Of all the transcripts, news and views on Syria I could assess this
morning – and they were many – I fancied this opinion by the brilliant Richard
Cohen, who writes
a weekly political column for the Washington
Post that appears on Tuesdays. This week’s is titled “When
doing nothing is a policy”.
In the movie “Lawrence of
Arabia,” the attempt to unite the Arabs comes apart in Damascus.
Lawrence bangs on his desk with the butt of his gun to bring the assembly to
order, but to no avail. Chaos erupts. Now something similar is happening in
Syria. A mountain of dead (70,000 or so),
not to mention an approaching regional bloodbath, suggests that once again
things are coming apart. Still, life does not exactly imitate art. Lawrence of
Arabia at least tried to do something. Barack of D.C. just sat on his hands.
Actually, he sat on his
polling numbers. The president’s refusal to do anything material to end the
Syrian civil war is a policy long suspected of having two elements — fear of
blowback and fear of the nightly news. Now comes a book from a one-time
administration insider who bluntly and altogether convincingly outlines the
role domestic political considerations played in the White House’s approach to
Afghanistan and Pakistan. The goal of policymakers was “not to make strategic
decisions but to satisfy public opinion.” Syria, it seems, has been no
exception.
The former insider is
the resplendently credentialed Vali Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies, senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution, life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and,
most pertinently, former senior adviser to the late Richard Holbrooke,
President Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. In that
capacity, Nasr says he saw the almost daily humbling of Holbrooke, a volcano of
a diplomat who was forever erupting ideas, plans and strategies — almost always
to no avail. In his telling, the White House was some sort of high school
cafeteria where Holbrooke was always being shunned and given the silent
treatment. He blames “a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House
advisers whose turf was strictly politics” for this. Mean Girls, not the Wise
Men, made American policy.
Nasr set down his views
in a book called “The Dispensable
Nation.” It will be published in April, but samizdat copies of it
are already being circulated. In a sense, the book only confirms the general
impression that Obama is a man without a foreign policy. He had naive
aspirations — a world to be changed by the transformative power of a good
speech — but no clear path to achieve anything. Nasr describes his dismay when
the surge in Afghanistan was announced in tandem with a pullout date. In his head,
Secretary of State John Kerry, the new implementer of Obama’s contradictory
policy, must now hear a reprise of the question he once asked
about his own war: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?”
Nasr’s regional
specialty was Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the thrust of what he says supports
the view that Obama shied from intervening in Syria out of domestic political
considerations. A president who was campaigning as the peace candidate — out of
Iraq and, soon, Afghanistan, too — could not risk anything bold in Syria. The
country fell into the margin of error. “It is not going too far to say that
American foreign policy has become completely subservient to tactical domestic
political considerations,” Nasr writes.
Boldness is what the
situation in Syria demanded. A civil war that could have been contained has
instead become a sprawling, regionwide bar fight. Arms could have been shipped
to the insurgents; a no-fly zone could have been imposed. Much could have been
done. Instead, Obama merely called for Bashar al-Assad to go and, for some
reason he, like Rep. Eric Cantor or somebody, remains immovable.
The stakes here are
enormous. Lebanon teeters, swamped with refugees. Jordan, too, is overwhelmed.
The Kurds in Syria’s north may, as they have in nearby Iraq, establish an
autonomous zone — and Turkey will not be pleased. The jihadists are on the
move, hungry for Syria’s vast store of chemical weapons. Israel watches,
nervously. What if Hezbollah gets its hands on chemical weapons? An Obama
administration, afraid of blowback, may well have allowed the Middle East to
blow apart.
The battle for Damascus
is now engaged. The war next month enters its third year, a humanitarian crisis
that has been permitted to fester under the rubric of foreign policy realism.
But another realism is now apparent: Inaction has bred the manufacture of
orphans — a carnage, a horror, a reprimand to inaction. Life imitates art.
Damascus is where it all came apart in “Lawrence of Arabia.” Damascus is where
it is coming apart in reality.
