John Cassidy, writing in The New Yorker, is generally positive about the president’s performance on the Syrian crisis, but he takes a couple of jabs. Are they warranted?
Setting aside the debate about how much criticism the President deserves for sending mixed messages (quite a bit) and how much credit he deserves for bringing the Russians and Syrians to the negotiating table (also quite a bit), the issue is what happens now. If the immediate goal was to stop Assad from gassing his own citizens, it’s been accomplished, at least for the moment…
…On Capitol Hill and in other parts of Washington, the President’s reputation as a decisive leader has taken another knock, but it was never very strong to begin with.
Let’s begin with the idea that the president is guilty of sending “mixed messages.” What were they?
I suppose the first mixed message goes back to when he initially stated that if Assad used chemical weapons it would cross a red line and be a game changer that would have serious consequences. Well, Assad used chemical weapons. Did he face serious consequences?
Back in June when the intelligence community finally decided that Assad had used chemical weapons on a limited basis, Obama reluctantly approved the delivery of lethal aid to the rebels. I’d say that having the world’s strongest military officially coming into a civil war on your opponents’ side is not a welcome development. You might call it a serious development. But if you want to call it something less than serious, we can move on to the administration’s performance in the aftermath of the August 21 sarin attack in Damascus.
While Secretary Kerry certainly engaged in some hyperbole (e.g., Munich) and the administration did a poor job, initially, making a convincing case for culpability, what they actually did was threaten to bomb the Assad regime. I’d call that serious, even if were to be “incredibly limited.” Except bombing Syria would have been a terrible idea, as Mr. Cassidy acknowledges.
Which brings me to Mr. Cassidy’s second dig at the president: that he is not decisive. But what’s the bottom line? Mr. Cassidy says himself, “If the immediate goal was to stop Assad from gassing his own citizens, it’s been accomplished…”
So, how are we going to measure “decisiveness”? If the president had said that Assad using chemical weapons would result in him losing his chemical weapons, and then that is exactly what happened, would we call that a lack of decisiveness? If the immediate goal in the aftermath of the 8/21 attacks was to prevent a recurrence, isn’t that what the president has accomplished?
It seems to me that the president made a decision early on that he did not want to be pulled into the Syrian Civil War, and if he has been decisive about anything, he has certainly been decisive about that. In fact, the lone area when I think he has changed his mind is when he agreed to supply lethal aid to the rebels, because that got our toes in the water a little deeper than the president wanted.
I get that people want to judge the president on style points, but isn’t it results that matter? He managed to keep his word about his red line without firing a shot. Considering that the American people and Congress didn’t support missile strikes or boots on the ground, his accomplishment is almost a miracle.
And people gotta nitpick.
Judging on style means that you don’t have to adjust your narrative to match new facts. Early on, the CW crystalized around the idea that the President and his administration were fucking Syria up by the numbers–and with no small amount of justification IMO. Then they managed to turn things around and make major steps towards keeping us out of the war while achieving our stated goals.
That poses a challenge for the established narrative… but that can be rectified if you complain about how the Administratuion looked doing it. Especially since questions of style can be spun any way you want.
Perception is reality. If you LOOK like you have the weaker position, you do! I don ‘t care how this is spun, Vladimir Putin comes out looking like the stronger president on this one. And it’s not the first time. He poked us in the eye with Snowden and the decision to post an article in the New York Times showed finesse. We got out-classed this time, it should be a lesson.
the media and “progressives” made up their minds a long long time ago that Obama is wrong. Everything else is just twisting the news to fit that pre-made narrative on a day-by-day basis.
the media and “progressives” made up their minds a long long time ago that Obama is wrong.
Coming from someone who thinks Obama is perfect, this is laughable. Your first part is correct. It’s your hatred of those who won’t “clap louder” that blinds you.
It seems like thousands of people got it in their heads that Team Obama was trying to sell a glorious little war and failing ignominiously at it — rather than that they were genuinely trying to do something about chemical weapons and seeking out advice from all comers, including the executive agencies and the Congress. He’s been evaluated against Bush’s hard-selling Iraq. But he wasn’t trying to hard-sell at all. That was entirely the wrong frame to impose around what was happening.
But he wasn’t trying to hard-sell at all. That was entirely the wrong frame to impose around what was happening.
So why was Kerry, and other “Democrats” going around screaming Munich!! and Hitler!!, and the rest of the scare tactics, for? And if they were using unapproved language, does that help the United States’ case? Obviously it didn’t.
Well, now that we’re getting indications that arriving at this hand-’em-over solution to Syria’s chemical weapons has been in the works for weeks, perhaps months, doesn’t it occur to you that all the posturing was likely as much a part of the dog-and-pony-show phase of political and diplomatic maneuvering as his so-called gaffe that was so quickly followed up by Putin’s “spontaneous” offer?
The swiftness with which a framework for carrying it out has been announced makes me think that Kerry and Lavrov (and their teams) have been hammering away at this for some time; then (perhaps with timetable forced by Assad’s latest atrocity) when the cake was baked, they set in motion the necessary Kabuki to sell it to the world.
Really, though, whether my second paragraph is correct or wildly off the mark, the fact remains that one doesn’t open negotiations with one’s last and final offer; one begins by demanding way more than what one will settle for.
Not buying it. Team Obama was too obviously caught off guard when Cameron couldn’t deliver. And his big speech on the need to bomb Syria was too obviously and poorly cobbled together at the last minute as Russia and Syria made their peace offering.
“While Secretary Kerry certainly engaged in some hyperbole (e.g., Munich) and the administration did a poor job, initially, making a convincing case for culpability…”
Gee, I must have missed it. Can someone provide a link to actual proof that Assad used chemical warfare?
I seemed to have missed all this as well:
Yeah, let’s go with some unidentified “intelligence community” determination and ignore the UN report for the May 15 to July 15, 2013 time period in Syria.
Let’s also mind-read Obama and declare that it was that “determination that turned him into a “reluctant” and very late supporter of Syrian rebels. Ignoring the US rebel training camps set up last year. And overlook all the other covert US actions funneling weapons to those “rebels.”
Yeah, let’s not let any facts get in the way of the preferred US narrative. And we should listen to Howard Stern (bomb Muslim countries and not Bill Maher.
History:
And that doesn’t include the bombs and weapons we supplied to and were used by others.
See also who provides a lot of the info to HRW’s report: Eliot Higgins. Who the fuck is that, you might ask?
Eliot Higgins
“Higgins has no background or training in weapons and is entirely self-taught, saying that “Before the Arab spring I knew no more about weapons that the average Xbox owner. I had no knowledge beyond what I’d learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo.” He has never been to Syria and has no friends or family there.”
Also not in Western-media:
Syrian rebel groups sought to buy materials for chemical weapons, prosecutors say
Then there was the other “expert” that Kerry and McCain cited: Elizabeth O’Bagy.
There is no “proof”. There is only circumstantial evidence as asserted by the intelligence agencies of 4 countries and the investigations of 2 NGOs.
The next steps.
Carlos Munoz, The Hill: Assad shifting chemical stocks to Lebanon, Iraq says rebel leaders
I think that this will be done quicker than expected. Delivery of chemical stocks for transport by sea from Lebanon would likely be the most efficient and safest way to deliver them to another country. That other country could either be Russia or the United States, given the Nunn-Lugar framework. The OPCW inspectors could then supervise the destruction of the chemical stocks outside of the civil war zone.
Don’t know if this is what is going on. But the the Free Syrian Army seems to be angry that strikes against Syrian military targets aren’t coming. It looks to me like posturing for the warhawks. And reminds me of the Cuban brigades’ attitudes to JFK not going all out when the promised uprising in Cuba did not occur.
I’m in the “conflict within the administration but muddled through” school instead of the 11-ty dimension chess school.
Kerry might not have been convincing because he was selling an agenda that he very much disagreed with. But went with the program until the planned agenda foundered internationally, in public opinion, and with Congress. I think in this case the memoirs (or Woodward book) at the end of the administration’s term will tell of Kerry bailing out a mess that the Responsibility-to-Protect twins had created. And Obama operating above the internal fray and going with what seemed to be working, changing course quickly when something was not working. If there’s a comparison with FDR it might be in the management style of how Obama supervises the execution of policy. It’s a much more flexible style than set chess-like strategies and decrees from on high.
We have seen glimpse of this style in the way that he went ahead with the surge in Afghanistan, cashiered McChrystal for publicly complaining about lack of resources when the President gave him what he said he needed, demoting Petraeus and instructing him to fulfill the commitment to the surge plan that he made, and then when Petraeus complained about poor intelligence or execution of CIA drone strikes, putting him in charge of CIA (where he flamed out). And we saw it once again pulling back the bigfooted DoD PR on the air stikes on Libya and lowering the US profile in that operation.
I always find it weird that people find it easier to believe that Obama has these incredibly elaborate plans than to believe that he’s willing to shift his approach when something he’s doing isn’t panning out. Pretty much everyone could see that the push towards military action was falling apart and there was plenty of reason to think it wasn’t going to work if they somehow went through with it.
But instead of believing that people within the Administration were able to see that too, some folks want to insist that there was some screwy plan in place, like introducing New Coke as a ploy to get people excited about Coke Classic.
PBTSD – Post-Bush Traumatic Stress Disorder.
History does not repeat, it rhymes. Said Mark Twain.
But sometimes it’s free verse.
I think the same could be said about the supporters of the president when it comes to nitpicking. Who really gives a fuck if this was all planned policy or if Obama just changed course when the opportunity arose. The latter is praise-worthy in and of itself. Why the need to make Obama into some diplomatic genius? He’s certainly not trying to take the credit; it’s one of his more likable traits if you ask me. Give credit to other people, get the result you want.
The end result, in this specific context, is all that matters. Style matters in some areas where I think the president is too focused on the result, but not here.
I think it’s a bit sociopathic.
How many civil wars have ever been successfully “contained?” This is the 20th century liberal internationalist order working precisely as intended: Russia and the US as the kingmakers over foreign realms, occasionally with a battleship or two mixed in for flavor. I expect next they will continue to attempt to dictate the terms of a neo-Baathist government to succeed Assad. I expect many millions of Syrians to resist.
It’s ironic that Sam Power is a public servant after rising to academic prominence for her theories on how institutions contort themselves to avoid the obvious problem. The Syrian civil war is successfully contained vis a vis Hezbollah and opening a strategic dialogue with Iran, but if some Syrian dude who came up through those refugee camps or on the battlefield should one day blow something up around the world, or the Syrian nation itself never recover, I hope this generation of global leadership will not throw up its hands and say nobody could have predicted it.
Since this website’s clientele seems to have taken an overwhelming turn for the wacky and anti-Obama (man, do I ever get nervous at seeing the likes of Calvin Jones and Voice in the Wilderness liking my posts), I just want to make clear that any disarmament is good disarmament and I’m glad that the show of American force was able to effect change. And that people who make “process” arguments are jokes and should be ignored.
I’m just concerned at the obviously anti-revolutionary sentiment taken hold regarding Syria (and the fact that the only pro-revolutionary space was occupied by the likes of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and John McCain). A conservative reform movement doesn’t really have a place in a bloody civil war that displaced a third of a country already.
It goes to show that Aug. 21’s worst sin was temporarily obstructing the world from pretending like the war wasn’t still going.
It’s hard to get behind a revolution involving the slaughter of Christians and Shia brought to us by the same people who brought us 9/11. Maybe if Obama called for airstrikes against Saudi Arabia and Germany…
“Decisive” is DC-speak for running around like your dick is on fire, messing shit up.
You know, like “The Decider”.
Or observing the obvious as Glen Ford did.
I found this an interesting reading.
M of A – A Short History Of The War On Syria – 2006-2014
Too tidy on the origins of the protests in Deraa. Unless billmon is going to argue that the Arab Spring, Greek opposition, Spanish indignados, UK Uncut movement, and Occupy Wall Street were all US operations.
This is Bernhard an not Billmon. He took over from Billmon.
The optimism alone was a giveaway that billmon wasn’t the writer. And that’s if one misses that the voice, style, and analysis are most definitely not billmon’s.
Billmon stopped writing on this site about 6 years ago.
Wasn’t aware that billmon ever wrote on the “Moon of Alabama” blog.
He was the best thing to happen to dKos when he first began commenting in November 2002.
MoA was Billmon’s blog and a great one and then one day he decided to stop writing, I think burn-out, Bernhard took over.
Nope. Billmon’s blog was “Whiskey Bar.” For some time I thought it was clever to honor the old Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weil song from Mahagonny. But that was wrong — he took from The Doors recording that was listed as “Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar)” and thought it was original to them.
Yes – maybe I should say it is a sequel to the Whiskey bar – but with the old design of the Wiskey Bar and many of the people who used to frequent that place, at least at the beginning.
And I just was that it was in 2004 that this happend.
Might have been a response to billmon shutting down the comments section at “Whiskey Bar.”
Looks about right to me. It is absurd on its face to believe that peaceful protesters suddenly took up arms against Assad. Even Chomsky has gotten this wrong, taking the Western-common-knowledge that peaceful protesters were responded to with brutality, and then they all took up arms to fight back. Bunch of bullshit. Thanks for the link.
Of course you are correct. But what happened was not sudden nor were the people taking up arms the protesters. Nor did the protests end even after the civil war started. Protesters were suppressed by police for about six months even as protests spread. Then Assad made his reform speech and after the protests failed to stop, the army joined the police in suppressing protests. As the army moved in seige on the towns of Deraa, Homs, and Hamaa in the late summer and early fall of 2011, Syrian soldiers with relatives in those areas began deserting from the Syrian army and formed the Free Syrian Army, only one of the opposition militias operating today. As the regional conflict continued more higher ranking civilian and military officials defected from the regime and either joined the fighting or began organizing a shadow government. Sometime in late 2011, some of these shadow government figures met with Syrian exiles in Istanbul to organize an international diplomatic effort. That was when SoS Hillary Clinton and President Obama started calling on Assad to enter into dialogue with the political opposition. It was in early 2012 that reports of CIA infiltration into Syria began surfacing in the lefty media following on retrospectives of the Libyan revolution as a CIA operation. Shortly afterward, the situation turned into an honest civil war.
It’s a complicated situation that does not fit into anyone’s narrative. And there are multiple internal and external political forces at play.
I stopped believing in Chomsky’s invincibility when he wrote that book about JFK’s assassination. He gets lots of things wrong.
A good enough recap — would have been better if it left out the suspected but far from confirmed bits or identified them for what they are. A bit heavy on projections that seem wildly optimistic for other than the short-term outcome of dousing the powder keg that the US, KSA, Qatar, and Israel created. But maybe those folks will return to the drawing board and try to figure out how to unwind GWB’s excellent adventure that moved Iraq from its odd unaligned position into the Iranian sphere since that added an impediment to regime change in Iran.
I find that recap quite delusional.
I think you can see why by looking at the assertions that are not supported by links.
It’s really the flip side of the neo-con argument, but it misses entirely that what the neo-cons started, Obama has resisted every step of the way. That’s why the Saudis and the Turks have been so pissed off for so long, and why they are pissed off today.
Obama has never bought into the idea that it would be some magic trick to throw out the Assad regime. He’s slow-walked everything, withheld support, refused to make commitments…
It’s also clear now that, for whatever reason, the Assad regime really did fire these weapons. I was very skeptical myself, and I definitely entertained the idea that forces in the resistance could have exploited Obama’s red line in order to box him in. But even if they did try, he slipped out of the noose.
In other words, Obama has never agreed that this is a fight against some axis of resistance. He hasn’t been waging that battle. And he just found a way to refuse to fight that battle.
And, if he’s right, he hasn’t lost anything, and neither has the United States.
It’s pretty unusual for Bernhard to write a story without links – if you look at the other stuff its usually full with it. However, he has often be right with his analysis of situations – always, of course not.
I guess he shows much more the non-US perception of this situation. Btw. if you read the international press and also the comments to the stories you will find that many people are convinced that Obama wanted that war and that he might be still be looking for reasons to bomb at a later point. I hope this perception will turn out to be wrong.
It is currently very difficult to see what really happend and even what is happening. There still hasn’t been shown any evidence that it was actually Assad using the CW’s – the UN just confirmed that CW’s were used but no prove of who did it. As you remember they were not allowed to look for evidence who done it.
Btw. what is going to happen to the CW’s owned by the rebels?
Overall I am glad that at least for the moment things are cooling down and there might be a gap to find more peaceful solutions, and not just for the CW’s.
And I should have looked again first – there are links.
I said to look at the assertions that lack links. I didn’t say he didn’t have links.
Allies, political opponents, and self-interested warmongers have been trying to push Obama to keep a residual force in Iraq, to stay in Afghanistan, and to crush the Assad regime and replace with a government hostile to the Shiites. He has refused, delayed, or taken half-measures every step of the way.
I always find it amusing when people are befuddled by Nit-Pickers picking nits and Nay-Sayers saying, “Nay.” Fish gotta swim…
Laughed. Fish indeed do gotta swim. Good one.
Then because we’ve seen to have forgotten:
2002
January – GWB’s “Axis of Evil” (Iran, Iraq and N. Korea) SOTU
July – secret meeting – WMD the agreed up casus belli (described in the Downing Street Memo.
September –
roll out of GWB’s “case for war” because new products aren’t released in August.
Sept 12, 2002 GWB UN General Assembly speech
Blair’s “white paper” (cribbed from an old master’s thesis)
October – Congress (the Democratically controlled Senate approved) approves GWB’s request for authorization on Iraq.
November – UN passes Resolution 1441 and inspectors return to Iraq
2003
February 5 – Colin Powell presentation to UN Security Council
March 19 – “shock and awe” begins.
—-
no one has forgotten anything
the only thing similar between Iraq and Syria is both are in the Middle East
And the US called for regime change of both (with some prodding from Israel) and threatened to bomb both unless they complied with UN weapons inspectors. Saddam did so and got blasted away anyway. But he didn’t have any allies.
They are similarities and differences between how GWB dealt with Iraq and Obama is dealing with Syria. But the primary similarity is taking an aggressive stand against countries that haven’t acted against us or one of our special allies. btw — under international law that is illegal, not that we pay that much mind to our illegal acts.
And the primary dissimilarity is that one led to a trillion-dollar war and the other, so far, jack squat. But, you know, six of one, half dozen of the other, pretty much.
Too soon to tell. In 1954 Republicans could have crowed that the Democratic war in Korea had cost much US blood and treasure, but assisting the South Vietnamese after the ouster of the France and restoration of the Shah in Iran hadn’t cost squat.
Sorry, I think you’re reaching a bit when you call threatening to bomb Syria a serious consequence. The red line comment was a veiled threat in itself and now the Syrians know it was just a bluff that got called. There were no serious consequences except the fact that Putin comes out looking like he muscled the US into backing down.