“The Power Of Words”: Syria Moving To Sign The Chemical Weapons Treaty Is A Win For The U.S.
The Syrian regime today told the United Nations that it intends to sign and abide by the Chemical Weapons Convention. This commitment does two things that change the dynamics of the international response to Syria regardless of whether it is implemented.
First, it ends arguments about whether Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has chemical weapons, and whether the concern with his using them is “just” an American preoccupation. Second, it gives the international and intrusive United Nations machinery a real and expanding role in dealing with Syria’s chemical stocks, potentially starting to move Russia off center stage.
The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein interprets an interview that Assad gave today as a “ransom note”: that Assad will not agree to move forward on chemical weapons destruction unless the U.S. agrees to stop arming his opponents. It’s almost touching to see Assad trying to inflate the importance of recent U.S. arms shipments, even as Syrian rebels continue to say they aren’t getting what they want. But if Assad has that interpretation, it’s a major plus for Washington. Here’s why every step toward getting Syria’s name on the Chemical Weapons Convention is a plus for Washington:
Implementation is no longer in Russia’s hands alone. As American politics takes a detour into obsessing with Vladimir Putin and his Thursday op-ed, Assad’s move to the U.N. actually begins the process of pushing Russia back out of the spotlight. Rather than foresee a future in which Assad hands chemicals straight to Russia, Assad’s signal of intent to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention kicks off a process that should put the U.N. out front in moving quickly to get Assad’s signature and establish what will comprise ratification. (You can see Assad claiming rebel attacks make it hard for the Syrian People’s Council, elected last year during the civil war, to meet. But its speaker has been sending fan letters to anti-war Western politicians without difficulty.)
As soon as that happens – or before, if Syria were to announce that it will begin abiding by the Convention, as Russia should be asked to pressure it to do – Syria becomes liable for declaring all of its weapons and production sites within 30 days, allowing 100 percent of them to be inspected by trained international inspectors affiliated with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and destroyed in a manner that can be verified by the OPCW. The Russians have apparently suggested to Washington that a model for how Syrian stocks are verifiably destroyed could be the joint U.S.-Russian destruction of old Soviet stocks carried out under the provisions of the Nunn-Lugar Agreement. Phones over at Nunn’s Nuclear Threat Initiative, which on its own has overseen removal of nuclear materials from some dicey places, should be ringing off the hook about now.
The standard for success becomes clearer. Pundits weighed in faster than a senator to a camera on the difficulty of destroying all of Syria’s chemical stocks. That’s the wrong standard. 16 years after the U.S. and Russia joined the treaty, we’ve destroyed 90 percent of our stocks and Russia 65 percent of its. What’s the right standard? Every pound destroyed is a pound that can’t be used by Assad, can’t fall into the hands of extremist groups and doesn’t swell the target list for possible military intervention.
Assad puts himself on the line internationally. The treaty text is simple, committing its signatories “never … to use chemical weapons” and “to destroy chemical weapons it owns or possesses.” The treaty also foresees a compliance mechanism – a soft one, but one much-discussed in recent days: “the Conference shall, in cases of particular gravity, bring the issue, including relevant information and conclusions, to the attention of the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council.” The use of “shall” is important. The treaty doesn’t say that treaty members vote on whether or not to refer to the Security Council, or that they “may” refer serious noncompliance to the Security Council. It says that they will. So one of Russia’s prior avenues for vetoing Security Council consideration would be removed.
Most important, Assad runs the risk, if his regime uses chemical weapons again, that Washington’s strike plans will be right back on the table, with considerably more international support. The rebels know this, and are likely to push him as hard as they can. Which hardly adds up to a win for Assad. It does, however, add up to the chance for a big win for the U.N., the Chemical Weapons Treaty, and the power of … words.
By: Heather Hurlburt, U. S. News and World Report, September 12, 2013
“The Copy And Paste Media”: How Assad Wooed The American Right, And Won The Syria Propaganda War
Even before President Barack Obama put his plans to strike the Syrian regime on hold, he was losing the battle of public opinion about military intervention. Part of the credit, no doubt, goes to a successful media blitz by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its supporters. In an interview aired on Monday night, Assad himself advanced his government’s case to Charlie Rose, saying that the United States had not presented “a single shred of evidence” proving the Syrian military had used chemical weapons.
Assad has always been able to skillfully parry Western journalists’ criticisms of his regime — and, at times, it has won him positive international coverage. Before the uprising, the U.S. media often described the Assad family as Westernized leaders who were trying to bring their country into the 21st century. The most infamous example was Vogue’s profile of Asma al-Assad, which described Syria’s first lady as “a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind … [with] a killer IQ.” But even experts in the field went along: Middle East historian David Lesch wrote a biography of Bashar describing the president as a modernizer, before changing his mind during the uprising.
The carnage over the past two and a half years put an end to much of this praise — but now pro-Assad media outlets have found a new way to influence the American debate. Assad supporters’ claims have repeatedly been republished unquestioningly by right-wing commentators in the United States, who share their hostility toward both Sunni Islamists and the Obama administration. It’s a strange alliance between American conservatives and a regime that was one of America’s first designated state sponsors of terror, and continues to work closely with Iran and Hezbollah.
“There is evidence — mounting evidence — that the rebels in Syria did indeed frame Assad for the chemical attack,” conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh told his audience on Sept. 3. “But not only that, but Obama, the regime, may have been complicit in it. Mounting evidence that the White House knew and possibly helped plan the Syrian chemical weapon attack by the opposition!”
Limbaugh’s cited an article by Yossef Bodansky on Global Research, a conspiracy website that has advanced a pro-Assad message during the current crisis. “How can the Obama administration continue to support and seek to empower the opposition which had just intentionally killed some 1,300 innocent civilians?” Bodansky asked.
Bodansky is an ally of Bashar’s uncle, Rifaat al-Assad — he pushed him as a potential leader of Syria in 2005. Rifaat is the black sheep of the Assad family: He spearheaded the Syrian regime’s brutal crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s, but then was forced into exile after he tried to seize power from his brother, President Hafez al-Assad, in 1983. Despite his ouster, however, Rifaat is just as hostile to a Sunni Islamist takeover as other members of the Assad family — a position Bodansky appears to share. Ending Alawite rule in Syria, Bodansky wrote on another pro-Assad website, “will cause cataclysmic upheaval throughout the greater Middle East.”
Pro-Assad voices have also helped shape the debate in Europe. The British organization Stop the War, which was instrumental in convincing Parliament to reject a strike on Syria, is not just made up of opponents of intervention — it includes staunch supporters of the Syrian regime. The organization’s vice president is a Stalinist who praised Assad for “a long history of resisting imperialism,” and warned that his defeat “will pave the way for a pro-Western and pro-U.S. regime.” Other top officials in the organization have also spoken publicly about the benefits of keeping Assad in power.
One of the most common ways for pro-Assad propaganda to find its way into reputable newspapers is through Christian news outlets. Arab Christians have many legitimate fears of how Islamist takeovers in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East could affect them — but nonetheless, some of the outlets that cover their plight regularly trade fact for fiction.
The official Vatican news agency, Agenzia Fides, for example, was caught reproducing word-for-word a report on the alleged mass killing of Christians in the city of Homs from Syria Truth, a virulently pro-Assad website. The Agenzia Fides report was eventually picked up by the Los Angeles Times — with no mention, of course, of the original source.
It’s not only the LA Times that has been duped in this way. USA Today ran an article earlier this year saying Saudi Arabia had sent 1,200 inmates on death row to fight in Syria, sourcing the claim to the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA). The document, however, appears to be a hoax, and had been passed around frequently by pro-Hezbollah websites prior to appearing on AINA. In addition to relying on pro-Assad sources, AINA also looks to U.S. conservatives for inspiration — it republished an article titled “The Myth of the Moderate Syrian Rebels” that first appeared in the far-right FrontPage Magazine.
One of the most prolific defenders of the Assad regime is Mother Agnes-Mariam de la Croix, who says she is a Carmelite nun born in Lebanon who converted to Christianity when she was 19. The National Review uncritically cited her claim last year that Syrian rebels had gathered Christian and Alawite hostages together in a building in the city of Homs, and proceeded to destroy the building with dynamite, killing them all. More recently, she has argued that the video evidence of the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack were fabricated, writing that it was “staged and prepared in advance with the goal of framing the Syrian government as the perpetrator.”
But right-wing Americans partisans have not been shy about simply copy-and-pasting claims made in pro-Assad media outlets when it suits their interests, no matter the source. For example, the website Jihad Watch, which is run by leading Islamophobe Robert Spencer, repeated a claim by the Arabic-language al-Hadath that Syrian rebels attacking the Syrian town of Maaloula “terrorized the Christians, threatening to be avenged on them after the triumph of the revolution.”
It doesn’t take much time reading al-Hadath to realize that this is a site staunchly loyal to the Syrian regime and its allies — and therefore inclined to dramatize stories of rebel crimes. The website contains an editorial by the editor-in-chief lauding Hezbollah, and another article reports that a kidnapped European writer said that the rebels launched the Aug. 21 chemical attack (the writer has denied making such claims).
Other stories in such publications, of course, would never see the light of day in the U.S. media. Al-Hadath, for example, features a section dedicated to news about Israel titled “Know Your Enemy” — a strange match for the American right-wing, to say the least.
By: David Kenner, Foreign Policy, September 10, 2013
“Yes, Vladimir, America Is Exceptional”: It’s Much, Much Better Than That Pink Negligee Russian Kind
As I read Vladimir Putin’s sanctimonious op-edabout U.S. policy in Syria, I imagined the Russian president sitting at the keyboard in a lovely pink negligee.
You will recall that when a satirical painting of Putin in lingerie went on display last month in St. Petersburg, police seized the offending artwork and shut down the exhibit. The artist, Konstantin Altunin, fled the country and is seeking asylum in France. No doubt he wanted to avoid the fate of the punk rock group Pussy Riot, three of whose members were arrested and sentenced to years in prison for an anti-Putin performance in a Moscow cathedral.
So when Putin tries to lecture “the American people and their political leaders” from a position of moral superiority, no one on earth can take him seriously. As for Syria, the sinister and barbarous government of dictator Bashar al-Assad would not last one week without the military hardware that Russia generously provides. Putin thus has the blood of tens of thousands of civilians on his hands.
Putin’s piece in the New York Times does raise an interesting question, however: Has President Obama, the patient seeker of multilateral solutions, now embraced the idea of American exceptionalism?
“It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation,” Putin wrote. (Once again, I couldn’t avoid that truly exceptional image with the negligee.)
I, too, was struck by this passage at the end of Obama’s speech:
“America is not the world’s policeman. Terrible things happen across the globe, and it is beyond our means to right every wrong. But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional. With humility, but with resolve, let us never lose sight of that essential truth.”
If this sounds like a big change in Obama’s worldview, you’ve been paying too much attention to the right-wing echo chamber — and not enough to what Obama actually says and does.
It is an article of faith among Obama’s critics that he believes the United States is just a regular country, no better or worse than others, and that, accordingly, he seeks to abdicate any leadership role in the world. Where do these critics get such an idea? From their own fevered imaginations, mostly.
What is supposed to be the smoking-gun quote came in 2009, when Obama, responding to a question during an overseas trip, said the following: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Aha, said the critics. He believes we’re just like post-empire Britain and bankrupt Greece.
But if you read the rest of the quote, the president was clearly saying that most people around the world have national pride — but the United States, in his view, is indeed unique.
He spoke of unmatched U.S. economic and military power. He said he was “enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world.” And he added that “we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.”
Ronald Reagan said it more poetically with “shining city on a hill,” but the idea is the same. Obama has told audiences many times that his life story would not have been possible in any other country. If anyone doubts his willingness to throw American weight around, with or without support from other nations, go ask for opinions in the places where missile-firing U.S. drones circle ominously overhead.
To me, the concept of exceptionalism underpins Obama’s strongest argument for taking military action in Syria. When we see more than 1,400 men, women and children killed with poison gas, it is not our nature to look away. We ask ourselves whether there is anything we should do. We weigh the costs and benefits, the risks and rewards, and we do what we can. The moral case for a strike against the Assad regime is predicated on the fact that if the United States doesn’t do something, nobody will.
Yes, Mr. Putin, you can call that American exceptionalism. I like it a lot better than the Russian kind.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 12, 2013
“It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”: In The End However, History Will Remember Where We End Up
In a political environment that stays thirsty for clear winners and losers and operates on a stopwatch, the Syrian debate hasn’t satisfied, and is unlikely to.
This debate is too serious to be subjected to the rules of Washington’s game, even as it must be conducted by its gamesmen.
It has broken down the normal tribalism of left-right, liberal-conservative constructs, and mixed folks into maddeningly contradictory coalitions.
On one side are some of President Obama’s staunchest supporters, who are always convinced that he’s the smartest man in the room, that he’s always playing chess when others are playing checkers.
As someone tweeted to me on Tuesday night, “I support my President and ANY decisions he makes.” She continued, “we elected him to do a job so we must pray for his discernment and allow him to do it.”
For many like this woman, their faith in Obama is resolute and unshakable. But, they have found kinship with conservative, hard-line war hawks who see an opportunity to alter the Syrian civil war and place another imperial imprint on the region. Their thirst for intervention will never be sated. Their trigger finger is always itchy. Their appetite for expansion knows no bounds.
This is the might-makes-right crowd.
On this side are also those who are simply convinced of the administration’s argument: that Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own people and that he should be punished, not only for moral reasons but to ensure our own national security.
And then there are people who generally support the president’s policies but feel, as a matter of principle — and perhaps provincial interest — that they simply cannot support his call to arms.
For them, this is not about an opposition to Obama the man, but to a military instinct.
And many of them seem to have reconciled their support for the president with their resistance to this action. That may help to explain why opposition to military action in Syria is overwhelming but, according to a Gallup report released Tuesday, Obama’s personal approval rating, as well as approval of his foreign affairs policies, remain relatively unchanged.
The truly anti-war-inclined, many of them true liberals, are so exhausted by our current and recent forays that they can’t even fathom another.
And they have real concerns. Would a United States military action be legal without a United Nations resolution? How do we ensure that dropping bombs won’t be tantamount to whacking the hornets’ nest, setting in motion painful repercussions that we cannot foresee? What to make of this Goldilocks bombing strategy of not-too-little, not-too-much but just enough? How is such a thing calibrated? And why bomb at all if we plan to leave Bashar Assad in power?
This genuine anti-war-in-Syria crowd finds itself in the odd company of the pro-war-on-Obama crowd. The latter will never be satisfied with anything this president does or how he does it. The president’s very presence irritates like a rock in a shoe.
For many of these folks, everything is a bargaining chip and all roads lead to Benghazi.
On Sunday, Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, said:
“One of the problems with all of this focus on Syria is it’s missing the ball from what we should be focused on, which is the grave threat from radical Islamic terrorism. I mean, just this week is the one-year anniversary of the attack on Benghazi.”
With Benghazi, Republicans are like a dog with a bone.
So into this crazy, mixed-up world of odd alliances steps the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, with a proposal — whether serious or not only time will tell — to defuse the situation by creating an even odder alliance: the Russians persuade the Syrians to declare and surrender their chemical weapons to international monitors in order to prevent American military action.
Under this new deal, we’d all be partners of a sort, working toward a common goal. And ironically, such a deal will most likely require boots on the ground in order to guard weapons inspectors and secure weapons, something that President Obama promised wouldn’t happen if Congress gave him authorization to bomb.
Now, personally, I don’t trust Russia’s Putin or Syria’s Assad any further than I could throw them, and the logistics of the Russian plan seem nearly impossible. Though at least America can now say that it has tried to pursue a diplomatic option before having to pursue a military one.
In the end, history will remember where we end up much more than how we got there. But, history takes time.
The fact that immense power should require immense patience seems to satisfy very few. We are an all-or-nothing culture, watching a get-it-over-quick clock. We dislike complexity, or ambiguity, or sophistication.
So, when the president offered no one-line take-away in his address to the nation on Tuesday, many of those already on the fence were left there with a one-word reflection: ambivalence.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 11, 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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