Posted on 06/05/2013 2:48:17 PM PDT by neverdem
Ordinary Syrians are confused by American hesitation to remove Bashar al-Assad.
Syria’s blood-soaked tyrant, Bashar al-Assad, is finally right about something. He recently told an Argentine newspaper that he doubts the joint Russian-American peace initiative will stop the bloodshed in his country. Of course it won’t. Syria’s civil war is an existential fight to the death between the Alawite minority that dominates the regime and the revolutionary Sunni Muslim majority that will be smashed if it loses. The peace initiative would merely be a naive waste of time, then, but circumstances might conspire to make it something worse than that: from the proverbial Arab Street’s point of view, by cooperating with Moscow and refusing to back the rebels, Washington appears to support the Assad dictatorship.
I recently returned from Beirut, where I once lived, and was dismayed to discover that, with few exceptions, just about everyone in Lebanon’s otherwise pro-Western camp thinks the Obama administration is backing Assad, and by extension Iran and Hezbollah. Sometimes they make this point through insinuation. “The international community thinks it’s okay for the Syrian regime to receive weapons and money from outside while the Free Syrian Army gets nothing,” said Mosbah Ahdab, a former member of parliament. “Everybody here is wondering what’s going on.”
Samy Gemayel, a current member of parliament and son of former Lebanese president Amine Gemayel, was more blunt. “The current government in the United States is friends with Bashar al-Assad,” he said. When I challenged him, he only backed down a little. “Not a friend,” he said, “but the people in the administration aren’t aggressive against Assad. Some of them have good relations with Assad, people like John Kerry.” Nadim Shehadi, a Lebanese-born scholar at Chatham House in the United Kingdom, added: “When you support the dictator who’s oppressing people, you’re also the enemy. The United States has more soft power in the region than before, but you’re going to lose it in Syria.” I heard variations on this complaint every day for almost a month.
They’re wrong, of course. Washington doesn’t support Bashar al-Assad. But it’s not hard to figure why it looks that way from Beirut. The United States has demolished three murderous governments in the greater Middle East and South Asia in the last ten years—the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party state in Iraq, and Muammar el-Qaddafi’s lunacracy in Libya. One of these regime changes took place on President Barack Obama’s watch, so everyone knows he’s just as capable of terminating a despot as was President George W. Bush. They think that since President Obama can quickly get rid of Assad, the fact that he won’t means that the White House likes him right where he is. It doesn’t help that Washington is sponsoring a joint initiative with Vladimir Putin, who really does want Assad to remain in the saddle, and at a time when Russia is gearing up to send advanced Yakhont missiles to Syria.
The reasons Washington isn’t moving aggressively against the Syrian regime are straightforward. Americans are weary of war and especially unwilling to insert themselves into Iraqi- and Lebanese-style sectarian blood feuds. And unlike Qaddafi, Assad has powerful friends. If the United States widens the conflict, Iran and Hezbollah might widen it further. They might even drag in the Israelis, igniting the worst conflagration east of the Mediterranean since the Iran-Iraq war. Washington is also concerned that Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaida, might become over time no less a menace than Assad has been all these years. So the Obama administration is cautious, and for good reason.
But that isn’t coming across. We went through the same thing in Iran when the inspiring but ill-fated Green Revolution broke out in 2009. Obama was so determined to pursue a grand bargain with the Islamic Republic that he could hardly bring himself to utter a word of encouragement to the most potent homegrown anti-regime movement since Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979.
True, the president can’t change the world with magic words; if only a superpower’s historical role were that simple. The Iranian regime won’t crumble if Obama yells at Tehran from the Oval Office; neither will Assad’s. But don’t discount moral clarity. In 1987, when President Ronald Reagan spoke at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and demanded that Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall, everyone knew where he stood. No one in Eastern Europe thought he was objectively pro-Soviet because he neglected to mount an invasion. To this day, the United States enjoys more goodwill in Eastern than in Western Europe, precisely because the victims of Communist repression understood that the West sympathized with them, even if it didn’t storm in and liberate them.
Extreme caution is called for in Syria, but that hardly changes the fact that it is in America’s national interest to see Assad removed. This man has more American blood on his hands than anyone in the Arab world who hasn’t been killed yet. He is a totalitarian state sponsor of international terrorist organizations, including al-Qaida. His government has exported chaos and violence, not just to Israel, but also to every one of its neighbors. His regime is part of the Iranian-Hezbollah axis, which may well go nuclear. Calling for his ouster doesn’t require undaunted courage. It won’t yield results by itself, but the White House, and the United States as a whole, without even realizing it, are paying a price for refusing to do even this much.
It’s hard enough for Americans to find goodwill in the Arab world, but it isn’t impossible. None of the people I spoke to in Beirut who groused about Washington’s perceived support for Assad are anti-American. I’ve known some of them for almost a decade. All are political liberals who more or less share our values, which largely explains why they oppose the Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah axis in the first place. There is no upside to alienating these people.
If the U.S. intervened on either side, it would be blamed. The fact is the U.S. shouldn't be supporting either side. This conflict is sucking the oxygen out for other negative things that could be happening in the Middle East.
Obama missed a golden opportunity when he sat on his hands during the Green Revolution in Iran. By broadcasting his vocal support for the Iranian rebels and by doing whatever he could to let the rebels know they had an ally, he could have changed the equation in the Middle East but instead, he did nothing, as usual. Funny how he is willing to support the Syrian rebels and the Muslim Brotherhood but wouldn’t give a dime to help the Iranian rebels. He is always reactive, never proactive.
Pity those poor left wing secularists in Lebanon who absolutely loathe Hezbollah, the Iranians, Assad, don’t much like al Quieda and on most days severely “criticize” the United States. Now they want our treasure and the lives of young Americans to save them from the meanies.
The enemy of my enemy can still be my enemy.
The author and the folks he interviewed want the U.S. to again engage itself more robustly into a matter where the U.S. is supposed to take the position that only Assad is our enemy or our potential enemy in the events taking place in Syria.
Now, we are told that we should take that position even more so because the Russians and Hezbolla have recently decided to help Assad.
We have been told before, in the Middle East, that we should act on the basis that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
On that basis we helped pay for the Saudi backed and planned projects to insert the Mujahadeen (and OBL) into Afghanistan to fight the Russians which also led to the Saudis and the Pakistani ISI helping to create the Taliban. And for how long were the Mujahadeen, OBL & Al Queda or the Taliban “on our side”?
The problem that “freedom loving people” (taking them at their word) in the Middle East have, whether they are in Lebanon or anywhere else is, that the situation in Syria is not about their hopes for Syria and not even about the hopes of true “freedom loving folks” in Syria - they do not represent the core of those running the show in the Syrian “opposition” anymore than the non-Taliban foes of the Russians represented the Islamist project that was running the show in Afghanistan.
Those in the interview and the author are wrong about other things as well.
Assad has not been a funder of Al Queda and Al Queda linked groups ARE part of the “Syrian opposition”.
The U.S. has not been absent or unsupportive of the “rebels”. Its aid was there and helping “the cause” covertly beginning a decade ago (U.S., some NATO countries, Saudis and some of the Gulf States & often through “international NGOs” they created or gave funds to for the project), and it has continued covertly and less than covertly at times in funding and arms that reflect the uncoventional warfare of the rebels, just not the military hardware of a standing army like Assad’s.
The situation that seeems to have strengthened Assad, Hezbolla and geopolitically Russia was not created by Assad, Hezbolla or Russia. It was created BY US operating with others in helping to create a “regime change” scenario in Syria which is, on the ground and politcally, actually an Islamist Sunni putsch. All the minority groups, non-Muslims and non-Sunni Muslims in Syria know this.
If the whole issue is “Assad is a dictator”, then what kind of government does the House of Saud run, or any of the potentates that claim hereditary rights to subjegate the people of the Gulf states to their rule? “Liberal Secular Democracies”???? Why is their no “Arab Spring” there??
Bullpucky.
I do think Obama supports Hezzbolah. The attack Isreal. He thinks that’s good.
“I do think Obama supports Hezzbolah. The attack Isreal. He thinks that’s good.”
I think Obama’s Middle East policy does not know an Islamist from a secular Muslim or one Islamist from another. I don’t think the results of his policy wind up supporting any one group of Islamists over another, EXCEPT in the case of the conflict in Syria where his policies are TRYING to take the side of the Sunni Islamists and their putsch there.
I don’t think he is intent on supporting any group BECAUSE that support will not favor Israel; I think I does not care if it is or is not detrimental to Israel. It’s his version of benign neglect.
Opposition to Iran?
That - in terms of Iran’s nuke programs - has more to do with the U.S. favoring the radical fundamentalist Wahabi-Sunnis in Saudi Arabia over the radical fundamentalist Shia theocrats in Iran.
Iran and Israel could somehow mend their fences overnight and Iran would still pursue its nuke program and the Saudis would expect us to still object. They know, in the long run, the major bones of contention in the Middle East will be between them.
Ordinary Syrians are confused by American hesitation to remove Bashar al-Assad.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.