with hundreds of millions of
dollars of U.S. military equipment seized from the Iraqi Army who
abandoned it.” If you suspect that sending more military aid to
Syria would have ultimately meant more American arms falling into
ISIS’ hands, you’re not alone.