Rebel fighters fire at government forces in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo yesterday. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it has documented the killing of around 82,257 people, including 34,473 civilians.
WASHINGTON: Former US defence secretary Robert Gates warned yesterday that deepening US military involvement in Syria’s civil war would be a “mistake,” warning the outcome would be unpredictable and messy.
In an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Gates also said he saw “no good outcomes” in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program and warned that a full US withdrawal from Afghanistan would be “a disastrous mistake.”
Gates’ comments on Syria come amid debate in Washington over whether to step up military support for rebels fighting the regime of President Bashar Al Assad, even as the administration attempts a new peace initiative with Russia.
“I thought it was a mistake in Libya, and I think it is a mistake in Syria, even if we had intervened more significantly in Syria a year ago or six months ago. We overestimate our ability to determine outcomes.
“Caution, particularly in terms of arming these groups and in terms of US military involvement, is in order,” he said.
“Anybody who says, ‘It’s going to be clean. It’s going to be neat. You can establish safe zones, and it’ll be just swell,’ well, most wars aren’t that way,” he said.
Gates, who served under both George W Bush and President Barack Obama, was US defence secretary in 2011 when the US joined a Nato-led air operation in Libya that helped rebels topple Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
On Iran, Gates said the best the US can hope for is that sanctions bite deep enough that the regime decides to change course.
“If there is no military attack, and they don’t change their policies, you will probably see a nuclear-armed Iran igniting a nuclear arms race in the most volatile part of the world, emboldened to be even more aggressive and with missiles that can reach Israel now and Europe soon.
“But if you do hit them, then I think the consequences of their retaliation could spin out of control,” he said.
Gates, a former intelligence officer who helped oversee US support for Afghan insurgents fighting the Soviet Union in the 1980s, said a residual US force should remain in the country after 2014, when US troops are scheduled to come home.
Meanwhile, the European Commission announced yesterday an additional ¤65m ($84m) in aid for Syrian refugees and internally displaced, warning the crisis is “already at breaking point”.
The announcement was made in a statement released to coincide with a visit to Syrian refugees in Jordan by humanitarian aid commissioner Kristalina Georgieva.
“The more atrocities and fighting go on in Syria, the more people run. There are no indications whatsoever that this ... is going to go down,” Georgieva said after visiting the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan’s north.
As temporary home to more than 160,000 Syrians, Zaatari is equivalent to the kingdom’s fifth largest city, according to the United Nations.
“We have to dig deep into our pockets (to help the Syrians) because the worst is yet to come. The crisis is beyond humanitarian response. We need to do more and we need do more in a better way,” Georgieva said.
The UN humanitarian office said on Tuesday that the number of displaced persons has gone up from around two million people to 4.25 million.
The figures — combined with more than 1.4 million Syrians who have fled abroad — mean that more than a quarter of Syria’s pre-war population of 22.5 million have been forced to quit their homes since the conflict erupted in March 2011.
In its statement, the commission said it was announcing an additional 65 million euros “in response to the rapidly growing scale of the humanitarian crisis resulting from the conflict in Syria”. “The additional funding will be spent inside Syria, to assist the more than four million people who have been forced to flee their homes, and in neighbouring countries that have generously welcomed some 1.4 million refugees.”
Agencies
