![A man prepares the bodies of those killed in last Wednesday's attack east of Damascus, Syria. [Credit: NY Daily News]](https://i0.wp.com/www.dougsbriefcase.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Credit-NY-Daily-News.jpg)
A man prepares the bodies of those killed in last Wednesday’s attack east of Damascus, Syria. [Credit: NY Daily News]
All of this is what low to moderate doses of sarin can do, according to the US Centers for Disease Control. More extensive exposure – the kind that an attack by a tyrant against civilians might inflict — produces convulsions, paralysis, loss of consciousness and respiratory failure.
Sarin is among the agents that may have been used in the attack on civilians that occurred in the hours after midnight last Wednesday in rebel-held areas east of Damascus. The Assad government denies responsibility for the attack. If they did it – and the early evidence strongly suggests that they did – it would be the worst chemical attack since Saddam Hussein’s assault on Kurds and Iranians in the late 1980s.
It occurred exactly one year after President Obama repeated his call for Assad to step down and warned that the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government would cross a “red line.” It puts renewed pressure on the President to act, particularly since the US military confirmed last June that the Syrian government had already crossed his “red line” in prior, smaller chemical attacks. In response to those incidents, the President promised to supply rebels with arms. Months later, those arms have yet to arrive.
While the President publicly says that he will wait for UN inspectors to determine the nature of this past week’s attacks, the internal debate at the White House on how to respond already has begun. The New York Times reported in its Friday edition on a lengthy meeting in which officials split on what, if anything, the US should do.
The meeting broke up without any decision, according to senior officials, amid signs of a deepening division between those who advocate sending Mr. Assad a harsh message and those who argue that military action now would be reckless and ill timed.
Credit: National Post
As his advisers split into rival camps, the President struggles to make sense of it all. He thought he could overcome Islamic hatred of the US government through a cult of personality. His Muslim-sounding name and Third World roots would give him credibility with moderate Islamists who despised President Bush. It didn’t work out that way. The very features that were thought to be assets became liabilities. They raised expectations to unrealistic levels and made him a bitter disappointment. He was just another American President after all, and though his style was softer, his methods were no less harsh. He replaced troops with drones, capture and interrogation with assassination, kept Guantanamo open, and ordered a “surge” in Afghanistan.
The Arab Spring at first seemed a potential turning point, a recrudescence of President Bush’s ideal of Islamic democracy. President Obama rushed to embrace it and even to claim credit for something that surprised him as much as it surprised everyone else. But the movement proved too unpredictable, too volatile, too unintelligible to provide an adequate framework for understanding the Muslim world. It instead presented a new series of challenges – in Egypt, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere – that have left the President at a loss.
He seems overwhelmed by a succession of events that are paradoxically interconnected and random. He must feel powerless. His warnings are ignored, his red lines crossed with impunity. He is criticized for not acting and for contemplating action. More fundamentally, he has no framework, no narrative he could use to rationalize intervention or inaction.
Pundits and academics have tried to make sense of it all. One of the most intriguing comes from Sheri Berman, a political science professor at Barnard College. Berman sees the turmoil in Egypt through the eyes of Karl Marx, who famously lamented that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.
Berman reminds us that Marx made those comments after the failed revolution of 1848. The tragedy to which Marx referred was the French Revolution of 1789, which began by overthrowing the monarchy, but ultimately led to its rebirth. The farce occurred in 1848 when, after the overthrow of Louis Philippe, a fragile republic faltered and resulted in Louis Napoleon being named emperor. In both cases, Berman notes, middle class people (Marx might have called them bourgeosie) allied with more radical elements in pursuit of economic and social change. But once in charge, those radical elements went too far, driving the liberal bourgeosie back into the arms of the authoritarian monarchists.
And that history, Berman argues, is repeating itself in Egypt today:
“with liberals and authoritarians playing themselves, and Islamists playing the role of socialists. Once again, an inexperienced and impatient mass movement has overreached after gaining power. Once again, liberals have been frightened by the changes their former partners want to enact and have come crawling back to the old regime for protection. And, as in 1848, authoritarians have been happy to take back the reins of power.”
Egyptian liberals, Berman argues, are repeating the mistakes of their nineteenth century French counterparts by looking at the Muslim Brotherhood as an irredeemably radical and menacing force and by looking to the military for salvation.
“They see their opponents as zealots determined to abolish everything liberals value. But just as not all socialists were proto-Stalinists, not all Islamists want to implement a theocratic regime. There are moderate Islamists today who are willing to play by the rules of the game, and they should be encouraged to do so.”
Liberal Egyptians should reach out to Islamists and build bridges to those “willing to play by the rules of the game.” My guess is that it’s not that simple. Nineteenth century socialists were notoriously anti-clerical; they hated religious authority as much as they hated the monarchy. They sought to loose the bonds of throne and priest. The Muslim Brotherhood, by contrast, seeks to carry out a religious agenda, one that is decidedly illiberal and brooks no compromise with the secular world. On which points of sharia law might they bend?
More importantly, it seems that Berman has misinterpreted events in Egypt. The people didn’t overthrow Mubarak; the military did. The generals put him in power, backed him when it coincided with their interests, and removed him when he became an inconvenience. They permitted elections, but Mohammed Morsi ruled only with their sufferance. When they tired of him, they deposed him as well. And it is they, admittedly with the apparent support of the country’s liberal bourgeiousie, who are systematically and brutally suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood. The authoritarians were never toppled. They have remained in control throughout and will continue to run things in Egypt for the foreseeable future.
Which explains why President Obama persists in his ludicrous denial of a military coup. If he turns against the Egyptian military, he cuts ties with the rulers of one of the region’s most powerful nations.
President Obama’s reluctant embrace of Egyptian strongmen hasn’t endeared him to the Egyptian liberals, despite their abiding contempt for the Muslim Brotherhood. In a powerful essay, Stanford University’s Fouad Ajami argues that Egyptians of all persuasions see President Obama and the US as the source of their varied grievances. Hatred of America is a fundamental precept of Islamism, so the Muslim Brotherhood’s anti-Americanism is to be expected. What is unexpected is that more moderate Egyptians improbably blame America for the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascendancy. Ajami writes:
“Young rebels who had come together to topple the old Mubarak dictatorship now conspired with the military and police to overthrow the first elected civilian ruler in Egyptian history… And in their willful escape and evasion, those who cheered the military seizure of power were willing to entertain the darkest of conspiracies. The rise of the Brotherhood was an American plot, they maintained, part of an American scheme to subjugate Egypt and deny it its place among the nations. Political Islam itself was disowned, turned into an American creation. Mohammed Morsi had kept the peace with Israel, brokered an accommodation between Hamas and Israel: this, too, became proof of this malignant American design.”
Ajami argues that we brought some of this resentment on ourselves.
“In this Egyptian drama, the United States did not give the best of itself. When the Obama administration could not call the coup d’état by its name, we put on display our unwillingness to honor our own democratic creed. Egypt has long been in the American strategic orbit. When our secretary of state opined that the army was ‘restoring democracy,’ we gave away the moral and strategic incoherence of an administration that has long lost its way.”
Ajami’s criticism misses the mark. It is unfair to accuse the President of moral incoherence. The President would like to do the right thing; he just doesn’t know what that might be or its cost in blood and treasure.
His strategic incoherence is undeniable. It explains why, more than 2–1/2 years after protests against Assad began, White House advisers still cannot formulate a response to this past week’s crimes against humanity. Assad’s repression is not news, nor would this be the first time that he has employed chemical weapons in its service. There are reports that the US may be preparing to launch cruise missiles against Syrian government forces, something that would make a statement, but not a difference in the attempt to overthrow Assad, serving the same symbolic purpose as delaying the delivery of F‑16s to Egypt while refusing to suspend other forms of aid.
That strategic incoherence is the fruit of intellectual incoherence: the President doesn’t know how to respond to these events because he doesn’t know what to make of them. Nor is he certain that intervention would be worth the price. Is it really a bad thing for the Egyptian military to go after the Muslim Brotherhood? Are we sure that if Syrian rebels were to oust Assad, the new regime would be friendly to the US?
The President would be more than justified in announcing that the US has no interest in what occurs in Syria and that it would confine its expression of moral disapproval to voting for UN resolutions. Similarly, he could say that US interests demand that we maintain strong ties to the Egyptian military, regardless of its decision to depose an elected leader and crush his political supporters. Such an announcement would draw criticism, of course, but every Presidential action does. It would at least have the virtue of accurately describing what we’ve been doing. There is something to be said for aligning our rhetoric, which has been high-minded and idealistic, with our actions, which have been thoroughly pragmatic.
For now, the President’s Middle East policy remains caught in that tension between pristine ideals and realpolitik. He preaches democracy and human rights and threatens to take retribution against those who cross his “red lines.” But he shrinks from following through on those threats in any meaningful way. Which may not be a bad thing.
The President wants to be on the side of the good guys. He just isn’t sure who the good guys are and whether standing up to the bad guys is really such a good idea. He is not alone. We all struggle to make sense of Syria, Egypt and the Arab Spring.
Community organizer, junior senator for 18 months, and now the commander in chief? I have the same assessment as Putin.
POTUS is in a difficult position. As you point out, nothing in his experience prepared him to deal with this sort of challenge. He’s inclined to conform his policy to democratic ideals, but disinclined to do what it takes to stand up to a tyrant. So he looks for easy outs, like firing off some cruise missiles to show Assad that we mean business. But what that would actually show Assad — and, more importantly, his Iranian patrons — is that he can get away with mass atrocities. My sense is that the President would be better off dropping the faux-bellicose “red line” rhetoric and announce a policy that is more in line with his reticence to engage militarily. Tell Assad that we don’t like him much and disapprove of his repression, but that we’re not willing to back up our disapproval by fighting for his removal. That is our de facto position, as near as I can tell. Why not just make it official?
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