HOW LONG MUST SYRIANS WAIT?
Richard Cohen
Washington Post, April 30, 2012
…Few people in Washington have much faith in the U.N.’s [Syria peace] plan, advanced by former secretary-general Kofi Annan. He has been doing what he has been trained to do—go through the motions of peacemaking.… Yet as each ticket is punched, more people die.
Time is not on the side of moderation or accommodation. The longer the killing goes on, the more radical and extreme the anti-Assad forces become. The intelligentsia that initially supported the movement will be marginalized by Islamic extremists.… Already, bombings have been reported, [including twin suicide car bombs that were detonated outside of Syrian intelligence headquarters last Wednesday, killing 55 and wounding nearly 400.…]
Those of us who have long advocated that the United States put some muscle into its diplomacy—even bomb Syrian military installations and impose a no-fly zone—have to concede the difficulties entailed. The Syrian air-defense system is thick, designed by the Russians to deter an Israeli attack. The composition of the Syrian opposition is largely unknown (to quote Butch Cassidy: “Who are those guys?”). More worrisome, Syria has a vast stockpile of chemical and biological weapons. The weapons have not been used…but a regime fighting for its life may well use everything at its disposal. Saddam did against the Kurds.
Still, none of this is insurmountable. Israel was able to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007 apparently without losing a single airplane.… What’s missing at the moment is not the wherewithal to deal militarily with the Assad regime but the will to do so—and to do so expeditiously. This is a matter of leadership and, so far, [US President] Barack Obama has provided precious little.
In “Prague Winter,” her compelling new memoir, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright emphasizes the importance of leadership—or its lack—in world affairs. As a woman, she is the Czechoslovakian-born daughter of Josef Korbel and Anna Spiegelova. As a diplomat, she is a daughter of Munich, the infamous agreement that turned part of her country over to Nazi Germany. She rebuts Tolstoy, “who argued that scholars routinely exaggerate the ability of the great and powerful to control events,” by citing the weak and vacillating leaders who failed to recognize evil and stand up to Hitler. They were accessories before the fact, changing history by inaction.
The Munich analogy can be overdone…[and] the supposed antidote to Munich, Vietnam, can also be overdone. Not every military action is a quagmire—and, anyway, quagmires can be avoided by using air power. The military interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Libya did not require boots on the ground. They ended when they were finished—a brilliant exit strategy.
The Syrian revolution is going to spiral into something awful. The longer it lasts, the more people die and the greater the chance of it spilling across borders. The plan, as it is now, is to wait for the inevitable—the failure of Kofi Annan and, after that, the predictable failure of an arms embargo that will weaken the opposition much more than it will Assad. Somehow, multiple failures are supposed to lead to success. That’s worse than Munich. It’s madness.
A SHAMEFUL IMPASSE ON SYRIA
Editorial
Washington Post, May 10, 2012
The Obama administration has reached an ignominious impasse on Syria. Administration spokesmen now publicly recognize that the United Nations diplomatic initiative it has backed for the past seven weeks has been a failure. They acknowledge—as they should have long ago—that Syrian President Bashar Assad has no intention of ending violence against his opposition, or meeting any other condition of the “Annan plan.”
Yet President Obama refuses to embrace other options. His administration’s strategy is one of militant passivity: Officials say they are waiting for U.N. envoy Kofi Annan to agree with them that his diplomacy has failed, and to say so to the U.N. Security Council. They are waiting for the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin, which has been pummeling its own pro-democracy movement in the streets of Moscow, to be shamed into abandoning its support for the Assad dictatorship. And they are waiting for the Syrian opposition—which is either in exile or under relentless assault from tanks and artillery—to metamorphose into a coherent alternative with detailed plans for governance.
This strategy will allow Mr. Assad to go on killing indefinitely. Mr. Annan, after all, describes his plan as the only alternative to a Syrian civil war, so he is unlikely to abandon it any time soon. The Russians don’t sound at all shamed: “Things are moving in a positive direction,” Moscow’s U.N. ambassador Vitaly Churkin chirped [last] Tuesday. The Syrian opposition, like any beleaguered resistance to a murderous dictatorship, can be counted on not to reach the high bar set by disdainful desk officers at the State Department.
More than 1,000 men, women and children have died since Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, declared the Annan plan “the best way to end the violence.” But the consequences of U.S. passivity go beyond loss of innocent Syrian life. The prolongation of the conflict poses serious threats to U.S. interests and allies.
Three nascent or foreseeable developments stand out. One is that what began as a secular, peaceful and pro-democracy movement in Syria will degenerate into a sectarian war in which the majority Sunni community targets Mr. Assad’s minority Alawites, while Kurds, Christians and other minorities are caught in the middle. In several parts of the country, including the cities of Homs and Hama, that already has happened.
A second danger is that al-Qaeda and other Sunni extremist movements will take advantage of the chaos.… Jihadists have flowed into Syria from Iraq and Jordan, and operatives linked to al-Qaeda are believed to have carried out a series of bombings in the last five months.…
The third and most grave threat is that sectarian war in Syria will jump across borders. Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey all have the same divides among Shiite and Sunni sects; Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has said Syria’s fighting could spread “like a house on fire.” Once that happens, outside intervention by the United States would be impossible and the damage uncontainable.
The administration’s experts on Syria recognize the danger. Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey D. Feltman told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “it’s one of the reasons why I said our policy is to try to accelerate the arrival of that tipping point” at which Mr. Assad falls. “The longer this goes on, the higher the risks of long-term sectarian conflict, the higher the risk of extremism. So we want to see this happen earlier,” Mr. Feltman said. That testimony was delivered on March 1.
OBAMA HITS SYRIA WITH BRUTAL BLAST OF ADVERBS
Jeffrey Goldberg
Bloomberg, May 7, 2012
The crackdown by Syrian dictator Bashar Assad against his own citizens counts as one of the most blood-soaked acts of political repression in the Middle East since his father and predecessor, Hafez Assad, waged his own onslaught against anti-regime activists three decades ago. Almost 10,000 people have died in the current Syrian uprising, and each passing day brings the killing and torture of more civilians, including many children.
Some critics say the U.S. has shamed itself by not intervening aggressively on behalf of Syria’s rebels and dissidents. They’re wrong. The Obama administration hasn’t helped to arm the rebels, nor has it created safe havens for persecuted dissidents. But it has done something far more important: It has provided the Syrian opposition with very strong language to describe Assad’s various atrocities.
The administration’s unprecedented verbal and written sorties against the Assad regime have included some of the most powerful adjectives, adjectival intensifiers and adverbs ever aimed at an American foe. This campaign has helped Syrians understand, among other things, that the English language contains many synonyms for “repulsive.”
But a crisis is fast approaching: America’s stockpile of vivid adjectives is being depleted rapidly. Some linguists of the realist camp are now arguing for restraint in the use of condemnatory word combinations. They note that the administration, in its effort to shock and awe the Assad regime with the power of its official statements and the stridency of its State Department briefings, has prematurely stripped bare its thesaurus, leaving the U.S. powerless to come to the symbolic aid of the Syrian people.
When the uprising began last year, the Obama administration clearly hoped that softer language would persuade Assad to cease murdering Syrians. It relied on traditional formulations of diplomatic distaste, calling on Syria to “exercise restraint” and “respect the rights of its citizens.”
When it became clear that mild criticism wouldn’t stay Assad’s hand, the administration began carpet-bombing Damascus with powerful sentences and, at times, whole paragraphs. In April 2011, shortly after Syrian security forces killed more than 80 unarmed demonstrators, President Barack Obama said, “This outrageous use of violence to quell protests must come to an end now.” He accused the Syrian government of using “brutal” tactics against civilians. Somehow, such combative words still didn’t persuade Assad to change course.…
A few months later, shortly after the Syrian government killed more than 30 people in the city of Latakia, Obama reached into the arsenal again and said the people of Syria had “braved ferocious brutality at the hands of their government.” This onslaught, Obama said, was “disgraceful.” The White House appeared surprised when Assad nevertheless chose not to flee Damascus.
So the administration upped the ante. In the months that followed, [White House Press Secretary Jay] Carney said the war waged on the Syrian people was both “heinous” and “unforgivable.” He wasn’t alone. Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, became a point person in deploying the full might of the American thesaurus. On Nov. 28, Rice accused Assad of perpetrating “outrageous and now well-documented atrocities,” and noted that the “patience” of the international community had “evaporated.” On Feb. 7, she reported Assad was now “off the reservation.”
On Feb. 9, Rice said the world was “horrified to watch the violence” in Syria. On Feb. 23, she said the Syrian government “has accelerated the killing of its people,” and the violence “has continued unabated for nearly a year at a breathtaking scale.” On April 2, she spoke of Assad’s “massive intensification of violence.” She also said she expected the Syrian government would implement a UN-negotiated cease-fire “without any conditions or codicils.” (The word “codicil” is known to strike fear in the hearts of dictators.) Rice later said “a moment of truth” was coming up “very soon.” It is hard to imagine the Assad regime can take such punishment much longer.…
Still more action may be needed. At the risk of deepening U.S. involvement in this very complicated conflict, my suggestion is that Obama and his team conduct a “surge” of new adjectives and adverbs in their campaign, including such words as “callous,” “merciless,” “pitiless”—and even, perhaps, “barbarous.” The optimist in me believes that the White House wouldn’t have to maintain this surge for too long. Why? Because several months after saying that the patience of the international community had “evaporated,” Rice wrote on Twitter that our patience had been “exhausted.” Now that patience has been both evaporated and exhausted, even Assad must understand that his time is nearly up.
Of course, Rice reported that patience had been exhausted on April 24. My suspicion is that, in three or four more weeks, we will learn that U.S. patience is “completely exhausted.” Then Assad should really be careful.
IF OBAMA’S RHETORIC ON SYRIA IS A JOKE,
WHY TRUST HIM ON IRAN?
Jonathan S. Tobin
Contentions, May 8, 2012
On most issues, Jeffrey Goldberg has been a dependable cheerleader for the Obama administration. But the president’s feckless stand on the ongoing slaughter in Syria has caused Goldberg to write one of the best takedowns of the president’s inaction.… [Yet] one wonders why the author of this wonderful riff on Obama’s meaningless tough talk on Syria thinks the president’s equally meaningless verbal assault on Iran is credible?
This is, after all, the same Jeffrey Goldberg who has consistently sought to assure friends of Israel that President Obama’s stance on Iran is more than mere rhetoric though, in fact, it has consisted of little but a collection of ominous adverbs punctuated by defenses of engagement and diplomacy since he took office. Granted the president has reluctantly embraced sanctions on Iran (though he was way behind France and Britain on this score), but it is fairly obvious that he did so only to maneuver Israel into a situation where it could not attack the Islamist regime on its own.
Goldberg rightly dismisses the notion that Obama’s rhetoric about Syria consists of anything more than lip service, yet he believes Obama can be trusted to eventually escalate his stance on the Islamist ayatollahs from rhetoric to action. When people wonder why many in Israel have little faith in the president’s word on Iran…perhaps we should refer them to Goldberg’s column on the administration’s verbal offensive against Assad.
A DISGRACE IN THE MAKING
Barry Rubin
Jerusalem Post, May 6, 2012
US policy toward Syria is turning into a scandal on both strategic and humanitarian grounds. The next three months will be wasted in a toothless observer effort during which time the Syrian regime will go on massacring people and mopping up the rebellion. In addition, US policymakers admit that they have no real back-up policy or idea what they should do next.
And then, to show how ridiculous the whole thing is, Syrian troops [recently] opened fire at oppositionists trying to talk to the UN monitors, forcing the observers to flee for their lives and injuring eight demonstrators. The UN responds by proposing a few dozen more equally helpless observers.
This is the same UN that in 2006 promised Israel that it would intercept Syrian weapons being smuggled to Hezbollah in Lebanon and stop that radical group from reoccupying its pre-war positions in the south of the country. In six years, not a single weapon has been intercepted and not a single Hezbollah terrorist stopped.…
There should be no question as to what should be done. Along with Iran, North Korea and Cuba, the Syrian regime is the most anti-American government in the world. It has done everything possible to sabotage US interests, to sponsor terrorism and to block peace. The Syrian regime is also Iran’s main ally. Any conceivable president who cared about or understood US interests would make the overthrow of the Syrian regime a top priority for the United States. I’m not talking about sending troops or going to war but about every other means. This should be blindingly obvious.
In addition, any competent president would work hard to help the moderate pro-democratic forces in the Syrian opposition so that they can gain power in the country. Instead, the Obama administration that subcontracted dealing with the Syrian regime to the UN has subcontracted dealing with the Syrian opposition to the Islamist regime in Turkey. Not surprisingly, the Turkish regime has pushed Muslim Brothers and other Islamists and their clients into the “official” leadership of the Syrian opposition, the Syrian National Council. This has led to a fracturing of opposition leadership.
And the Syrian regime is being rewarded with no more pressure and being given the ability to stall for time even though it has already violated the cease-fire. This is not merely a bad US and Western policy; it is the worst possible policy, lacking any strategy to undermine the radicals and help the moderates.
After two-and-a-half years of the Obama administration treating [Assad] as a friend we have seen almost a year of dithering over the opportunity to get rid of the regime. It is like when the administration ignored the stealing of the election in Iran and the opposition movement there, as if it wanted to coddle, not confound, the Tehran regime. It also came to the rescue of the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip, pressing Israel to minimize sanctions.
In contrast, the administration has not hesitated to overthrow an ally in Egypt, and came close to doing that in Bahrain. The pattern is that the radical side breaks every agreement, rejects compromise and escalates aggression and the Obama administration takes it all with a smile on its face and a song in its heart.… US foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, is hopelessly bankrupt.
