Even
The Atlantic’s typically hawkish Jeffrey
Goldberg was confused,
tweeting, “Still trying to understand
Hillary’s point re: no-fly zone shared with
Russia, which supports Assad’s air force.
Not getting it.” It’s understandable why he
doesn’t get it: It makes no sense. Either
Clinton is calling for an actual no-fly zone
that would involve de facto war against
Russia and Syria, or she’s calling for a
fantasy one where Russia reverses its entire
foreign policy and becomes a client state of
the U.S. She’s either being wildly reckless
or willfully obtuse.
No
other major Democrat supports Clinton’s
tortured position. President Barack Obama
himself
has dismissed the idea, including when
Clinton pushed for it while serving in his
administration. But Clinton isn’t alone. She
has lots of company on the other side of
aisle, including from GOP establishment
favorite Sen. Marco Rubio (with whom
she shares a foreign policy consultant,
Beacon Strategies), who has repeatedly
called for a no-fly zone in similarly vague
terms. In the Republican debates, the
moderators haven’t even gone as far as
Raddatz tried to in clarifying what this
means.
The
term “no-fly zone” is casually thrown around
in the debates unchallenged, either because
the moderators themselves don’t know what
exactly it means or because they assume
their audience doesn’t. Either way, “no-fly
zone” has become the most effective way of
calling for regime change in Syria without
appearing to do so. It’s a neocon
dog-whistle designed to appeal to hawks
without offending a war-weary public. As
George Orwell wrote in “Politics
and the English Language,” “such
phraseology is needed if one wants to name
things without calling up mental pictures of
them.”
If
Clinton and the GOP want to spark a war with
Syria, and by extension Russia, they should
be honest about that and what it would
entail. Right now all we have is
tough-on-Assad bromides and virtually no
realistic assessment of how such a plan
would be carried out.
This type of bellicose language form Clinton
wouldn’t be so troubling if she wasn’t both
Obama’s former secretary of state and his
likeliest successor. As Secretary of State
John Kerry and Obama attempt to negotiate an
end to the Syrian conflict, having just
adopted a very
tenuous framework at the U.N. Security
Council, the specter of a de facto
declaration of war against Russia in January
2017 is hardly helpful. Perhaps the Russians
assume it’s just election-year bluster, but
perhaps they don’t. Or perhaps the Iranians
don’t. Or perhaps, above all, Assad does
not.
Is
this a risk worth taking to score political
points in an election? Clinton’s
grandstanding may focus-group well and make
her look “tough,” but it can only undermine
efforts to bring Syria’s devastating civil
war to an end. Clinton might not care that
her position is unworkable and reckless. But
shouldn’t the media?
Adam Johnson is an associate editor at
AlterNet and a contributor to the media
watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
