COTLER’S PLEA ON SYRIA
Editorial
Jerusalem Post, February 5, 2012
The international community has justifiably expressed outrage over Saturday’s veto by Russia and China of a UN Security Council resolution demanding that Syrian President Bashar Assad step down.…
The internationally respected jurist, Prof. Irwin Cotler, visited The Jerusalem Post [last] Sunday…to make an impassioned appeal for his own country, Canada, and other like-minded states to press Moscow and Beijing to rethink their positions on Syria.…
“This has been scandalous behavior by Russia, not only vetoing the Security Council resolution, but in fact continuing to supply arms to Assad.… In other words, to be complicit in the killings,” [Cotler affirmed].…
Asked what the best outcome would be for Israel, Cotler said: “I don’t know what will be better or worse—that’s speculation. I do know that the carnage should not be allowed to continue. The killing and the cruelty and the torture are not abating.…”
For the sake of the Syrian people—and the stability of the region—we can only echo Cotler’s plea for Russia and China to change their minds and join the international consensus against the atrocities of the Assad regime.
OBAMA FALLS INTO A U.N. TRAP
Editorial
Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2012
Remember when the United Nations was going to be the new global venue for “collective security”? The place where the Obama Administration’s faith in diplomacy and willingness to lead from behind would pay off in world solidarity against dictators and thugs? So much for that. On Saturday, Russia and China vetoed a U.S.-backed Security Council resolution supporting an Arab League plan to ease Syria’s Bashar Assad from power.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice now says she’s “disgusted.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the veto “a travesty” and struck a note of unilateralism that would make Dick Cheney proud: “Faced with a neutered Security Council, we have to redouble our efforts outside of the United Nations with those allies and partners who support the Syrian people’s right to have a better future.” She added that “Assad must go.” Coalition of the willing, anyone?
The surprise is that the U.S. should be so surprised. Moscow had been signaling for weeks that it would protect its client in Damascus even as Mr. Assad added to his death toll, now at more than [6],000. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has defended Russian arms sales to Syria and ruled out any new U.N. moves. This week he plans a solo “peace mission” to Damascus that looks like a transparent attempt to buy Mr. Assad more time for killing.
This is what happens when a U.S. Administration sees the world as it would like it to be, not the way it is. The White House apparently believed its own spin that last year’s Libyan operation signaled a brave new multilateral era. But Russia abstained on that U.N. resolution, and strongman Vladimir Putin raged that he had been duped when NATO used the resolution to claim the authority to oust Moammar Gadhafi. The Libyan mission succeeded after much needless delay only because the U.S. military provided most of the firepower behind a NATO and Arab facade.
Russia doesn’t count for much anymore in world affairs, but it does retain its U.N. veto. Mr. Putin has his own domestic upheavals to consider as he seeks to become president again, and he isn’t about to set a precedent for U.N. intervention against a bloody-minded ally. Ditto for the Chinese. The American folly is in giving the U.N. any ability to stop an anti-Assad coalition that includes the Turks, all of non-Russian Europe, the U.S. and the Arab world.…
Syria is a good test of President Obama’s foreign policy. He has put the credibility of his office on the line by declaring that Syria’s tyrant must leave. With each week of Mr. Assad’s brutality, the cost in lives and the odds of civil war will continue to rise unless Mr. Obama does more than bow before the false moral authority of the U.N.
THE LAST BATTLE OF THE COLD WAR
Fouad Ajami
Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2012
Afghanistan was once thought of as the last battle of the Cold War. But that designation must be accorded the ongoing struggle in Syria.
The late dictator Hafez Assad built his tyrannical regime in the image of the late Soviet Union. He usurped power in his own country four decades ago, when the power of the USSR was on the rise. His armies and factories were in the Soviet mold, as were his feared intelligence services. The Treaty of Brotherhood, Cooperation, and Coordination Hafez Assad forced on the hapless Lebanese in 1991 was vintage Warsaw Pact.
History hasn’t altered much: Now Hafez’s son, Bashar, in a big battle to defend his father’s bequest, has Vladimir Putin’s Russian autocracy by his side. The Soviet empire has fallen, but there, by the Mediterranean coast, a Syrian tyranny gives Russia the old sense that it still is a great power.
Time and again at the United Nations, Moscow has declared the sovereignty of the Assad regime a “red line”—and stated that it would veto any resolution in the Security Council that would put it in jeopardy. True, Beijing also has gone along for the ride, so fervent a believer is China in the unfettered claims of national sovereignty—the rulers there forever thinking of their hold on Tibet. But China has paltry interests in Damascus.… No such luck with the Russian Federation.… Mr. Putin is invested in Syria, as well as in other dictators in the region.
There are philosophical and ideological stakes at work here. Mr. Putin has ridden the windfall of oil and gas revenues for a good decade, buying off the middle classes, tranquilizing his country, and justifying his authoritarianism at home as the price of restoration of grandeur and power abroad. But the middle classes have turned against him. And former supporters have grown weary of his Mafia state, with its rampant criminality and cronyism. And so when Russians took to the streets to protest the rigged elections to the Duma of Dec. 4, Mr. Putin’s response to the fury was identical to that of the Arab rulers when faced with the protesters of the Arab Spring.
There was something familiar and repetitive about Mr. Putin’s paranoia—his dark view of the world, the insistence that the Russian protests had been instigated by foreign conspirators. The campaign of vilification waged against U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul—the charge that he had been dispatched to Russia to subvert its political system—bore a striking resemblance to the Syrian charge that U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford had fed the flames of the Syrian rebellion.
The sun has set on the Soviet empire, but Mr. Putin stands guard, with a “philosophy” of his own—order secured by a strongman.… Syria feeds another Russian obsession: Islam. If the Chinese see Tibet everywhere, the Russians are fixated on Chechnya. In the Syrian inferno, the Russians see a secular tyranny at war with radical Islamists, and thus see in Syria a reflection of themselves.… Old military considerations also endure. Syria offers Russia a Mediterranean naval base at Tartus, a city in the territory of the ruling Alawis at that.…
The powers that be in NATO—neighboring Turkey included—have not been terribly coherent in dealing with this Syrian crisis. They show little taste for a military offensive that would topple the Syrian dictatorship. An American president proud to have ended an engagement in Iraq is not itching for a war of his own in Araby. The United Nations offers no way out.… Both the regime and the oppositionists who have paid so dearly in this cruel struggle are betting that time is on their side.
(Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.)
SYRIA: IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT FREEDOM
Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post, February 2, 2012
Imperial regimes can crack when they are driven out of their major foreign outposts. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not only signal the liberation of Eastern Europe from Moscow. It prefigured the collapse of the Soviet Union itself just two years later.
The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria could be similarly ominous for Iran. The alliance with Syria is the centerpiece of Iran’s expanding sphere of influence, a mini-Comintern that includes such clients as Iranian-armed and -directed Hezbollah, now the dominant power in Lebanon; and Hamas, which controls Gaza.… Additionally, Iran exerts growing pressure on Afghanistan to the east and growing influence in Iraq to the west. Tehran has even extended its horizon to Latin America, as symbolized by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s solidarity tour through Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Cuba.
Of all these clients, Syria is the most important. It’s the only Arab state openly allied with non-Arab Iran. This is significant because the Arabs see the Persians as having had centuries-old designs to dominate the Middle East. Indeed, Iranian arms and trainers, trans-shipped to Hezbollah through Syria, have given the Persians their first outpost on the Mediterranean in 2,300 years.
But the Arab-Iranian divide is not just national/ethnic. It is sectarian. The Arabs are overwhelmingly Sunni. Iran is Shiite. The Arab states fear Shiite Iran infiltrating the Sunni homeland through (apart from Iraq) Hezbollah in Lebanon, and through Syria, run by Assad’s Alawites, a heterodox offshoot of Shiite Islam.
Which is why the fate of the Assad regime is geopolitically crucial. It is, of course, highly significant for reasons of democracy and human rights as well. Syrian Baathism…runs a ruthless police state that once killed 20,000 in Hama and has now killed more than [6,000] during the current uprising. Human rights—decency—is reason enough to do everything we can to bring down Assad.
But strategic opportunity compounds the urgency. With its archipelago of clients anchored by Syria, Iran is today the greatest regional threat—to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states terrified of Iranian nuclear hegemony; to traditional regimes menaced by Iranian jihadist subversion; to Israel, which the Islamic Republic has pledged to annihilate; to America and the West, whom the mullahs have vowed to drive from the region.
No surprise that the Arab League, many of whose members are no tender-hearted humanitarians, is pressing hard for Assad’s departure. His fall would deprive Iran of an intra-Arab staging area and sever its corridor to the Mediterranean. Syria would return to the Sunni fold. Hezbollah, Tehran’s agent in Lebanon, could be next, withering on the vine without Syrian support and Iranian materiel. And Hamas would revert to Egyptian patronage.
At the end of this causal chain, Iran, shorn of key allies and already reeling from economic sanctions over its nuclear program, would be thrown back on its heels. The mullahs are already shaky enough to be making near-suicidal threats of blocking the Strait of Hormuz. The population they put down in the 2009 Green Revolution is still seething. The regime is particularly reviled by the young. And its increasing attempts to shore up Assad financially and militarily have only compounded anti-Iranian feeling in the region.
It’s not just the Sunni Arabs lining up against Assad. Turkey, after a recent flirtation with a Syrian-Iranian-Turkish entente, has turned firmly against Assad, seeing an opportunity to extend its influence, as in Ottoman days, as protector/master of the Sunni Arabs. The alignment of forces suggests a unique opportunity for the West to help finish the job.…
How? First, a total boycott of Syria, beyond just oil and including a full arms embargo. Second, a flood of aid to the resistance (through Turkey, which harbors both rebel militias and the political opposition, or directly and clandestinely into Syria).… Make clear American solidarity with the [coalition of countries] against a hegemonic Iran and its tottering Syrian client. In diplomacy, one often has to choose between human rights and strategic advantage. This is a rare case where we can advance both—so long as we do not compromise with Russia or relent until Assad falls.
OBAMA’S RHETORICAL STORM
Caroline B. Glick
Jerusalem Post, February 6, 2012
The Obama administration is absolutely furious at Russia and China. The two UN Security Council permanent members’ move to veto a resolution on Syria utterly infuriated the US’s President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice. And they want us all to know just how piping mad they really are.
Rice called the vetoes “unforgivable,” and said that “any further blood that flows will be on their hands.” She said the US was “disgusted.” Clinton called the move by Moscow and Beijing a “travesty.…” The rhetoric employed by Obama’s top officials is striking for what it reveals about how the Obama administration perceives the purpose of rhetoric in foreign policy.
Most US leaders have used rhetoric to explain their policies. But if you take the Obama administration’s statements at face value you are left scratching your head in wonder. Specifically on Syria, if you take these statements literally, you are left wondering if Obama and his advisers are simply clueless. Because if they are serious, their indignation bespeaks a remarkable ignorance about how decisions are made at the Security Council.
Is it possible that Obama believed that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would betray Bashar Assad, his most important strategic ally in the Middle East? Is it possible that he believed that the same Chinese regime that systematically tramples the human rights of its people would agree to intervene in another country’s domestic affairs? Outside the intellectual universe of the Obama administration—where stalwart US allies such as Hosni Mubarak are discarded like garbage and foes such as Hugo Chavez are wooed like Hollywood celebrities—national governments tend to base their foreign policies on their national interests.…
In fact, it is impossible to believe that the administration was unaware that its plan to pass a Security Council resolution opposing Assad’s massacre of his people—and so jeopardize Russian and Chinese interests—had no chance of success.…
We have two pieces of evidence to support th[is] view.… First, for the past 10 months, as Assad’s killing machine kicked into gear, Obama and his advisers have been happy to sit on their hands. They supported Turkey’s feckless diplomatic engagement with Assad. They sat back as Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayep Erdogan employed the IHH, his regime-allied terror group, to oversee the organization of a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition. Second, the administration supported the Arab League’s farcical inspectors’ mission to Syria. That mission was led by Sudanese Gen. Muhammad al- Dabi. Dabi reportedly was one of the architects of the genocide in Darfur. Clearly, a mission under his leadership had no chance of accomplishing anything useful. And indeed, it didn’t.
And so, after nearly a year, the issue of Assad’s butchery of his citizens finally found its way to the Security Council last month. Many in the US expected Obama to use the opportunity to finally do something to stop the killing, just as he and his NATO allies did something to prevent the killing in Libya last year.… Sadly for the people of Syria, who are being shot dead even as they try to bury their families who were shot dead the day before, unlike the situation in Libya, Obama has never had the slightest intention of using his influence to take action against Assad…[so he] opted for diplomatic Kabuki.
Knowing full well that Putin—who is still selling Assad weapons—would veto any resolution, rather than accept that the Security Council is a dead end, Obama had Rice negotiate fecklessly with her Russian counterparts. The resolution that ended up being called to a vote on Saturday was so weak that US Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, issued a statement calling for the administration to veto it. As Ros-Lehtinen put it, the draft resolution “contains no sanctions, no restrictions on weapons transfers, and no calls for Assad to go, but supports the failed Arab League observer mission,” and so isn’t “worth the paper it’s printed on.…”
But instead of vetoing it, the administration backed it to the tilt and then expressed disgust and moral outrage when Russia and China vetoed it. The lesson of this spectacle is that it we must recognize that the Obama administration’s rhetoric hides more than it reveals about the president’s actual policies.
The first place that we should apply this lesson is to the hemorrhage of administration rhetoric about Iran. For the past several weeks we have been treated to massive doses of verbiage from Obama and his senior advisers about Iran. The most notable of these recent statements was Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s conversation with The Washington Post’s David Ignatius last week.
Panetta used Ignatius to communicate two basic messages.… The purpose of the first message is clear enough. Panetta wished to increase pressure on Israel not to take preemptive action against Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The purpose of the second message is also clear. Panetta spoke of the US’s obligation to Israel’s defense in order to remove the justification for an Israeli attack. After all, if the US is obliged to defend it, then Israel mustn’t risk harming US interests by defending itself.…
Since Obama was elected the US has devoted most of its energies not to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but to pressuring Israel not to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And Panetta’s remarks to Ignatius were consistent with this mission.…
We [now] know three things for certain about Iran. It is getting very late in the game for anyone to take any military actions to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Iran will not stop its nuclear weapons program voluntarily. And Obama will not order US forces to take action to stop Iran’s nuclear project.
What remains uncertain still is how Israel plans to respond to these three certainties. The fact that Israel has waited this long to strike presents the disturbing prospect that our leaders may have been confused by the Obama administration’s rhetoric.…
Obama and his deputies use rhetoric not to clarify their intentions, but to obfuscate them. Just as they will do nothing to prevent Assad from continuing his campaign of murder and terror, so they will do nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
