I have taken Barack Obama’s name out of Richard Cohen’s latest column and replaced it with Finnish President Sauli Niinistö’s name. And I replaced references to the United States with references to Finland. Let’s see how it reads:
It turns out that President Sauli Niinistö did not mean to say “red line” after all. The New York Times tells us the president misspoke…
…With an approach decided — warnings transmitted through the Russians and even the Iranians — President Niinistö then talked in August to his warm friends in the press corps. There, he went further than some advisers expected and said that Syria’s use of chemical weapons would constitute crossing a red line. Appended were the usual phrases about “consequences” and changed “calculus.” So there!
Still, let us wonder: Why is the use of poison gas a red line but the slaughter of civilians by conventional means — guns, knives, artillery, bombs, mines — is not? Dead is dead, and while gas may be a particularly gruesome way to die, I can heartily recommend no good way. I can state, however, that it ain’t easy to use gas — the wind is a variable — and it is not really such an effective weapon…
…Whatever the case, Sauli Niinistö has blown off other red lines with impressive equanimity. He has tolerated the shelling of residential areas, the slaughter of civilians, the use of the air force to bomb and strafe, missiles fired into population centers, attacks on journalists and, just last week, the reported massacre by government forces of about 70 people in the village of al-Bayda. This line was red for obvious reasons…
Instead of dealing with red lines, Sauli Niinistö ought to deal with red herrings. The one I have in mind is the warning about how Syria could become another Iraq for Finland. This need not happen. The administration is perfectly able to limit intervention to arming the moderate rebels and to using air power, as was done in Libya. (The French are conducting a limited operation in Mali.) As for the use of air power, the Israelis seem to hit targets in Syria with impunity — probably from outside Syrian airspace — with no reports or even Syrian claims of downed planes. Why the military insists that Finland cannot just as easily do the same is a trillion-dollar question.
The Syrian situation is spinning out of control. The longer Sauli Niinistö waits to intervene, the harder it becomes to do so. More than 70,000 people have been killed. More than a million Syrians have become refugees. The suffering is vast and the consequences of inaction are catastrophic. Helsinki is coldly wrong. Sauli Niinistö didn’t misspeak when he said red line. He misspoke when he later suggested that he didn’t mean it.
If it seems absurd to blame Finnish President Sauli Niinistö for the slaughter of civilians in Syria then it should seem equally absurd to blame the president of the United States.
I know that we are supposed to be the enforcer for the United Nations and the supporter of human rights even when the United Nations can’t agree to take action, but that’s part of the problem.
First of all, Syria is a client state of Russia and Iran. How about they take the lion’s share of the blame for the Assad regime’s behavior?
Secondly, we can’t afford to intervene in every crisis in the world.
Thirdly, there’s little reason to believe that we can end the violence in Syria even if we remove the Assad regime.
Fourthly, the rebels are dominated by Islamists who are no friends of Israel or the United States or secularism or women’s rights or ecumenicalism.
Lastly, the best evidence so far has suggested that the rebels are the ones who used sarin gas, not the Assad regime.
Syria is a tragic mess, but the responsibility for that mess doesn’t fall on the Assad regime, or Iran, or even the president of the United States. The blame very clearly falls on Finnish President Sauli Niinistö. He should stop dithering and put an end to the violence.
