Don’t Just Sit There, Bomb Something
by Chas Freeman
An acquaintance who, like me, used to work on foreign affairs in the
U.S. government, told me the other day that he thought that, in going
after Bashar al-Assad, President Barak Obama had decided on an approach
more akin to Bush 41 (carefully building a consensus) than Bush 43 (you
are either with us or against us). He added that, to make a success of
bombing Syria as Bush 41 made of bombing Iraq in the first Gulf War, the
president didn’t just need the support of the Congress and the public
but also of NATO, the Arab League, and a coalition of the willing. But
the obstacles Obama faces are much greater than those George H. W. Bush
did and I don’t think the analogy to the first Gulf War really holds.
The circumstances today are totally different than in 1990, when
strong impulses to rally behind the United States borne of the Cold War
continued to animate allied decisions. There is no longer a common
external threat to draw other countries into formation behind us. Two
decades of perceived American indifference to allied and friendly views
on a wide range of issues have taken their toll, especially in the
Middle East and Europe. The Syrian issue, although greatly complicated
by foreign players within the region and beyond it, has no global
context of Manichean struggle to channel reactions to it.
In 1990-1991, as the USSR collapsed, the Russians ceased to be a
significant factor in the Middle East, erasing the bipolar order of the
past and freeing Saddam wrongly to assume that he could act on his own
and with impunity against Kuwait. In 2013, the region is driven by
regional rather than global dynamics but, thanks to events in Egypt and
Saudi disillusionment with the U.S. policies of the past thirteen years,
Russia is on the make and poised for a comeback as a strategic player
in the Middle East.
In 1990, the world’s Muslims were solidly anti-communist and mostly
well-disposed to the United States. Anti-communism is now an
irrelevancy. The fallout from 9/11, the failed American pacification
campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, and U.S. identification with Israel’s
attacks on Lebanon and Gaza have replaced Muslim goodwill with
animosity. The appeal of American values has been tarnished by numerous
abuses, and the worldwide credibility of U.S. intelligence is low. The
British defection from the enterprise leaves our pretensions to speak
and act for the “international community” in tatters. (The poodle has
left the American lap and walked off the job. The French are
halfheartedly applying for the position. They aren’t house-trained and
will want too much to get it.)
Major actors in the international community, such as it is, value the
institutions that embody it, the U.N., the U.N. Charter, and
international law, to none of which the U.S. has deferred, except highly
selectively, since our Kosovo intervention with NATO in October 1998.
Fifteen years of selective adherence to treaties and laws greatly
detract from the credibility of our claim now to be acting to enforce
the Geneva Convention of 1929 in Syria, especially when the
“international community” as well as the Arab League and our own allies
have declined to authorize us to do so. Abroad, we are not seen as
righteous vigilantes on behalf of humanitarian principles but as
proponents of the theses that military might confers right, that
military actions trump diplomacy (which is mostly just for show), and
that political solutions are for wimps. There will be no international
rally behind an essentially unilateral U.S. attack on Syria. On the
contrary, if we carry out such an attack, it will further diminish our
international standing and leadership. Illegal actions to enforce
legality are the very definition of cynicism.
When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, it was a clear and abrupt
challenge to the rule of law in the post-Cold War era, not to mention an
obvious threat by a single, very selfish state to monopolize the
world’s major sources of energy. From the outset, the U.S. and Saudi
Arabia sought and received U.N. authorization to “form a posse” to deal
with these challenges. The atrocities in Syria are the product of a
civil war, not of a violation of any other country’s sovereignty. The
situation in Syria is also an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe that
has been allowed to fester for over two years, with respect to which the
U.N. has been marginalized and is now ignored by us and some other
players. Whatever happens, it is highly unlikely that we will accede to
the desire of other great powers that we defer to the U.N. and hence to
their interest in international norms of behavior. For this reason,
President Obama is likely to take a drubbing from allies, friends, and
adversaries alike at the upcoming G-20 meeting in St. Petersburg, where
he must make the case for what he has unilaterally decided but Congress
has yet to approve.
To my mind, the most interesting and significant aspect of what has
just happened — the issuance of an order to attack, followed by its
sudden suspension until Congress can review it — is the domestic
rediscovery of the fact that wars cannot be successfully mounted or
sustained without a measure of domestic political backing. (In tactical
terms, this is an attempt to share the political blame and pin the
charge of vacillation and weakness on the Republican House.) There is a
chance that, in the course of debating the order to attack Syria,
someone will actually read our Constitution (Article I, Section 8,
Clause 11) on how wars are to be legally authorized. I note that, in his
statement
Saturday, the president claimed inherent authority to make
war. I hope that this concept, like the divine right of kings in its
pedigree, is appropriately challenged in the debate. Unfortunately, the
divine right of legislatures, an equal problem in the breakdown of the
separation of powers and hence the operation of our system of
government, will not be challenged.
Getting our country, our government, and the president’s authority in
foreign affairs into the multiple conundrums in which they now find
themselves was the work of many administrations and Congresses, not just
poor Mr. Obama (as the venerable Israeli peace activist, Uri Avnery
aptly termed him in a recent column). I don’t think anyone could envy
the position our president is now in domestically or internationally. He
was dealt a bad hand. He has not played the game in such a way to pick
up better cards since. Now his bluff has been called.
– Chas Freeman served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during
the war to liberate Kuwait and as Assistant Secretary of Defense from
1993-1994. Since 1995, he has chaired Projects International, Inc., a
Washington-based firm that creates businesses across borders for its
American and foreign clients. He was the editor of the Encyclopedia
Britannica entry on “diplomacy” and is the author of five books,
including “America’s Misadventures in the Middle East” and “Interesting
Times: China, America, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige.”
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We invite you to join with the whole Church at the invitation of Pope Francis to pray for peace in Syria. He has declared this Saturday
to be a day of prayer and fasting to obtain peace for this country so
in need of our compassion and desperately searching for hope. 
