“The Syria Babble We Don’t Need”: Reducing Complicated Issues To Campaign Style Contests
Our country is about to make the most excruciating kind of decision, the most dire: whether to commence a military campaign whose real costs and ultimate consequences are unknowable.
But let’s by all means discuss the implications for Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Iowa, New Hampshire and 2016. Yea or nay on the bombing: which is the safer roll of the dice for a Republican presidential contender? Reflexively, sadly, we journalists prattle and write about that. We miss the horse race of 2012, not to mention the readership and ratings it brought. The next election can’t come soon enough.
So we pivot to Hillary Clinton. We’re always pivoting to Hillary Clinton. Should she be weighing in on Syria more decisively and expansively? Or does the fact that she authorized the war in Iraq compel restraint and a gentler tone this time around? What’s too gentle, and what’s just right? So goes one strand of commentary, and to follow it is to behold a perverse conflation of foreign policy and the Goldilocks fable.
The media has a wearying tendency — a corrosive tic — to put everything that happens in Washington through the same cynical political grinder, subjecting it to the same cynical checklist of who’s up, who’s down, who’s threading a needle, who’s tangled up in knots, what it all means for control of Congress after the midterms, what it all means for control of the White House two years later.
And we’re doing a bit too much of this with Syria, when we owe this crossroads something more than standard operating procedure, something better than knee-jerk ruminations on the imminent vote in Congress as a test for Nancy Pelosi, as a referendum on John Boehner, as a conundrum for Mitch McConnell, as a defining moment for Barack Obama.
You know whom it’s an even more defining moment for? The Syrians whose country is unraveling beyond all hope; the Israelis, Lebanese and Jordanians next door; the American servicemen and servicewomen whose futures could be forever altered or even snuffed out by the course that the lawmakers and the president chart.
The stakes are huge. Bomb Syria and there’s no telling how many innocent civilians will be killed; if it will be the first chapter in an epic longer and bloodier than we bargained for; what price America will pay, not just on the battlefield but in terms of reprisals elsewhere; and whether we’ll be pouring accelerant on a country and a region already ablaze.
Don’t bomb Syria and there’s no guessing the lesson that the tyrants of the world will glean from our decision not to punish Bashar al-Assad for slaughtering his people on whatever scale he wishes and in whatever manner he sees fit. Will they conclude that a diminished America is retreating from the role it once played? Will they interpret that, dangerously, as a green light? And what will our inaction say about us? About our morality, and about our mettle?
These are the agonizing considerations before our elected leaders and before the rest of us, and in light of them we journalists ought to resist turning the Syria debate into the sort of reality television show that we turn so much of American political life into, a soap opera often dominated by the mouthiest characters rather than the most thoughtful ones.
Last week, in many places, I read what Sarah Palin was saying about Syria, because of course her geopolitical chops are so thoroughly established. A few months back, I read about Donald Trump’s thoughts on possible military intervention, because any debate over strategy in the Middle East naturally calls for his counsel.
They’re both irrelevant, but they’re eyeball bait: ready, reliable clicks. I wonder how long I’ll have to wait before a post on some Web site clues me into Beyoncé’s Syria position. Late Friday, Politico informed the world of Madonna’s. (She’s anti-intervention.)
This type of coverage hasn’t been the dominant one. But plenty of it is creeping in.
Here’s a smattering of headlines, subheads, sentences and phrases from various news organizations last week: “Votes on Syria could have huge ramifications on 2016 contenders”; “Vote puts Republicans mulling 2016 run on the spot”; “Democrats and Republicans are choosing their words carefully, lest they take a hit three years from now”; “the difficult line G.O.P. presidential contenders like Rubio must balance in trying to project a sense of American military might without turning off conservatives skeptical about following Obama’s lead”; “the risk for Paul is if Obama’s prescription for Syria turns out to be a success”; “Mitch McConnell’s muddle”; “Hillary Clinton’s Syria dilemma.”
Some of this rightly illuminates the political dynamics that will influence the final decisions about a military strike that individual members of Congress and the president reach. It’s essential in that regard.
But some merely reflects the penchant that we scribes and pundits have for reducing complicated issues to campaign-style contests and personality-based narratives, especially if those personalities have the stature and thus the marketability of celebrities.
Celebrities get clicks, while the nitty-gritty is a tougher sell. I’ll not soon forget a BuzzFeed post from last February with this headline: “The sequester is terrible for traffic.” It didn’t mean Corollas and Escalades. It meant the number of readers bothering with Web stories on a subject they deemed as dry as they apparently did the federal budget and automatic cuts to spending.
The traffic lament shared the screen with a link to an utterly different style of political feature asking readers to indicate which “presidential hotties” they’d get down and dirty with. The headline on that post? “Sexy U.S. presidents: would you hit it or quit it?” Sex, I guess, brings on rush hour. Maybe presidents do, too. They’re celebrities, even the dead ones.
It’s easy for the media and our consumers to focus on recognizable figures, how they’re faring and what they’re saying (or, better yet, shouting). I even spotted recent reports on what Chris Christie wasn’t saying. They noted that he hasn’t articulated a position on Syria, though that’s unremarkable and appropriate. He isn’t receiving the intelligence that members of Congress are, and he doesn’t get a vote.
He’s not the story, and neither is Paul or Rubio or the rest of them. What matters here are the complicated ethics and unpredictable ripple effects of the profound choice about to be made.
And if we want the men and women making it to be guided by principle, not politics, it surely doesn’t help for journalists to lavish attention on electoral calculations and thereby send our own signal: that we don’t expect, and voters shouldn’t count on, anything nobler. On a question of war and peace, we need nobler. We need the highest ground we can find.
By: Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 7, 2013
“Let’s Be Clear”: The Congressional Resolution On Chemical Weapons Is Completely Different From The Iraq War Resolution
There has been a lot said in the last week comparing the Congressional resolution authorizing the use of force to punish Bashar al Assad’s government for using chemical weapons to the resolution authorizing the Iraq War. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As an ardent opponent of the Iraq War resolution, I am proud to say that 60 percent of the Democrats in the House of Representatives voted against authorizing the Iraq War. Today, I support the resolution authorizing force to sanction the use of chemical weapons in Syria.
There are five major differences between the current resolution and the one that authorized the Iraq War:
1). The President is asking for a narrow authorization that the U.S. exact a near-term military price for Assad’s use of chemical weapons. He is not asking for a declaration of War – which is exactly what George Bush asked from Congress in Iraq.
George Bush sent thousands of U.S. troops to overthrow the government and then occupy Iraq. He spent what will ultimately be trillions of dollars to overthrow the Iraqi regime and then conduct a 10-year campaign to pacify the country.
The President’s proposal to Congress is not intended to overthrow the government of Syria. And it certainly does not involve conducting an American war against Syria. This is not an action that the President would have contemplated absent the use of chemical weapons. This resolution is intended entirely to make the Assad regime pay a price for their violation of a 100-year international consensus that the use of chemical weapons is unacceptable in the civilized world.
Some have argued that killing people with chemical weapons is no worse than killing them with a gun or a bomb. Both are horrible. But the difference that created a worldwide consensus against their use is that they are weapons of mass destruction. Like biological and nuclear weapons they are distinguished by two characteristics that would make their regular use much more dangerous for the future of humanity than guns and bombs:
- They can kill massive numbers of people very quickly.
- They are completely indiscriminate. They kill everything in their path. They do not discriminate between combatant and non-combatants — between children and adults.
Those two characteristics make weapons of mass destruction different from other weapons. In the interest of our survival as a species we must make the use of all weapons of mass destruction unthinkable. That must be one of humanity’s chief goals if it is to survive into the next century.
There has been talk about “other options” to punish Assad and deter him from using chemical weapons in the future. But the fact is that the only price that matters to Assad — or to anyone who is in the midst of a military struggle — is a military price.
There is a worldwide consensus that no matter how desperate someone’s military situation, the use of chemical weapons in specific — and weapons of mass destruction in general — is never justified.
When combatants are in the midst of a military struggle, they don’t really care about their “reputation” or even the economy of their country. They care about their military situation.
That is not true of countries like Iran or any other country that is not at war. Economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure are important levers on most countries and governments — but not governments in the midst of military battles that threaten their survival.
As a result, to reduce the likelihood that an actor like Assad will use chemical weapons again, he has to experience a military sanction — the degradation of his military capacity — because at the moment, that’s all he cares about. I’m sure Assad would be happy to worry about whether he is indicted by the International Criminal Court, or the state of the Syrian economy at some time in the distant future. Right now he cares about his military capacity.
If we do nothing, the odds massively increase that he will use chemical weapons again, because he knows that they work to kill huge numbers of his opponents — and that he can do so with impunity. That would be a disastrous setback for humanity’s critical priority of banning the use of weapons of mass destruction — weapons that could easily threaten our very existence.
2). The resolution on chemical weapons explicitly limits the authorization to 90 days. The resolution on Iraq was unlimited — and resulted in a conflict lasting over a decade.
Opponents have questioned whether short-term air strikes could be effective at substantially degrading Assad’s chemical weapons infrastructure. There is no guarantee. But there is some precedent for believing they can. As Walter Pincus wrote in today’s Washington Post:
…the precedent worth recalling is Operation Desert Fox in December 1998, in which the Clinton Administration went after Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s facilities for weapons of mass destruction over four days.
Although the operation almost immediately faded from the American public’s mind because it was followed quickly by the House impeachment debate, it did destroy Iraq’s WMD infrastructure, as the Bush administration later discovered.
3). The resolution on Iraq was based on faulty — actually fabricated — intelligence about the supposed presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Those “intelligence” assessments turned out to be totally untrue — much of it manufactured.
The resolution on chemical weapons is not based on anyone’s estimate of the likelihood that Assad has weapons of mass destruction. It is based on their actual use — recorded and widely distributed on video — and intercepts that document the orders for their deployment.
4). The Iraq War Resolution involved the commitment of American troops — on the ground — where thousands of them died and thousands more were maimed. This resolution explicitly precludes American troops on the ground in Syria.
5). President George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their entire team wanted to invade Iraq. The Neocons desperately wanted to finish what they started with Desert Storm. They had an imperial vision of America’s role in the world that involved American domination of the Middle East through the projection of military power. That vision turned into the nightmare in Iraq. Iraq became one of the great foreign policy disasters of all time.
President Obama and his team have exactly the opposite goal. The team is composed of people who opposed the War in Iraq — and the Neocon world-view — including the President who was against the War in Iraq from the first day.
He has been very explicit that his aim is to end America’s wars in the Middle East — not to begin another.
Bush and his team used the false specter that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — and was behind the 9/11 attacks — to drive America into a war that had nothing to do with either.
On the contrary, President Obama is motivated entirely by his goal of enforcing the international consensus against using chemical weapons — not starting a war. In fact, he has done everything in his power for two years to avoid America’s military involvement in the Syrian civil war.
Some have argued that those who opposed the Iraq War Resolution, but support the President’s proposal, would have opposed a similar resolution if it had been presented by George Bush. And the answer is yes, that is clearly a factor. The motivations and world-view of the people you are empowering to use military force should matter a great deal. The fact is that while Bush and the Neocons might have tried to use a resolution to start a long war — the Obama team will not.
Progressives may differ on whether using military action to sanction Assad is the correct course of action for the United States. But the argument that Obama’s proposal to use military means to sanction the use of chemical weapons by Assad is analogous to the Bush’s rush to war in Iraq is just plain wrong.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post, September 5, 2013
“The Bush Burden”: Draped Over Congress Like Scrooge’s Ghost
He’s there in every corner of Congress where a microphone fronts a politician, there in Russia and the British Parliament and the Vatican. You may think George W. Bush is at home in his bathtub, painting pictures of his toenails, but in fact he’s the biggest presence in the debate over what to do in Syria.
His legacy is paralysis, hypocrisy and uncertainty practiced in varying degrees by those who want to learn from history and those who deny it. Let’s grant some validity to the waffling, though none of it is coming from the architects of the worst global fiasco in a generation.
Time should not soften what President George W. Bush, and his apologists, did in an eight-year war costing the United States more than a trillion dollars, 4,400 American soldiers dead and the displacement of two million Iraqis. The years should not gauze over how the world was conned into an awful conflict. History should hold him accountable for the current muddy debate over what to do in the face of a state-sanctioned mass killer.
Blame Bush? Of course, President Obama has to lead; it’s his superpower now, his armies to move, his stage. But the prior president gave every world leader, every member of Congress a reason to keep the dogs of war on a leash. The isolationists in the Republican Party are a direct result of the Bush foreign policy. 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. And for the nearly 200 members of both houses of Congress who voted on the Iraq war in 2002 and are still in office and facing a vote this month, Bush shadows them like Scrooge’s ghost.
In reading “Lawrence in Arabia,” Scott Anderson’s terrific new biography of one outsider who truly understood the tribal and religious conflicts of a region that continues to rile the world, you’re struck by how a big blunder can have a titanic domino effect. The consequences of World War I, which started 100 years ago next year, are with us still — particularly the spectacularly bad decisions made by European powers in drawing artificial boundaries in the Mideast. Syria and Iraq are prime examples.
Until the Syrian crises came to a head, we had yet to see just how much the Bush fiasco in Iraq would sway world opinion. We know now that his war will haunt the globe for decades to come. Future presidents who were in diapers when the United States said with doubtless authority that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction will face critics quoting Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney with never-again scorn.
The parallels are imprecise and many degrees apart: Iraq was a full-scale invasion, Syria is a punishment. But there it is — the Bush hangover, felt by all.
At the least, when the main cheerleaders for the last war talk about what to do now, they should be relegated to a rubber room reserved for Bernie Madoff discussing financial ethics or Alex Rodriguez on cheating in baseball.
Rumsfeld has been all over the airwaves with fussy distinctions about this war and his, faulting Obama for going to Congress for approval to strike. Like the man he served in office, he shows not a hint of regret or evidence that he’s learned a thing.
“You either ought to change the regime or you ought to do nothing,” he said this week, as if he were giving fantasy football advice. Calling Obama a weak leader, he said: “Did he need to go to Congress? No. Presidents as commanders in chief have authority, but they have to behave like a commander in chief.” In other words, more swagger, bluster and blind certainty.
Liz Cheney, in a feckless run in Wyoming for the Senate highlighted by a sellout of her own lesbian sister’s right to marry, says she would vote against the resolution to use force in Syria. She’s made a career, such as it is, backing her father’s legacy of waterboarding, nation invading and pillorying supporters of diplomacy before war.
And Senator Marco Rubio, robust defender of the Iraq war, has just cast a no vote on taking action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He did this for one reason: to fend off the Bush-spawned neo-isolationists who will play a big role in the 2016 presidential nomination.
There are people on the public stage who have genuinely agonized over lessons of the Bush disaster. They say, with some conviction, that they will never be fooled again.
But for all of these neocons stuck on the wrong side of history — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, say the names loud and clear — it’s not a change in conscience at work; it’s a change in presidents. Later this month, dozens of Republicans in Congress will make the same decision, simply because they hate Obama, and would oppose him if he declared Grandmother Appreciation Day.
The voice that stands out most by his silence, the one that grates with its public coyness, is Bush himself. He has refused to take a side in the Syrian conflict. The president, he said, “has a tough choice to make.” Beyond that, “I refuse to be roped in.”
This is cowardice on a grand scale. Having set in motion a doctrine that touches all corners of the earth and influences every leader with a say in how to approach tyrants who slaughter innocents, Bush retreats to his bathtub to paint.
By: Timothy Egan, The New York Times, September 5, 2013
“It’s Always Morning In America”: Republicans, Before Talking About Reagan And Chemical Weapons, Don’t Forget Actual History
Reagan worship in Republican politics reaches unhealthy levels from time to time — “Ronaldus Magnus,” for example — though it’s generally the result of Reagan fans not remembering the 40th president nearly as well as they think they do.
A few years ago, for example, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia was the result of Reagan’s historic leadership. That didn’t make any sense at all — the Prague Spring happened in 1968.
Or take today’s example, from Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the former chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“It is against the norms of international standards and to let something like this go unanswered, I think will weaken our resolve. I — I know that President Reagan would have never let this happen. He would stand up to this. And President Obama — the only reason he is consulting with Congress, he wants to blame somebody for his lack of resolve. We have to think like President Reagan would do and he would say chemical use is unacceptable.”
Look, I realize the 1980s seems like a long time ago, and on Capitol Hill, memories are short. But if prominent members of Congress are going to talk about Reagan and the use of chemical weapons, at a bare minimum, they should have some rudimentary understanding of how Reagan approached the use of chemical weapons.
So long as saying unpleasant-but-true things about Reagan is still legal, let’s set the record straight.
The Reagan administration was, of course, quite ambitious when it came to foreign policy and national security. For example, Reagan invaded Grenada without telling Congress he intended to do so; he bombed Libya without congressional approval or consultation; and he illegally sold over 1,000 missiles to Iran to finance an illegal war in Nicaragua.
And as Heyes Brown explained, Reagan also did largely the opposite of what Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen said he did with regards to the use of chemical weapons.
For the majority of the 1980s, Iraq under Sadaam Hussein was locked in combat with the Islamic Republic of Iran in a war that killed more than 100,000 people on both sides. The United States explicitly backed the secular Hussein over the Ayatollah Khomeini’s government in Tehran, still smarting from the embassy hostage crisis that had only ended when Reagan took office. That backing not only included the shipment of tons of weapons to support Baghdad, but also looking the other way when Iraq unleashed its chemical weapons stockpiles — including sarin and mustard gas — against Iranian civilians and soldiers alike.
Recently declassified documents from that time indicate that not only did the U.S. government know that Hussein possessed these weapons, but “conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein’s military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin.” President Reagan also remained silent during the Al-Anfal campaign, in which Hussein used poison gas against the Kurdish population in Northern Iraq to put down a revolt against his rule. In what has later been called a genocide, more than 100,000 men, women, and children were killed, nearly 100 times more than the attack that took place outside of Damascus last month.
Indeed, after Saddam Hussein gassed his own people, Reagan dispatched … wait for it … Donald Rumsfeld to help solidify the relationship between the Reagan administration and the brutal, murderous Iraqi dictator. Rumsfeld gladly shook hands with Hussein after he used chemical weapons to kill Iraqi dissidents.
Perhaps someone can let Rep. Ros-Lehtinen know.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 5, 2013
“Insincere Symbolism”: The Stakes In What Happens Next Are Not Necessarily Greater Than The Lives Immediately Affected
Regardless of one’s position on a hypothetical U.S. military strike on Syria, it’s rather important to recognize that a lot of the highfalutin talk about Obama setting some terrible or wonderful precedent–or about the acceptance or rejection of his position by Congress or this or that subset of the international community determining the ultimate fate of his presidency–disguises some very petty motives and/or very fixed loyalties and antipathies. Kevin Drum nails it today:
[I]t’s almost as if the only thing anyone really cares about is their own narrow parochial interest. Enforcing a century-old ban against the use of chemical weapons may sound high-minded in the abstract, but down on the ground there’s virtually no one who (a) actually cares about that and (b) would view a U.S. strike through that lens. You’re for it because you’re a Democrat or a Sunni or an Israeli or a member of the rebel army. You’re against it if you’re a Republican or a Shiite or an Egyptian or Vladimir Putin. Hardly anyone truly cares about American credibility or international norms or foreign policy doctrines or any of the other usual talking points. They’ve just chosen sides, that’s all.
Regardless of your own personal view on a Syrian strike, you should keep this in mind. Your motivations—either for or against a strike—might be entirely virtuous, but there’s very little virtue among the actors whose opinions actually matter. The lesson you think will be sent by either restraint or action is probably not the lesson the rest of the world will take from it.
I’d go further and say that those who have “chosen sides” for “parochial interests” have every reason to inflate their own motives into great matters of philosophy, law, geopolitics and morality. It’s all the more reason to stand guard against claims that the stakes in what happens next are much greater than the lives immediately affected–which ought to be more than high enough to ensure grave reflection.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Editor, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 2, 2013
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