Tag: Syria

A reader writes:

You and Charles Pierce both seem to have done a 180 on the Syria question, and neither of you seems to have explicitly admitted it.  You’ve gone from slamming Obama for being imperial, idealistic, bloodthirsty, foolhardy – and God knows what else – to praising him for his subtlety, nuance, willingness to listen, and so on. Which, fine. But maybe somewhere along the way, you could just throw in a bit of an acknowledgment along the lines of: “Oops, I jumped the gun on this one; I overreacted, got hysterical, and now I see the President doing his characteristic thing – seeing the big picture when others did not.”

I don’t think I’ve done a 180. I remain opposed to any military intervention that could be seen as a way to alter the outcome of the Syrian civil war. I remain of the belief that the Congress should have the final say on any war, large or unbelievably small. Where I have shifted – and this may be a function of being off-grid when this atrocity occurred – is a greater awareness of and concern about the breach of the international norm with respect to chemical weapons. I have acknowledged this shift – here. Money quote:

I have to say I found myself shifting a little – not a lot, but a little – after reading the transcript of the president’s press conference at the end of the G20 Summit.

A better grasp and appreciation of the entire history in this area also affected me. And as this has all shaken out, I see a way to reconcile all these apparently conflicting goals in Russia’s and Syria’s public acknowledgment of the chemical weapons stash and apparent willingness to sign up to the Chemical Weapon Convention. This may turn out to be illusory, or too difficult to accomplish, or some kind of ruse to keep Assad in power for a while longer, but no president would turn such an offer down. If only such an offer had been possible in Iraq in 2003. Another reader wonders if we are “finally hearing the meep meep”:

I’m so glad you have calmed down about Obama on Syria. He is on the verge of accomplishing, without firing a shot, what Bush launched an invasion to do.  Congress is going to get him out of bombing Syria, and yet Obama is going to be able to point to the Republicans and call them the ones who blinked as a dictator massacred his people.  He is re-establishing the precedent that going to war requires congressional approval. He will have enhanced internationalism.

Republicans are loving this right now because they think Obama looks incompetent. They are blindly stumbling into an outcome that gives Obama everything he has ever said he wants, ever. And they’re not going to realize it until it’s too late. It’s such a perfect outcome, how could this have not been planned? Is Obama on the verge of pulling off the greatest rope-a-dope in the history of US politics?

Another isn’t buying it:

Your reaction to Obama’s address last night sounds suspiciously like you’re getting ready to declare another “meep, meep!” victory for Obama’s long-view, chess playing strategy:

Will Assad be more likely to surrender his chemical weapons if the US attacks or if Russia insists on their destruction? Please. It isn’t close.

As if Obama planned on this all along!  Putin may very well have just pulled Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire, while saving Assad and further ensconcing Russia as Syria’s and Iran’s protector (assuming, of course, that Syria indeed does hand over those weapons and this transfer can be verified). So Russia might have just saved Obama from himself. His policy and performance in regard to Syria has been jaw-droppingly amateurish, beginning with his drawing of “red lines” a year ago that he had no will to enforce, and the absurdly thin arguments he has advanced for military action, contradictory goals, general incoherence and flailing of these past weeks.

Even if this all works out in the end, this has not been Obama’s finest hour. Even admirers of Obama like myself must admit this. He was more than willing to get us into another stupid fucking war until the American people rejected it and the Russians intervened.

Has it occurred to my reader that it was necessary to actually risk another war to get the diplomatic solution we now have? Obama had to make that proposal credible and serious for it to work. Yes, it was a huge risk. Yes, it places a premium on restricting WMDs that may be too ambitious. But it may have paid off. And in the end, a president needs to be judged on results, not news cycles. And those alleging incoherence have not acknowledged that diplomacy – always Obama’s first preference with respect to Syria – sometimes requires a deadly serious intent to do something you don’t really want to do. It requires some level of nerve-wracking bluff. Bluff is not incoherence, although it sure can be risky. And a president who can live with that risk is a president with some cast-iron balls. And that’s why the view that this has revealed weakness in Obama seems completely wrong to me. It has revealed steel.

And you don’t have to argue that Obama is some kind of Jedi warrior who saw all this from the start (a silly idea) to see that he was able to pivot, shift, test, improvise and flush out new options in a horrible situation as the crisis careened from one moment to another. This is what leadership can be – and you saw a very similar set of patterns in Eisenhower’s administration, and even, as Michael Dobbs noted today, in John F Kennedy’s haphazard, contradictory, and risky maneuvers in the Cuba missile crisis. Eisenhower was ridiculed, and regarded as an idiot from day to day in Washington. Can you imagine what the neocons today would say if a president cut off a war as Eisenhower did in Korea? He’d be Carterized immediately. And Eisenhower was indeed regarded as out of his depth by the hard right, if not an active Communist appeaser. But he endures as one of the greatest foreign policy presidents of the last century.

Another reader ladles on the scorn:

Assad and the Russians have no intention of agreeing in a meaningful and substantive way to giving up all these weapons and allowing a verifiable implementation of any agreement.  They are going to make us a laughing stock by delay, denial, and obfuscation.  On the other hand, it does give President Obama a little face-saving in the short run from the big mess he let himself get into. There are no good alternatives in this morass, but I think this might be the least worst alternative.

But again: why is the US on the hook for this? Russia has said this is what it wants; so, staggeringly, has Syria. They are the ones now on the hook. And the key objective is to stop future chemical attacks by Assad and to minimize the dangers of those weapons being dispersed or in the hands of Sunni Jihadist terrorists. Isn’t that far more likely now than, say, a week ago? Mission advanced. Another pivots back to domestic politics:

I hope that Assad can be made to back down. But in a way, the best thing that could happen at home would be for the Republicans to vote down the use of power.

It would inoculate Democrats for a generation against going to war: “The Republicans voted against punishing Syria, which was a threat to Israel, why should we support this next war?” Who would have predicted that in a long interview on NPR, Republican Tom Cole would have said that Assad’s use of chemical weapons did not result in any direct security threat to America or its allies.  Democrats will be able to play back that interview for years: “Syria, Israel’s most hostile neighbor, deployed chemical weapons and the Republicans voted against any use of force.” Meep meep?

Another adds:

Seems to me that AIPAC and the Israeli government are still pushing for a strike, latest developments be damned. If, as it appears likely, the US Congress either votes down the authorization to strike, or doesn’t bring it to a vote, it’d be the first Congressional rebuke of AIPAC that I can remember. Does your crack staff know the last time that happened?

Another awesome development. Another reader references Kerry’s historic gaffe:

Just a funny thought: remember another time that an Obama surrogate went out in public and accidentally blurted out a major shift in policy that immediately set in motion a process no one expected would start, and is at this point now a reality? Marriage equality?

Another points to another major achievement that many, including me, thought would never come:

I’m with you on Syria. I don’t think Obama gives two shits how he gets there; he’s just concerned with the final destination.  Does anyone remember all the ups and downs and sausage-making over the ACA? Nope. They just know it’s Obamacare.

The way I see it, we have a president confident enough and secure enough in his authority to let others take the credit, to let the Russians lead.  Because in the end, who cares how we get there? What matters is that the weapons are gone.

But of course the Washington class will frame this as a huge loss for the president, because.  Can you imagine George W. Bush or Dick Cheney taking this route?  Not a chance.  They would’ve bombed the shit out of Syria just to show they could.

The current solution doesn’t have the drama of dropping bombs or sending sorties over Damascus, so Obama comes off as a bit of a dull president.  And in this case, that’s fantastic, because he’s getting shit done.  He always does.

Meep meep.

Fred Kaplan analyzes Obama’s speech:

John Judis argues along the same lines:

Obama attributed the Russian initiative partly to “the credible threat of U.S. military action.” That’s certainly the case. The Russians and Syrians would not have budged without the threat of American force. And even if the protracted negotiations over the next months don’t result in a clear and firm proposal. Assad will have acknowledged his use of chemical weapons and be far less likely to use them again, as will other dictators who find themselves facing popular rebellions. And if by any chance he does use them, Obama should have less trouble in building an international coalition to punish him. That’s all to the good, and is the result—even with all the bungling diplomacy—of Obama’s initial threat of force.

Ezra Klein points out that “Obama needs the country’s backing to strike Syria so he can strike a diplomatic bargain to get rid of Assad’s chemical arsenal, thus ending America’s interest in striking Syria”:

At this point, the White House has a surprisingly good plan to avoid war while achieving the limited goal of disarming Assad’s nuclear arsenal. But it relies on them making a very bad argument for a much larger war with much broader, more humanitarian, objectives.

George Packer doubts that disarmament will work:

There’s a brutal and chaotic war going on.

The United Nations would evacuate its advisers from Syria if a single one of them were killed, something that Assad or his extremist enemies could easily arrange. Armed factions will be trying to grab control of the weapons the whole time. Assad will have every incentive to withhold some part of his arsenal in case of ultimate need, and he’ll have a friend on the Security Council to help him delay and deceive.

Chait is puzzled by pundits’ opposition to a non-military path:

A prime time presidential address should either announce a policy course or make a specific appeal to Congress; it should not be wasted on a situation where the course is so unclear and the appeal so vague and undirected. Yes, it’s been on the schedule since last week, but there is no rule saying that a president must speak when he’s announced that he will speak if significant events intervene. And after the Russian gambit and the Congressional vote’s postponement, it would have been the better part of valor to simply postpone this speech as well.

Larison agrees that the speech was unnecessary:

It’s impossible to take seriously Obama’s claim that he doesn’t think “world’s policeman” is the proper U.S. role when he is delivering a speech defending the necessity of enforcing an international norm with military action. He recycled several of his officials’ worst fear-mongering arguments about proliferation, Iran, and terrorism, but these have not improved through repeated assertion. All in all, this was a speech that Obama didn’t need to give, and he said nothing that would persuade anyone not already supportive of his policy.

And Dreher is skeptical that the speech made a difference:

Was anybody’s mind changed by that speech? I can’t imagine it. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t convincing either. It’s about the best attempt one could imagine to sell an incoherent, bad policy.

In the fooferaw over Obama’s allegedly chaotic foreign policy over the last few weeks, it seems important to me to note that what is now on the table is what Obama has long explicitly said he wanted on the table. He isn’t being presented with a defeat; he is being offered the thing he said he was looking for all along. Read the presser after the G20 – before yesterday’s transformation. Here’s the money quote:

My goal is to maintain the international norm on banning chemical weapons.  I want that enforcement to be real.  I want it to be serious.  I want people to understand that gassing innocent people, delivering chemical weapons against children is not something we do.  It’s prohibited in active wars between countries.  We certainly don’t do it against kids.  And we’ve got to stand up for that principle.

If there are tools that we can use to ensure that, obviously my preference would be, again, to act internationally in a serious way and to make sure that Mr. Assad gets the message.

Hasn’t this now been accomplished? And this time, the means and the end are better matched than if America’s use of military force had somehow smacked Assad into compliance (an unlikely outcome in any case). What we’ve learned most acutely this past decade is that overwhelming military force is not the sole criterion for power or for achieving international goals. It is even becoming anachronistic and self-defeating in some respects. Charles Kenny gets it:

[L]ong gone are the days when being the top nation militarily meant you could invade half-continents, get countries to adopt your national sports, and set up global economic institutions to your preferred design.

There’s an irony that a U.S. military system that has the power to wipe civilization off the face of the planet through thermonuclear Armageddon is considerably less capable of actually imposing its political leaders’ will on the world than were the British armed forces of 150 years ago that gave pride of place to a cavalry using lances.

Our world has changed. And the old neo-imperial model – categorically proved wanting in Iraq – has to cede to a new form of global interaction. A mixture of great power maneuvering and effective use of the norms of the United Nations system is what will likely be the result, if we are lucky. It’s always better to use the institutions you’ve got. And the core point is that it would be the best means of advancing our interests. Will Assad be more likely to surrender his chemical weapons if the US attacks or if Russia insists on their destruction? Please. It isn’t close.

And if “power” is to mean anything, it must surely mean the ability successfully to advance and defend our national interests. By surrendering some obvious power, we gain much more beneath the surface. Of course, the underlying capacity for massive force makes this work – and there is no obvious or preferable alternative to the US providing that. I’m not arguing for some kind of peacenik abandonment of military strength. I’m simply arguing that the military machine itself is not power. It is, in some frustrating ways, a constraint upon it.

Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau makes an emotionally-charged case for military action:

I don’t like war, or the risks that accompany even the most limited conflicts. But I cannot un-see the images played on CNN over the weekend of little children gasping for their last breath while an invisible poison destroys their nervous system. The world is a messy, complicated place, and I know we don’t always have the ability, or frankly the will, to stop bad things from happening everywhere, all the time.

But years from now, when the history is written about the time a madman gassed hundreds of children while the whole world watched in horror, I want to be able to tell my own kids that I was part of a country that did something about it; that we acted to save more innocents from this special kind of horror, in Syria and in other places where such evil is contemplated.

Obama has also cited the deaths of children on countless occasions – and I don’t doubt it’s informed by a father’s instinctual anguish and recoil. I do not doubt the sincerity of this feeling, or the rightness of it. We just have a duty not to let our frontal cortexes be flooded with that kind of non-negotiable. It was exactly these kinds of absolutes – the torture of children under Saddam, for example – that replaced calm thinking in 2003.

And in the end, far, far more children died because of the US invasion than would have happened in most feasible alternative scenarios. Garance sees the same emotionally blackmailing rhetoric in speeches by Susan Rice (see above) and Samantha Powers:

Either U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power and National Security Adviser Susan Rice have been working from a script or the two foreign-policy pros, both mothers, share a remarkable affinity for making similar points in the same way, as evidenced by their vivid descriptions of gassed Syrian children during recent speeches making the administration’s case for congressional authorization to use force against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

As the administration finds that its other messages are, to be kind, not breaking through, its top female national security officials have been making the case that it’s about the kids. They know that it is impossible to look at the pictures of fat babies and adorable toddlers wrapped for burial in late August and not be horrified — not if you have an ounce of humanity. But the question has never been that there was an atrocity committed; the debate has been what to do in response to it.