Syria: “When doing nothing is a policy”

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”.

By Richard Cohen

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.

"Obama's failure in Syria"

The following appears today in the Washington Post

By Richard Cohen

There are two kinds of wars, we are told — wars of choice and wars of necessity. The former is to be avoided and the latter fought with appropriate reluctance. World War II was a good and necessary war but Vietnam was not. The war in Iraq was a matter of choice (also of imbecility) but Afghanistan was not — although it now may be. Wars can change over time. The one in Syria certainly has. It has gone from a war of choice to a war of necessity that President Obama did not choose to fight. A mountain of dead testifies to his mistake.

More than 60,000 people have been killed, most of them civilians. An estimated 650,000 refugees have fled across Syria’s various borders. They live in miserable conditions, soaked and frozen by the chilling rains of the Mediterranean winter, caked in mud. Children have died. More children will die.

The war threatens to destabilize a whole region. The Kurds in Syria’s north are restless. The Palestinians, refugees in Syria from their one-time homeland, are refugees yet again in Jordan. Lebanon is awash with Syrians, fellow Muslims but often of a different sort. The ethnic nitroglycerin of that country — an unstable mixture of Sunnis and Shiites, various Christians and Druze — looks increasingly fragile. All Lebanese are mental census takers: Has their group increased or decreased, and what does it mean?

And what of Bashar al-Assad, the unimpressive son of a frighteningly impressive father? Will he seek exile in Moscow, possibly rooming with that vulgarian, Gerard Depardieu? Not likely. Assad will retreat to the Alawite redoubt and the slaughter will continue. Bloodbath will follow bloodbath, a settling of scores from the recent past, the distant past and — just for good measure — the imagined future: Kill before you can be killed. It’s the earliest form of hedging.

I am talking about a misery that beggars description. I am talking of infants dying of dysentery and the old taking one last feeble step. I am talking about barbarity that always accompanies civil war and I am talking, finally, of a catastrophe that could have been avoided. A little muscle from NATO, which is to say the United States, could have put an end to this thing early on. The imposition of a no-fly zone, as was done in Libya, would not only have grounded Syrian airplanes and helicopters but also have convinced the military and intelligence services early on that Assad was doomed and the outcome was not in doubt. At that time there were places he could have gone.

But the White House was resolute in its irresolution. A presidential campaign was on, and it was no time for foreign adventures. Iraq was winding down; with any luck, Afghanistan would too. The United States had no dog in the Syrian fight and, besides, Washington — in an admission of incompetence — could not tell the good guys from the bad guys. Waiting cleared things up. Now the bad guys (jihadists and others) are more in control and the moderates have, as moderates usually do, lost out to radicals. Procrastination, as well as the prospect of one’s hanging, clarifies the mind.

In retrospect, this was a war of necessity. It was necessary to avoid a regional calamity, the spread of more violence to Lebanon and Iraq. It was necessary to avoid a humanitarian disaster; great suffering that could have been avoided or at least mitigated. It was necessary to take a stand against barbarity because this is — is it not? — a basic obligation. It was necessary to intervene because we could do so at very little cost. To do what you can when you can might not have the Metternichian ring of a Great Strategic Doctrine, but it has the force of common sense. It is both compelling and workable. We are talking, simply, of saving lives.

It was necessary, finally, because not only must the thugs of this world be held accountable by the world community, they must know they will be held accountable by the world community. The indiscriminate shelling of cities and towns must not be tolerated. The purposeful killing of journalists must not be tolerated. The people of any country are not chattel to be treated any way their government wants. This — a furious sense of moral indignation — must return to U.S. foreign policy and be the centerpiece of Obama’s second term. This is no longer a matter of choice. It is a necessity.