“Genuine Democracy, What A Concept”: President Obama Gives Democracy A Chance In Syrian Crisis
Regarding the Obama administration and Syria, preliminary thoughts about a rapidly evolving situation:
It’s not necessary to think that President Obama has performed brilliantly throughout this debacle to suspect that next time around it’s going to be much harder for an action-hero president to stampede the country into war. As a corollary, hawkish politicians will find it more difficult to intimidate skeptics by questioning their patriotism.
On the eve of George W. Bush’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq 10 years ago, this column observed that “regime change” wasn’t a conservative policy, but “utopian folly and a prescription for endless war.” It suggested that over the longer term, Bush’s neoconservative advisors “may have misjudged the American people as well. Mostly, Americans wish to be left alone; they have no heart for endless wars of empire.”
Maybe I was right about that.
Ten years ago, fools were pouring Bordeaux wine into gutters and ordering “freedom fries” because the French urged the Bush administration to let U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq do their work. Ten years ago, American agents were kidnapping suspected terrorists and delivering them into Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s dungeons to be tortured. Ten years ago, “diplomacy” was a dirty word, a synonym for cowardice.
Ten years ago, President Bush, having promised to put his case against Saddam Hussein to a vote in the UN Security Council, reneged on that vow, ordered weapons inspectors busily finding no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to clear out, and commenced his “shock and awe” bombing campaign. The “embedded” American news media treated the subsequent invasion like the world’s largest Boy Scout Jamboree.
These days, diplomacy gets more respect. Most Americans hope for the success of a French-sponsored Security Council resolution transferring custody of Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons to international monitors. The numbers in a recent New York Times poll reflect a massive change in public opinion. Six out of ten Americans oppose bombing Syria. Sixty-two percent say the United States should avoid taking the lead role in solving foreign conflicts.
Ten years ago, a strong plurality favored U.S. activism. Asked last week if America should use force to turn dictatorships into democracies, people said no by a remarkable 72 to 15 percent. “A war-weary public that can turn an eye from children being gassed—or express doubt that it happened—is another poisoned fruit of the Bush years,” comments New York Times columnist Tim Egan.
Actually, the great majority, 82 percent in a recent CNN poll, believe that the Assad regime launched nerve gas weapons against its own people. But they’ve also witnessed reports of stupefying barbarities by his enemies, and bitter experience has left people wary of believing that American bombs can make things better. They fear that cruise missiles would only be the catalyst for an interminable, slow-motion grind like the Afghan war, which nearly everybody supported at the start.
This reluctance is also why—assuming the Russian, French, and Syrian agreement holds up—that political damage to President Obama for his hesitant, crawfishing approach to the Syrian crisis is apt to prove more limited than Beltway drama critics think. Obama’s ambivalence is widely shared.
As Michael Tomasky points out, Republican hypocrisy has been shocking even by GOP standards. During the 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney took a hawkish line, proposing to arm Syrian rebels and to conduct covert operations against the Assad regime. As recently as April, putative 2016 GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio chided Obama’s passivity.
“It is in the vital national security interest of our nation to see Assad’s removal,” he insisted. Regime change!
Last week Rubio voted no in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
If President Obama’s for it, GOP opportunists are against it. The end.
That said, the irony of Russian president Vladimir Putin appearing to rescue Obama from a political trap built by George W. Bush and baited by his own bluffing rhetoric about “red lines” would be almost disabling but for the horrors of nerve gas.
A deadly anachronism, gas weapons don’t work when it rains or the wind blows. They’re essentially useless in modern combat. Their appeal to a tyrant like Bashar al Assad is as an indiscriminate means of genocide, exterminating defenseless civilians like insects. Not to mention farm animals, pets, birds—basically anything with a nervous system.
Historical memories of the horrors of gas barrages during WWI are particularly strong among the Russians and French. On this subject, there really is an international community.
This too: however indecisive President Obama appeared to Beltway cognoscenti, he treated the American people like adults and honored the Constitution.
“I put [the question] before Congress,” Obama explained “because I could not honestly claim that the threat posed by Assad’s use of chemical weapons on innocent civilians and women and children posed an imminent, direct threat to the United States.”
Genuine democracy—what a concept.
By: Gene Lyons, the National Memo, September 11, 2013
“Never Go With Carrots Only”: In Syria, President Obama’s Tough Line Paid Off
When the ancient Greek or Roman playwrights had painted themselves into a corner, plot-wise, they sometimes resorted to the dramatic device known as the deus ex machina, in which one of the gods was hoisted over the stage and dropped in to resolve the otherwise inchoate drama.
Something similar happened this week with Syria. The drama had progressed into a mix of international tragedy and domestic political bathos. President Obama’s threat of military action against Syria was right in principle but garnered no real political support — not least because Obama and his generals agree there is no military solution in Syria.
Cue the gods (in Moscow!): The stage directions may have been confusing, starting with a throwaway line from Secretary of State John Kerry, followed up quickly by his Russian counterpart. Then suddenly the stage was crowded with a cheering chorus that included U.S., French and Russian presidents, the U.N. secretary general, the Chinese and even Iranians.
Anyone who thinks this was simply a theatrical accident should go back to drama school. Obama, Kerry and the Russians have been talking about control of Syrian chemical weapons for many months, most recently a week ago at the G-20 meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia. Let it be said that the mercurial Vladimir Putin (whom Obama regards as the most transactional leader in the world) knows how to propose an 11th-hour deal.
The deus ex machina has been cranked into place, but that doesn’t mean the Syria play is over. The complicated diplomatic part is just beginning. I hope Obama and his allies will keep in mind some basic principles, so that we don’t quickly return to another Syria breakdown:
● Obama’s tough line paid off. The Russians endorsed international control of Syria’s chemical weapons only after Obama threatened to attack and didn’t flinch in St. Petersburg or on Capitol Hill. He may be a weakened president in foreign affairs, but this show of strength regained him some precious credibility. As a Syrian rebel leader told me by phone Monday night, “Never go with carrots only.”
● The U.N. Security Council now moves to center stage. The right framework is the resolution France was drafting Tuesday, with U.S. help. It would require Syria to place its chemical weapons under international control for supervised demolition. Syria could face military reprisals if it violates this resolution, which the French are proposing under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, which authorizes force. Finally, the resolution would call for punishment of those responsible for the Aug. 21 chemical attack. The Russians want to soften this language.
● The next step is revival of peace talks in Geneva, where elements of the regime and the opposition can negotiate a cease-fire and transition plan. The United States and Russia, as co-sponsors of these talks, should begin thinking now about how to prevent a chaotic vacuum and sectarian revenge-killing when a political transition begins. The lessons of Iraq and Libya are clear: Reconcilable elements of the Syrian army and state institutions must remain intact so they help the rebuilding.
● President Bashar al-Assad must go. The Russians know this; they’ve repeatedly said so privately to U.S. officials. Now they need to make it happen. U.N. inspectors have gathered evidence that Syrian civilians were killed by sarin nerve gas on Aug. 21; this action could have been done only by the regime. It would be politically dangerous, as well as immoral, to allow Assad to remain in power once these findings are disclosed.
● The United States should step up its training and supply of moderate Syrian rebels — less to topple Assad than to provide a counterweight to jihadists in the opposition and help stabilize a future Syria. The first CIA-trained commandos are now heading into the field, in units of 30 or 40. Step up that flow!
● Iran should prove that it deserves a seat at the Geneva table. It can’t be part of the Syria solution unless it changes its destabilizing policies — not just in backing Assad but also in its nuclear program, its support for Hezbollah and other actions. A new Iranian president and foreign minister will be in New York in two weeks. The Iranians and the Obama administration should think big about a new security framework for the region.
● Given the United States’ profound reluctance to fight another war in the Middle East, Israel knows it will have to take responsibility for its own security, including any military action against Iran. The good news is that Israeli power is robust and credible. Both Assad and the Iranians seem to be deterred from reckless action, and the Russians (in secret) are cooperative. Credible threats of force prevent wars.
By: David Ignatius, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 10, 2013
“Contemptible Animals”: Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, And Their Craven And Brazen Hypocrisy On Syria
The Republican hypocrisy on Syria is just amazing. Imagine that Mitt Romney were president. Romney took a far more hawkish line than Barack Obama did on Syria during the campaign. He wanted to arm the rebels, supported in-country cover ops, and so on. So if Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons during President Romney’s tenure, there’s every reason to think he’d be pushing for action too. And what, in that case, would Republicans now temporizing or opposing Obama be doing in that case? They’d be breathing fire, of course. There’s a lot of chest thumping talk right now about how a failed vote will destroy Obama’s credibility. I guess that may be to some. But to anyone paying attention, the credibility of these Republicans is what will suffer, and the vote may well come back to haunt some of them in 2016.
Some Republicans are, to their credit, taking the position consistent with their records. John McCain stood up to those people who looked like they were about two feet away from his face at that town hall meeting last week. Lindsey Graham deserves more credit, since he’s facing reelection and is being called “a community organizer for the Muslim Brotherhood.” On the other side, Rand Paul and the neo-isolationists are probably taking the same position they’d take if Romney were president, although we can’t be completely sure. If Romney were in the White House, by 2016, “was so-and-so tough on Syria?” would probably be a top litmus test (unless, of course, things got really terrible over there). I could easily see Paul declaiming on the unique evil of chemical weapons that just this once required him to break from his noninterventionist views, but as things stand he at least is taking the position with which he is identified.
But most of them? Please. The Gold Weasel Medal goes to Marco Rubio, as others such as Tim Noah have noted. Back in April, Rubio thundered that “the time for passive engagement in this conflict must come to an end. It is in the vital national security interest of our nation to see Assad’s removal.” Removal! Obama’s not talking about anything close to removal. So that was Rubio’s hard line back when Obama was on the other side. And now that Obama wants action? Rubio voted against the military resolution in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.
Ted Cruz? Just in June, Cruz wanted to go into Syria and rough ’em up. “We need to develop a clear, practical plan to go in, locate the weapons, secure or destroy them, and then get out.” Now? Syria is a distraction from, you guessed it, Benghazi. He said last week: “We certainly don’t have a dog in the fight. We should be focused on defending the United States of America. That’s why young men and women sign up to join the military, not to, as you know, serve as al Qaeda’s air force.”
There are many others. These two are worth singling out because they want to be president, and their craven and brazen flip-flopping on one of the most important issues to come before them in their Senate careers is more consequential than the flip-flopping of some time-serving senator no one’s ever heard of. But the whole picture is contemptible.
Can you imagine how these people would be wailing for Assad’s head on a pike if Romney were asking for this resolution? And the Republicans in the House? I suppose a small percentage of them may be opposed. But the radio blowhards, now inveighing against “Obama’s war,” would be whooping up war fever like Hearst, and most in the House would follow suit. And remember, this is the party that voted en masse for a massive Medicare expansion in 2003—that is, a vote that was against everything they stood for, but one they took in the name of party loyalty.
They are out to undermine Obama’s credibility. They don’t care a whit about Assad, Iran, Hezbollah; indeed, on that last point, if any of them knows anything about Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, they must admire him. Nasrallah accomplishes with impressive efficiency in Lebanon what they want to accomplish in America—preventing the government from being able to do anything good for the people. All they want to do is make Obama look bad.
In contrast, look at Obama’s explanation of why he went to Congress in the first place. He was asked this question last week while in Russia. What he said is worth reprinting at length, I think: “I did not put this before Congress, you know, just as a political ploy or as symbolism. I put it before Congress because I could not honestly claim that the threat posed by Assad’s use of chemical weapons on innocent civilians and women and children posed an imminent, direct threat to the United States. In that situation, obviously, I don’t worry about Congress; we do what we have to do to keep the American people safe.
“I could not say that it was immediately, directly going to have an impact on our allies. Again, in those situations, I would act right away. This wasn’t even a situation like Libya, where, you know, you’ve got troops rolling towards Benghazi and you have a concern about time, in terms of saving somebody right away. This was an event that happened. My military assured me that we could act today, tomorrow, a month from now, that we could do so proportionally, but meaningfully. And in that situation, I think it is important for us to have a serious debate in the United States about—about these issues, because these—these are going to be the kinds of national security threats that are most likely to recur over the next five, 10 years.”
That’s a candid and thoroughly decent (and by the way, thoroughly constitutional) thought process. Obama couldn’t honestly say to himself that what Assad did represented the kind of direct threat to the American people that would permit the sidestepping of Congress, so he decided to go through all this. Now, of course, one can more cynically say it was the polls, and surely they played a role. But the president’s statement is in line with what we know about virtually all his top aides telling him “Don’t go to Congress” and him resisting that advice.
Obama isn’t a stupid man. He knew a lot of these yahoos would vote no just because it’s him. But he surely hoped that a certain number of them just might cast a vote in line with their worldview, which would slide many of them into the yes column. I’m sure many of my liberal readers are just glad they’re voting no, however cynically they might be doing it. Fine. But you should also leave a little space in your brain for the contemplation of just what a bunch of relentless hypocrites they are, making a decision as weighty as this purely on the basis of their hatred of Obama. And this defeat, if defeat it is, is supposed to destroy his credibility? It would only destroy theirs—that is, if they had any.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 9, 2013
“A Presidency Is Not On The Line”: The Vote On Syria Is Important, But It Will Not Dictate The Fate Obama’s His Presidency
The Hill published an item this morning that helps capture much of the Beltway thinking about Congress’ upcoming votes on military intervention in Syria. “The fate of President Obama’s second term hangs on his Tuesday speech to the nation about Syria,” the piece argues. “If Congress votes against a military attack on President Bashar Assad’s regime, Obama’s credibility may be shot, perhaps for the rest of his tenure.”
This is certainly the conventional wisdom, eagerly touted by Republicans. If Congress rejects the White House’s call for action, Obama’s defeat will be so catastrophic, he might as well resign.
Obviously, the House and Senate votes are very important; it’d be foolish to argue otherwise. The world is watching, and if the president’s call for authorization is rejected by Congress, it will carry significant consequences — for Syria, for U.S. foreign policy, and for the administration.
But let’s not go too overboard.
Yes, Obama is prepared to use force in response to Syria’s alleged use of chemical weapons, and lawmakers seem prepared to turn down the president’s request. But let’s not lose sight of the larger dynamic here: Obama asks Congress for a lot of things, and lawmakers routinely say no. Kevin Drum’s take rings true:
[W]hy would rejecting Obama’s request “incapacitate the president for three long years”? I’m not asking this in the usual rhetorical way, where I pretend not to know even though I really do. I’m really asking. Presidents suffer defeats all the time. Obama lost on cap-and-trade. He’s lost on plenty of judicial and executive branch nominations. He couldn’t get agreement for a grand bargain. He lost on gun control. What’s more, Republicans have been opposing him on virtually everything from the day he took office. In what concrete way would a defeat on Syria change this dynamic in even the slightest way?
Legislation that Congress was unlikely to pass will face equally long odds regardless of the outcome of the Syria debate. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine any lawmakers looking at a bill that might yet pass and saying, “Well, I was prepared to vote for this, but since the authorization to use force in Syria didn’t work out, forget it.”
Obama couldn’t get Congress to focus on job creation. Or gun violence. Or really much of anything at all. A loss on a Syria resolution may have some qualitative differences — it’s foreign policy, not domestic — but Clinton lost House votes on Bosnia and Kosovo, and his presidency didn’t magically collapse on the spot.
If Obama comes up short on Syria, it’d really just be a reminder that congressional Republicans will simply reject everything the president wants out of hand, even when they agree with him — which is something we already knew.
Brian Beutler is thinking along the same lines.
When President Obama decided to seek authorization to bomb Syria, he didn’t just throw the fate of his plans into the hands of 535 unpredictable members of Congress. He also made himself vulnerable to overblown suggestions that his entire second term is on the line.
Political reporters have a weakness for narratives, and the narrative of a weakened president is irresistible. Moreover, members of Congress will feed that narrative. Even Democrats. If you’re Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid, a great way to pad your vote count is to plead to your caucus that if the resolution fails, Obama will become a lame duck a year earlier than he ought to.
This pitch is both morally and factually incorrect.
Lawmakers who were prepared to vote for immigration reform won’t change their minds over Syria. The same is true of lawmakers who want to hold the debt ceiling hostage, change the sequestration policy, or really do much anything. The vote on Syria is important, but it will not dictate the fate of Obama’s presidency.
Just to be clear, the outcome of this foreign policy fight matters. In the short term, it will carry life-and-death consequences in Syria, and in the medium term, it will likely affect the nation’s diplomatic and national security efforts (though I’ve long argued that Republican radicalism has put the U.S. in a post-treaty phase anyway).
But the notion that Congress can effectively end Obama’s presidency with one vote on a resolution on force in Syria appears to be an overstatement. Some Republicans may want to use it as an excuse to reject an agenda they disapprove of anyway, and some in the media may see a pretense to write the president’s political obituary, but both are a little over the top.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, September 9, 2013
“A Criminal Regime Of Terror”: A Negotiated Solution In Syria Starts With Congress’ Approval To Attack
A vote by Congress to reject the resolution sought by President Barack Obama to authorize military force in Syria will add to the long list of unintended consequences already produced by bad policy choices on Syria. Among other things, it will kill for the foreseeable future any prospect of a negotiated end to this gruesome, destabilizing, and dangerous conflict. Indeed, the eleventh-hour suggestion by Russia that Syria might put its chemical stockpile under international supervision aims to kill the president’s prospects by offering Congress the alternative of a lengthy, open-ended, and likely inconclusive process, one that would leave Bashar al-Assad’s regime free to return to business as usual: slaughtering civilians in their homes with conventional weaponry.
Let us first stipulate some hard, unpleasant truths. A large majority of Americans either doesn’t care about Syria, thinks the United States has no business doing anything about it, or both. Many in Congress normally inclined to support Obama think that he, of all people, may lead us into armed conflict resembling Iraq or worse. Others in Congress would gladly sink, or at least capsize, the ship of state (at least in terms of the country’s reputation and credibility) as long as Obama is on board. These are the facts the president faces as he tries to make a case for a resolution he need not have put before the Congress in the first place.
As if popular and Congressional apathy over the depredations of the Assad regime were not enough, the president hit a wall of indifference at the G20 gathering in St. Petersburg as well. In addition to the usual defense of the indefensible one would expect from Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the customary “let’s not further militarize this regrettable situation” from others, Obama was forced to endure “let’s have negotiations instead of violence” advice from Pope Francis and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Neither the Holy Father nor the Secretary-General was able to identify a way forward to peace talks. This is understandable, because under current conditions none exists. So long as the Assad regime’s strategy of choice remains one of mass terror aimed at populated areas it does not occupy, there is no prospect of dialogue, negotiation, compromise, reconciliation, reason, or peace. This was recognized in late 2011 by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who begged the Assad regime to take the initiative in implementing a ceasefire and a series of humanitarian steps. The regime’s latest answer to Annan, Ban, and Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN–Arab League envoy for Syria, was the chemical abomination of August 21.
Obama recognizes, at long last, that a criminal regime endowed with artillery, aircraft, rockets, and missiles will use those delivery systems to visit random death, widespread destruction, and universal terror on innocent civilians. It does so with conventional ordnance that kills and maims with high explosives. It does so with chemical munitions that strangle and smother. It drives millions from their homes, many into neighboring countries. It scars for life, physically and emotionally, those it does not kill outright. So long as this campaign of mass terror continues, it will make it impossible for anyone purporting to represent the opponents of this regime to take part in anything labeled a negotiation. So long as it continues, it is as solid an indicator as one could want that the regime has no interest in negotiating a blessed thing.
Ban, the Pope, and others who earnestly seek peace in Syria are not unaware of the foregoing. They hope, as does Obama, that some combination of Putin and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will prevail on Assad to knock it off: to spare the innocent and give peace a chance. Indeed, Russia and Iran are free to do so, and by so doing make a U.S. military operation unnecessary and unthinkable. Yet as long as they enable the war crimes and crimes against humanity of the Assad regime, can Obama be faulted if he opts, with Congress’ permission, to neutralize the regime’s tools of terror—its artillery, rockets, missiles, and aircraft?
Contrary to prevailing opinion in the West, the Assad regime and its enablers do indeed think there is a military solution to the Syrian crisis. If Congress denies Obama the option of neutralizing Assad’s tools of terror, it will confirm the view of Assad and his supporters. It will do so by keeping the mass terror machine untouched and in business. For all we know Assad may have already learned his lesson about chemicals. No doubt Tehran and Moscow are mystified by their client’s stupidity. Yet if he returns to the practice of pounding populated areas with vicious impunity, no one should expect Western passivity to produce a negotiated solution to anything.
Russia and Iran should convince Assad to declare a ceasefire, invite UN observers, implement Annan’s humanitarian, de-escalatory steps, and prepare for Geneva. The chances of them doing so are low. They, and any sense of restraint by Assad, sink to zero if and when Congress turns down the president. If there are those in Congress sincerely interested in a negotiated end to Syria’s nightmare, one that can begin to stabilize the region soon instead of decades from now, they will give Obama the authorization he seeks.
By: Frederick C. Hof, The New Republic, September 9, 2013
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