“Following The Will Of The People, Sometimes”: For Some Politicians, Public Opinion Only Seems To Matter On Syria
When the Founding Fathers sought to form a country for the people and by the people, one of the central components was to establish a representative government – to create a legislative body that reflected the will and values of the masses.
In today’s technologically advanced, media-frenzied world, tweets, “likes”, emails, texts and sound bites have become the voice of the people. Politicians are left to sift through massive amounts of data points to determine the will and desire of their constituents.
In addition, public opinion polls are conducted on an almost constant basis that seek to demonstrate and frame the public debate in ways that elected officials can fine-tune and adjust their strategy and approach to better anticipate the public’s demand.
So it’s always curious to see whether a politician chooses to reflect the poll’s findings or whether they act counter to its conclusions.
Of late, public polls have suggested that the American people are war fatigued and that they increasingly fear that military action in Syria would engage the United States in another messy, prolonged conflict in the Middle East. Further, there is a serious concern that involvement in Syria would increase the terrorist threat to Americans. According to a new survey by the Pew Research Center and USA Today, 63 percent of Americans oppose U.S. air strikes in Syria, a 15-point shift against the involvement in just the last week.
As a result, this overwhelming opposition to the strikes – echoed in town hall meetings, negative phone calls and emails to congressional offices – has shaped the points of view for a majority of House members who pledged their opposition and sought defeat of a proposed resolution for force in Syria.
Kristina Miller, author of Constituency Representation in Congress noted that, “it’s commonplace for politicians to cite opinion among their constituents. When there’s a vote that’s particularly difficult or consequential, it provides them some cover – ‘I was doing what my people wanted me to do.'”
But, when presented with polling that shows overwhelming support for expanded background checks for gun purchases (86 percent support), apparently public opinion becomes less compelling and even dismissed, as House Republicans refuse to debate or take action on any bill addressing this issue.
Similarly, 64 percent of Americans support the immigration reform act passed by the U.S. Senate, but stalled in the House. “The public supports the immigration bill 2-1 and shows unusual agreement given the divisions in the country on many other issues,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “It seems the only group divided on this issue is Congress.” But, efforts for comprehensive immigration reform legislation have been stymied by the GOP in the House and left for another day.
According to the latest United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection poll, Republican primary voters pose the greatest threat to a GOP incumbent, with 35 percent of those polled saying they would be less inclined to support their re-election if they support a military strike in Syria.
One has to wonder if, when a politician puts their finger in the wind, is he or she really looking to find the pulse of the people, or just convenient political cover? Do our elected officials really care about the will of the people, or are they most interested in casting “safe” votes (or avoiding them altogether), so as to not threaten reelection?
By: Penny Lee, U. S. News and World Report, September 12, 2013
“That Threat Worked”: It’s Critical To Keep The Military Option Alive
For all you innumerable skeptics of President Obama’s calls for military strikes on Syria, consider this:
For decades, Syria has refused to confirm that it has chemical weapons. Now, facing a limited strike, its position abruptly changed to: Oh! We do have them after all! And we want to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention! We want to show them to United Nations inspectors.
In short, the mere flexing of military power worked — initially and tentatively. And while it seems that neither Congress nor the public has any appetite for cruise missile strikes on Syria, it will be critical to keep the military option alive in the coming weeks or Russia and Syria will play us like a yo-yo.
Frankly, I’m skeptical that a deal can be worked out in which Syria hands over its chemical weaponry, and President Obama may have exchanged a losing struggle with Congress with a Sisyphean struggle with Russia. But it’s not impossible. And even if Syria cheated and stalled and eventually handed over only half of its chemical arsenal and none of its biological arsenal, that would still be a huge win for global security.
So here’s a three-track strategy for Syria going forward:
• Negotiate with Moscow on removal of Syrian chemical weapons and insist on conditions to ensure we’re not being played, including immediate disclosure to the United Nations of chemical weapons stockpiles, a binding Security Council resolution confirming the deal, a reference in the resolution to “serious consequences” for noncompliance, and immediate installation of camera monitors on at least a few locations.
• Groundwork in Congress to authorize a limited missile strike if Syria does not comply, partly to retain leverage with Moscow.
• Expansion of efforts to arm and support moderate Syrian rebels, accompanied by covert cyberwarfare on the Syrian regime, to try to change the momentum on the ground.
Ultimately, that’s the best hope to coerce President Bashar al-Assad to step down so that all sides can try to reach a cease-fire and power-sharing agreement. Yet if we’re going to sustain the pressure, we have to address these fundamental questions: Can we really promote peace with military force? Is it possible to help a country by bombing it?
Longtime readers know that I adamantly opposed the Iraq war and Afghan surge, oppose strikes on Iranian nuclear sites and tend to think we overinvest in military tools and underinvest in diplomatic ones. So many readers were stunned that I’ve endorsed missile strikes on Syria — and I’m hearing screams of betrayal.
“You can’t kill people to show that it’s wrong to kill people,” Christine protested on my Facebook page.
“When has violence, killing and aggression helped anything,” demanded Jan, also on Facebook.
The answer is: Sierra Leone, Mali, Ivory Coast, Bosnia and Kosovo. In each of those countries, an outside military force intervened at minimal cost and saved large numbers of lives. In several (as Clausewitz would have predicted), war buttressed diplomacy and helped achieve peace agreements.
We think of warfare in binary terms, as if our options are invasions or nothing at all, but that’s misleading. All-out wars have a poor record, but modest interventions of the kind President Obama is talking about in Syria have a more successful (though still mixed) history.
That’s even true in Iraq, although I hate to mention the word because it sends a shudder up every reader’s spine. While the war that began in 2003 was a disaster, two limited interventions succeeded in Iraq. One was President Clinton’s 1998 bombing of Iraqi military sites for a few days (maybe the closest parallel to Obama’s plan for Syria); it may have convinced Saddam Hussein to abandon W.M.D. programs. The other is the no-fly zone over Iraq’s Kurdish areas in the 1990s to prevent a genocide there. They were limited uses of force that proceeded so smoothly that they are hardly remembered.
“War is obviously terrible, but it’s not the ultimate evil,” notes Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Some things are worse, and one is the deliberate slaughter of civilians.”
Human Rights Watch doesn’t take a position on a strike on Syria, and Roth notes that military intervention isn’t the first tool to reach for to prevent mass atrocities. Sometimes armed intervention hurts. Sometimes it helps. We’re left to decide on a case-by-case basis.
In Syria, for two-and-a-half years, we’ve given the regime a green light, and the killing has escalated from 5,000 a year to 5,000 a month — and, last month, to a poison gas attack that was perhaps the biggest massacre in the war. Now Obama’s threat of military strikes has turned the light yellow, Syria is scrambling to adjust, and there is some hope of a diplomatic solution.
Let’s not allow the light to go green again.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, the New York Times, September 12, 2013
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