Obama Risk A Global Catastrophe
President Obama is caught between the harsh realities of the Mideast
and the fantasy world of Washington’s warmongers, but he prefers to
risk a global catastrophe than to stand up to the neocons, the
liberal hawks, the Israelis and the Saudis, a dilemma that Daniel
Lazare explains.
By Daniel LazareOctober 03, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Consortiumnews"-
“Only odd-numbered world wars start in Sarajevo.” That was the joke
during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. Though it turned out not to be
true, fortunately, a strange echo occurred a few years later when
NATO military commander General Wesley Clark threatened to shoot
down Russian planes flying paratroopers into Kosovo, prompting a
British general to
refuse on the grounds that “it’s not worth starting World
War III.”
But war among the great powers may now be in the
offing in Syria, where the conflict seems to be exploding on a new
and grander scale. Instead of two players, NATO and Russia, it now
includes a half dozen or more: the U.S., France and Great Britain,
plus Russia, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab gulf
states. Where the conflicting claims of Bosnians, Serbs and Croats
were difficult enough to sort out in former Yugoslavia, the struggle
over Syria is an immense tangle in which a growing list of
combatants struggle to impose their disparate points of view.
The upshot is a game of chicken that is bigger,
bloodier and more intractable than anything in decades. Recognizing
that an Islamic State takeover in Syria will lead to another round
of jihad in Chechnya, Vladimir Putin sees no alternative but to step
up support for the besieged government of Bashar al-Assad. Refusing
to stand by while fellow Shi‘ites are slaughtered, Iran sees no
alternative but to step up support as well.
Determined to halt any expansion by Iran or
Hezbollah on its border, Israel increasingly tilts toward ISIS and
Al Qaeda, while the Saudis – more and more paranoid about a “Shi‘ite
crescent” extending from Yemen to Bahrain, Syria and even the
kingdom’s own Eastern Province – have vowed to intensify their
support for the Sunnis.
Too much is at stake for anyone to back down. An
Israeli-Russian rapprochement, which could conceivably defuse the
crisis, has long been an intriguing possibility. Israel has refused
to condemn Russia’s annexation of Crimea. After all, Israel’s huge
Russian immigrant population tilts toward Putin, while the only
monument to the
victorious Red Army outside the former Soviet bloc lies
in the seaside town of Netanya, about ten miles north of Tel Aviv –
all of which suggests that it is better disposed to Russia than is
generally realized.
If Putin could engineer an agreement that would
allow Assad to hold onto power while reining in Hezbollah, Israel
would conceivably go along. But Israel fears that Hezbollah will
take advantage of any such truce to build up its missile arsenal,
which is why in the end it will almost certainly say no.
Besides, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
told the General Assembly on Thursday, it regards ISIS
and Iran as common enemies, “and when your enemies fight each other,
don’t strengthen either one – weaken both.” Hence, its policy is to
prolong the deadlock even though the results in the end may prove
more dangerous for the Jewish state rather than less.
Finally, there is the United States. It has a
relatively young, hip, liberal president who opposed the 2003
invasion of Iraq. It also has military expenditures bigger than
those of the
next nine most powerful countries combined. So surely it
has both the good sense and the clout to see that disaster is
averted.
But, no, the U.S. is too beholden to the Israelis,
to the Saudis, and to an increasingly Strangelovian foreign-policy
establishment at home to act independently.
Foot-Dragger-in-Chief
Barack Obama has long cultivated a Yoda-like air
of detachment and inscrutability as hawks tried to push him in an
ever more bellicose direction. Yet, despite his administration’s
saber rattling, he backed off from bombing Syria in 2013 when Putin
arranged for Assad to jettison his chemical-weapons arsenal.
Obama also has refused consistent Turkish demands
to open up a no-fly zone in Syria’s north, which would inject the
U.S. military directly into the battle to topple Assad’s
Baathists. But Obama has let the CIA channel funds to thousands of
rebels, many of them
Islamists allied with Al Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s official
Syrian affiliate. He has not blocked the Saudis from supplying Al
Nusra with
U.S.-made high-tech TOW missiles.
The ultimate absurdity occurred two weeks ago when
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest
blamed U.S. war hawks for forcing the President to embark
on a $500-million program to teach anti-Assad rebels how to battle
Islamic State even though he knew all along that it wouldn’t
work. “But I think it’s also time for our critics to ‘fess up in
this regard as well,” Earnest said. “They were wrong.”
What was this other than a confession by the Obama
administration that it is too weak to say no? It knows that its
Syria policy is a disaster, but it is too worried about what the
Israelis, Saudis or Washington’s neocons might say to embark on
anything different.
So the U.S. is unable to apply the brakes either.
Ordinarily, the press might be expected to inject a note of reason
except that the major media outlets so far seem as confused (or
misleading) as anyone. Anne Barnard and Neil MacFarquhar’s
front-page story in Friday’s New York Times is
typical of the muddled thinking that passes for journalism these
days.
Rife with innuendo, it charges that Russia has
intervened in Syria in order to embarrass Obama – “always a
consideration for Mr. Putin” — and predicts that “the glow of early
Russian successes will almost certainly fade … as the realities of
Syria’s grim, four-year civil war slowly assert themselves. Mr.
Assad’s forces are worn down and demoralized, and they are in
control of only about 20 percent of Syria’s territory.”
True enough, although they might have added that
if the Syrian military is showing signs of exhaustion, it is because
the U.S. and its allies have poured “hundreds of millions of dollars
and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons” into the arms of
the opposition, as Vice President Joe Biden let slip in a talk at
Harvard’s Kennedy School last October.
Barnard and MacFarquhar also report that Assad “is
vilified by many in the majority Sunni population,” which may also
be true, although they might have noted the longstanding campaign by
the U.S. and its allies to stir up sectarian hatred in the first
place. (Assad is an Alawite, an offshoot of Shia Islam.)
In
a secret 2006 diplomatic cable made public by Wikileaks,
for example, then-U.S. Ambassador to Syria William V. Roebuck urged
Washington to “play on Sunni fears of Iranian influence” in order to
weaken the Assad regime. Although reports that Iranian Shi‘ites are
proselytizing among poor Sunnis are “often exaggerated,” Roebuck
said, “[b]oth the local Egyptian and Saudi missions here (as well as
prominent Syrian Sunni religious leaders) are giving increasing
attention to the matter and we should coordinate more closely with
their governments on ways to better publicize and focus regional
attention on the issue.”
The reports of Shi’ite proselytizing were
exaggerated yet Roebuck advised blowing them up all the more.
Prescient Warnings
In August 2012, the Defense Intelligence Agency
warned that Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al
Qaeda – all fiercely anti-Shi‘ite – were the main driving forces
behind the anti-Assad rebellion, that they were seeking to establish
a “Salafist principality in eastern Syria,” and that they were
attempting to drum up an anti-Shi‘ite jihad among “the rest of the
Sunnis in the Arab world,” which is “exactly what the supporting
powers to the opposition” – i.e. the West, the Gulf states, and
Turkey – “want in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”
In his remarks at the Kennedy School last October,
Biden that the Gulf states flooded the Syrian rebels with arms and
money because “they were so determined to take down Assad and
essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war.” Sectarianism didn’t just
arrive from the sky — rather America and its Gulf allies did their
best to nurture and expand it.
Barnard and MacFarquhar go on to say that with
Islamic State advancing on Homs and Damascus from the east, “rival
insurgents were putting new pressure on the Syrian coastal
provinces, where Mr. Assad’s support is strongest. The fighters
advancing on that front were not from the Islamic State but from the
Army of Conquest, a group that includes an affiliate of Al Qaeda
known as the Nusra Front and other Islamist groups, including
several more secular groups that have been covertly armed and
trained by the United States.”
In other words, U.S.-backed forces are working
hand-in-glove with Al Qaeda as they advance on coastal provinces
where Syria’s Shi‘ite population is concentrated. They might have
added that this is a bloodbath in the making that America and its
allies are doing everything to foment. But instead they criticize
Putin for trying to stop it.
Instead of clearing up the confusion, the press
compounds it – and hence adds to the danger of a wider conflict. The
Times is even more hypocritical in its opinion pages. Its
lead editorial accuses Putin of “escalat[ing] the bloody
conflict” – as if the U.S. and its allies had not already ratcheted
it up as high as possible – and complains that intervention “risks
bringing Russia into direct confrontation with the United States,”
even though Putin is acting at the invitation of the Syrian
government while the United States flouts international law by
sending in warplanes without Syrian government permission.
“This move by President Vladimir Putin complicates
an already chaotic battlefield and will certainly make a political
settlement even harder to achieve,” the editorial adds. Yet it is
the U.S. that has helped prevent a political settlement by demanding
that Assad step down as a precondition for any further talks.
The Times says that Assad’s “hold on
power has weakened as the Syrian Army has lost ground not only to
the Islamic State, which is trying to establish a caliphate in Syria
and Iraq, but also to a coalition of insurgent groups that is
opposed to the Islamic State” – without acknowledging that the same
groups, as its own journalists report, are also allied with Al
Qaeda.
“Mr. Putin could have prevented the turn to
violence back in 2011 by persuading his ally not to attack peaceful
antigovernment protesters,” the editorial adds. But it is unclear
how Putin could have pulled off such a feat since the U.S. failed to
prevent its ally Saudi Arabia from sending in troops to crush mass
protests the same year in Bahrain or from conducting nightly bombing
raids in Yemen that so far this year have killed more than 2,300
civilians.
The Times faults Putin for “not try[ing]
to work out a plan with the Americans to ensure their respective
warplanes would not come in contact,” but then says the United
States “rightly rejected a Russian warning after the airstrikes
started to avoid Syrian airspace and halt their attacks on the
Islamic State.”
It concludes by declaring that “Obama will have to
work with America’s partners on a unified response to Russia’s moves
and seek a way to end the war,” which means acceding to Saudi vows
that support for the rebels “will
be intensified.”
The effect is to encourage more of the same
mindless confrontationalism that has already plunged Syria into
catastrophe. What will Obama do if Russia continues to bomb rebels
supported by the U.S. and Saudis? Will he step up military aid or
send in jets to chase Russian fighters off? What if U.S. and Russian
planes exchange fire? Will he back away from a showdown or allow
himself to be maneuvered into a broader conflict?
No one knows. But with the warmongers in control
in Washington, the fighting can only spread.
Daniel Lazare is the author of several books
including The
Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt
Brace).