US Chose Bad Time to Impose Syria Sanctions-Arabs

US Chose Bad Time to Impose Syria Sanctions-Arabs
Wed May 12, 2004 11:46 AM ET

By Lin Noueihed

BEIRUT (Reuters) - The United States, battling a prisoner abuse scandal and insurgency in Iraq, could not have chosen a worse time to slap new sanctions on Syria, Arabs said Wednesday.

Many warned that the sanctions, welcomed only by Syria's arch-foe Israel, would only fuel anger against America.

"If they are having such trouble in Iraq, they should at least calm down Iraq's neighbors," said Mohamed al-Sayed Said of Egypt's al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

"Whoever is ruling Syria would be foolish not to try harder to embarrass the Americans in Iraq. Anyone seeing his regime so severely undermined and humiliated would have no option but to try and spoil it for the Americans in Iraq."

Labeling Syria "an unusual and extraordinary threat," President Bush Tuesday signed an order imposing sanctions long in the pipeline on Damascus for backing anti-Israeli groups and allowing anti-American insurgents to cross the Syrian border into Iraq.

Damascus has repeatedly said the sanctions would only harm the handful of American firms in Syria and would not persuade it to end backing for groups it defends as legitimate resistance.

Many Arabs said the widely-expected move was the latest in a series of Middle East policy mistakes driven by Washington's blind bias toward Israel, the only country in the region to welcome the sanctions.

"This is an important decision that proves, once again, the resolve of the United States to wage all-out war -- not just against terrorist groups, but also against the countries that harbor them," the Israeli foreign ministry said in a statement.

The sanctions ban exports except for food and medicine, freeze assets of Syrians and Syrian entities suspected of links to terror or weapons of mass destruction and ban Syrian flights to and from the United States.

Bush will consider further sanctions unless Damascus ends its support for anti-Israeli militant groups such as the Palestinian Hamas and Lebanon's Hizbollah, pulls its troops out of Lebanon, ends development of forbidden weapons and cooperates fully with U.S.-led efforts to stabilize Iraq.

"(The sanctions) are only going to increase tension in the region, and we have enough of that," Kuwaiti Islamist parliamentarian Nasser al-Sane told Reuters.

"Because Syria is an Arab country there's going to be an Arab reaction sympathetic to Syria, because its a member of the Arab family this is only going to increase the conflict."

Damascus, which bitterly opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, has described the sanctions as "unjust and unwarranted."

It says it has done its best to control the border but would still pursue a policy of "dialogue" with Washington.

"When they say the Syrians should be more careful about the border, they forget to mention that they (the Americans) are on the other side. Why aren't they doing a better job?" an Arab League official said.

"I don't think this is the right approach. The right approach is through dialogue, especially since they have recently indicated they have seen the Syrians cooperate."

Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, whose country is under heavy political and military influence from Syria, said the sanctions were "wrong in both content and timing" and were further proof that Washington pandered to Israeli interests.

"This decision poses the question of whether the series of mistakes the American administration is committing in the region will lead to more tensions, escalation and feelings of injustice on the Arab side," he said in a statement.

Some dismissed the sanctions as little more than symbolic, given Washington's economic and political ties with Damascus.

"The American pressure on Syria is a long-term plan and this is part of it," said Saudi political analyst Abdullah al-Otaibi.

"U.S. image in the Middle East is already bad," said another Gulf analyst. "It just solidifies the Arab conviction that Israel is running the show in the Middle East."

My father, who helped in a small way to kill thousands, was not a violent man. Curtis LeMay, who led him into battle, surely was. The former, two years off a small farm in the central San Joaquin Valley, left a quiet college campus in California in early 1943, and at twenty-one joined the American armed forces. For much of the Great Depression, a decade prior, millions in the Imperial Japanese Army had been plundering China and Southeast Asia, and they were now engaged in a murderous fight to the death against an assorted host of enemies. In contrast, William Hanson had fired a small rifle only at birds and rabbits, in the countryside five miles outside the backwater farming town of Kingsburg, California. In his two decades he had never ventured more than a few miles from his parents' farmhouse. He had never been in an airplane, and had never seen a bomb. When he enlisted in the United States Army, his future plane, the B-29, did not even exist as a combat-tested bomber.

When William Hanson joined the American army, imperial Japan was still largely unscathed. The closest American land forces to Japan were over 2,000 miles away. Only a few planners like Curtis LeMay knew that thousands of enlisted civilians like my father in a few months of training could kill both brutally and efficiently, if given the proper equipment and leadership - and backed by the vast industrial capacity of the American nation. My grandfather, a farmer who twenty-seven years earlier had left the same forty acres, also served in a democratic army. Frank Hanson ended up as a corporal in the 91st Infantry Division and was gassed in the Argonne. He told my father that he should quickly get used to killing - and that he probably would either not come back, or would return crippled. Americans, my grandfather added, had to learn to fight fast.

A little more than a year after his enlistment, on March 9, 1945, a 400-mile-long trail of 334 B-29s left their Marianas bases, 3,500 newly trained airmen crammed in among the napalm. The gigantic planes each carried ten tons of the newly invented jellied gasoline incendiaries. Preliminary pathfinders had seeded flares over Tokyo in the shape of an enormous fiery X to mark the locus of the target. Planes flew over in small groups of three, a minute apart. Most were flying not much over 5,000 feet above Japan. Five-hundred-pound incendiary clusters fell every 50 feet. Within thirty minutes, a 28-mile-per-hour ground wind sent the flames roaring out of control. Temperatures approached 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The Americans flew in without guns, and LeMay was not interested in shooting down enemy airplanes/ He instead filled the planes with napalm well over their theoretical maximum loads. He wished to destroy completely the material and psychological capital of the Japanese people, on the brutal theory that once civilians had tasted what their soldiers had done to others, only then might their murderous armies crack. Advocacy for a savage militarism from the rear, he though, might dissipate when one's house was in flames. People would not show up to work to fabricate artillery shells that killed Americans when there was no work to show up to. Soldiers who kill, rape, and torture do so less confidently when their own families are at risk at home.

The planes returned with their undercarriages seared and the smell of human flesh among the crews. Over 80,000 Japanese died outright; 40,918 were injured; 267,171 buildings were destroyed. One million Japanese were homeless. Air currents from the intense heat sent B-29s spiraling thousands of feet upward. Gunners like my father could see the glow of the inferno from as far away as 150 miles as they headed home. The fire lasted four days. My father said he could smell burned flesh for miles on the way back to Tinian. Yet only 42 bombers were damaged, and 14 shot down. No single air attack in the history of conflict had been so devastating.

Unfortunately for the Japanese, the March 9 raid was the beginning, not the end, of LeMay's incendiary campaign. He sensed that his moment - a truly deadly man in charge of a huge democratic force free of government constraint - had at last arrived, as the imperial Japanese command was stunned and helpless. All the old problems - the weather, the enemy fighters, the jet stream, the high-altitude wear on the engines, political limitations on bombing civilians - were now irrelevant. There was to be no public objection to LeMay's burning down the industrial and residential center of the Japanese empire - too many stories about Japanese atrocities toward subjugated peoples and prisoners of war had filtered back to the American people. To a democratic nation in arms, an enemy's unwarranted aggression and murder are everything, the abject savagery of its own retaliatory response apparently nothing.

Suddenly, all of Japan lay defenseless before LeMay's new and unforeseen plan of low-level napalm attack. To paraphrase General Sherman, he had pierced the shell of the Japanese empire and had found it hollow. LeMay had thousands of recruits, deadly new planes, and a blank check to do whatever his bombers could accomplish. Over 10,000 young Americans were now eager to work to exhaustion to inflict even more destruction. Quickly, he upped the frequency of missions, sending his airmen out at the unheard-of rate of 120 hours per month - the Eight Air Force in England had usually flown a maximum of 30 hours per month - as they methodically burned down within ten days Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, and Osaka before turning to smaller cities. His ground crews simply unloaded the bombs at the dock and drove them right over to the bombers, without storing them in arms depots. Between 300 and 400 planes roared out almost every other day, their crews in the air 30 hours and more each week. Missions over Japan, including preliminary briefings and later debriefings, often meant 24 consecutive hours of duty. Benzedrine and coffee kept the flyers awake.

In exchange for the unprovoked but feeble attack at Pearl Harbor on their country, American farmers, college students, welders, and mechanics of a year past were now prepared - and quite able - to ignite all the islands of Japan. Their gigantic bombers often flew in faster than did the sleek Japanese fighters sent up to shoot them down. Japanese military leaders could scarcely grasp that in a matter of months colossal runways had appeared out of nowhere in the Pacific to launch horrendous novel bombers more deadly than any aircraft in history, commanded by a general as fanatical as themselves, and manned by teenagers and men in their early twenties more eager to kill than ever Japan's own feared veterans. So much for the Japanese myth that decadent pampered Westerners were ill equipped for the savagery of all-out war. Even in the wildest dreams of the most ardent Japanese imperialists, there was no such plan of destroying the entire social fabric of the American nation.

When the war ended, William Hanson had become a seasoned central fire control gunner on a B-29, with thirty-four raids over Japan. His plane and nearly a thousand others had materialized out of nowhere on the formal coral rock of the Mariana Islands, burned the major cities of Japan to the ground - and in about twelve months were gone for good. Yet for the rest of their lives these amateurs were fiercely loyal to the brutal architect of their lethal work, who announced after the war was over, "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal." LeMay was absolutely right - he would have. My father occasionally ridiculed LeMay's bluster and his cigar, but it was LeMay nonetheless whom he ridiculed - and LeMay whom he was proud that he had served under.

For much of my life I have wondered where such a murderous force of a season came from. And how a democracy made a willing killer out of my father and other farm boys, putting their lives in the hands of an unhinged zealot like LeMay, who was ostensibly neither emblematic of a democratic citizenry nor representative of the values that we purportedly cherish. Or was he? How can a democratic leader brag of such destruction, take pride in his force's ability to destroy thousands - in short, how can be be so utterly uncouth? How in less than a year after being assembled can a motley group of young recruits fly the most lethal bombers in history to incinerate a feared militaristic culture six thousand miles from their own home? And how can that most murderous air force in the world nearly disappear into the anonymity and amnesia of democracy six months after its victory?

Those thoughts are the easy anxieties of the desk-bound class. I have come to realize that both Curtis LeMay and my father are stock types, not aberrations, of the democratic society that produced them. Democracy, and its twin of market capitalism, alone can instantly create lethal armies out of civilians, equip them with horrific engines of war, imbue them with a near-messianic zeal within a set time and place to exterminate what they understand as evil, have them follow to their death the most ruthless of men, and then melt anonymously back into the culture that produced them. It is democracies, which in the right circumstances, can be imbued with the soul of battle, and thus turn the horror of killing to a higher purpose of saving lives and freeing the enslaved.

My father knew of that soul long ago, which explains why during these last fifty years he was proud to have server under LeMay - an authentic military genius notwithstanding his extremism. Despite his horrific stories of B-29s overloaded with napalm blowing up on takeoff, of low-flying bombers shredded by flak and their crews of eleven sent spiraling into their self-generated inferno over Tokyo, of the smell of burning Japanese flesh wafting through the bomb-bay doors, of parachuting flyers beheaded on landing, he never equated that barbarity with either LeMay or himself.

On the contrary, he seemed to think that the carnage below his plane and the sacrifice of his friends in the air - twelve of sixteen B-29s in his 398th Squadron, 132 of 176b men, were shot down, crashed, or never heard from again - had been necessary to win the war against a racist imperial power, and to save, not expend, both Asian and American lives. Despite his lifelong Democratic party credentials, my father spoke highly of "Old Iron Pants" even in the midst of the general's subsequent entry into controversial right-wing politics. The bastard shortened the war against evil, my father told me. You were all lucky, he went on, once to have had angry men like LeMay and us in the air. We flew into the fire, he said, because we believed that we were saving more lives than we took. As he aged, all memories - childhood, job, family - receded as the recollection of those nights over Tokyo grew sharper; parties, vacations, and familial holiday festivities became sideshows compared to annual reunions with his 313th Bomber Wing and 398th Squadron. His last hallucinatory gasps of July 1998 were a foreign vocabulary of B-29 operations and frantic calls to crew members, most of whom were long since dead.

Democracies, I think, if the cause, if the commanding general, if the conditions of time and space take on their proper meaning - for a season can produce the most murderous armies from the most unlikely of men, and do so in the pursuit of something spiritual rather than the mere material.

- Prologue to "The Soul of Battle", by Victor Davis Hanson

US Chose Bad Time to Impose Syria Sanctions-Arabs

Note the usual media way of speaking about "Arabs" as if they ALL think exactly alike, and ALL are belligerent towards us.

Of course, if I ever were to say to a media person, "Arabs all think exactly alike, and all are belligerent towards us, and should be treated accordingly", I'd be raked over the coals. How dare I lump all Arabs together like that!

The United States, battling a prisoner abuse scandal and insurgency in Iraq, could not have chosen a worse time to slap new sanctions on Syria, Arabs said Wednesday.

This is just beyond laughable and into self-parody. "Arabs" said that?? "Arabs"? All of them?

Many warned that the sanctions, welcomed only by Syria's arch-foe Israel, would only fuel anger against America.

Why is that? Why do "Arabs" care one way or the other?

Of course, notice how "Arabs" has suddenly become "Many". How many Arab people does the media need to interview before they become "Many Arabs", and then just "Arabs", I wonder?

"If they are having such trouble in Iraq, they should at least calm down Iraq's neighbors," said Mohamed al-Sayed Said of Egypt's al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

Ok, that's the opinion of one Arab, is that it, does he speak for all "Arabs", or are there more?

they should at least calm down Iraq's neighbors," [...] "Whoever is ruling Syria would be foolish not to try harder to embarrass the Americans in Iraq.

Heh. Look at this paradoxical progression. First of all he says that we should "calm down" Syria. How dare we get Syria riled up, that's a bad idea since we're having troubles in Iraq! Second he says that according to his expert opinion, Syria ought to and is right to meddle in Iraq.

So basically, we're right then, Syria is meddling in Iraq, and he's admitting it. It's funny how Syrian misbehavior is used to justify Syrian misbehavior, and used to argue against our response to that misbehavior.

Summary: aggression of an Arab country can never be questioned and must never be responded to.

Damascus has repeatedly said the sanctions would only harm the handful of American firms in Syria and would not persuade it to end backing for groups it defends as legitimate resistance.

So Syria even admits to the misbehavior. What's the problem then, we're slapping sanctions cuz they're doing X, and they even admit doing X. The sanctions are a bad idea because they encourage Syria to do X - which they're *already* doing and *right* to do?? That makes no sense.

Once again a quote from "Many Arabs". Remember, so far we've heard from one (1) of them.

"(The sanctions) are only going to increase tension in the region, and we have enough of that," Kuwaiti Islamist parliamentarian Nasser al-Sane told Reuters.

Ok, that's Arab #2. Is that "Many" yet?

Anyway, a question is growing in my mind. Why does an Egyptian, and a Kuwaiti, give a rat's ass what we do vis-a-vis Syria?

"Because Syria is an Arab country there's going to be an Arab reaction sympathetic to Syria, because its a member of the Arab family this is only going to increase the conflict."

Interesting. Very, very interesting. I want to remember these words because there's an important point here.

Notice he speaks of something called "the Arab family". Question: do we properly apprehend that (at least some, probably many if not most) Arabs think in such terms?

Ok, this anonymous guy is Arab #3.

Is the Lebanese "President" even an Arab? I guess I'll count him as Arab #4.

Anyway want to get back to this "Arab family" business above, it's itching at my brain. Obviously we all can see that there is some pan-Arab chauvinism that causes us lots of problems in dealing with these societies. It is a kind of virulent chauvinism which, culturally, seems to make it impossible for one Arab to criticize another Arab, even if/when that second Arab commits cold-blooded murder by sawing an innocent (but non-Arab) man's head off.

Basically this is a culture steeped in the most genocidal kind of racism.

But you know what really bothers me, is the role that our media plays in cultivating and encouraging that racism. Look at what happens, the US engages in a policy towards one "Arab country" or another, and the media rushes out to find out what "Arabs" think so they can tell us. We see it in story after story. And they never even say "majority of Arabs" in the headlines, the headlines always just say "ARABS".

WHY?

At the beginning of World War 2, when it was contemplated to attack Germany, did the news media run stories about what "whites" would think about it? "Whites say attack on Germany bad policy"?

It's bad enough that the societies populated by ethnic-Arabs are so fundamentally, genocidally racist. But it's downright disastrous for our media to collaborate in that racism, and egg it on, by always giving such prominence to the supposed monolithic, hateful view of "Arabs" towards everything we do and don't do, by giving credence to the idea that it makes perfect sense that an Arab in Kuwait would be angry about what the US government does to the nation of Syria.

Why does the media play along with the mad, chauvinistic posturing of the most racist and genocidal Arabs?

This really, really bothers me here.

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