Summary: As the Syrian Crisis unfolds, it starts to resemble both a weird, 21st-century “remake” of Barbara Tuchman’s classic The Guns of August, married to an odd set of nested paradoxes. We seem caught between the possibility of hostilities and a diplomatic resolution which nobody will find terribly satisfactory. Any peaceful resolution of the Syrian Question will probably depend upon continuing to tolerate for the time being the presence of a noisome dictator. There are no perfect outcomes, and not a lot of even good outcomes. The best we can hope for is a least bad outcome, as we embrace the consolations of sometimes Soviet Admiral Sergei Gorshkov’s philosophy that “good enough is best.”
By: Paul S. Marchand
Watching the so-called Syrian Crisis unfold is somewhat akin to living through a weird, 21st-century “remake” of the late Barbara Tuchman’s now classic The Guns of August. We all have a sense that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons against other Syrians represents something that is simply “not done.” Assad’s crossing of a so-called red line has been treated by the United States as something akin to Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand on that thrice-cursed day of Vidovdan, June 28, 1914.
In making a case to the American public for unilateral military intervention against the Assad regime, President Obama has attempted to follow Theodore Roosevelt’s advice of speaking softly and carrying a big stick. As the President has sought to build up support for a so-called surgical strike against Syria, the world has seen much of the same kind of diplomatic maneuvering that consumed the month of July, 1914. The intervention of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Viktorovich Lavrov --- apparently in response to an off-the-cuff remark from Secretary of State John Kerry at a media availability --- seems to have led to some sort of “road to Damascus” volte-face from the Syrians, who have now acknowledged their possession of chemical weapons and have ventilated, through the Russian Foreign Ministry, a proposal to surrender their chemical weapons inventory to international control.
This was where events stood this evening when the President addressed the nation. Mr. Obama’s remarks were, in all honesty, somewhat paradoxical. On one hand, the President disclaimed any intention of acting as “the world’s policeman,” or of putting American “boots on the ground” in Syria, but he certainly retained in his text some distinct emphasis on the idea that the Syrians --- and their backers in the Kremlin--- had only been brought to their expressed willingness to make concessions by the presence of “credible [American] military force.” Clearly, the Presidential text was overtaken by today’s events.
Still, we may credit the president with not having made the terrible mistake Austria-Hungary made at the end of July, 1914. In that earlier crisis, Vienna had delivered to the Serbian government, which it held responsible for Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, a stringent ultimatum, to which a reply from Serbia was demanded within 48 hours. The Serbs complied with the 48-hour deadline in a document that essentially conceded all of Austria-Hungary’s demands. Indeed, so complete was Serbia’s capitulation that German Emperor Wilhelm II declared that Serbia’s reply had “remove[ed] all cause for war.”
To the extent that Damascus’s response to the Russian démarche appears to represent a significant climbdown by the Assad regime, the Obama administration would have appeared far too bellicose for its own good had it not expressed a willingness to delay military action and a Congressional vote pending further talks. Not for this administration, then, the senile belligerence of Vienna, or the hell-bent-for-war rejection by the George W. Bush administration of Iraqi diplomatic efforts to stave off the US invasion of a decade ago. This administration, at least for the time being, appears to agree that talking is better than shooting. As Winston Churchill once put it: “jaw jaw is better than war war.”
At all events, however any talks may go forward, we must acknowledge that in the current diplomatic dance over Syria, there remain paradoxes within paradoxes within paradoxes.
First, we must understand that Syria is not Libya. US military efforts against Muammar Qaddafi were essentially in the nature (as an old Chinese proverb has it) of “giving the falling wall a push.” Qaddafi’s ramshackle regime ultimately collapsed of its own contradictions and inconsistencies. Syria, on the other hand, is ruled by a family dictatorship that has perfected over many years the infrastructure and apparatus of ironfisted control. Bashar Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, was easily the most brutal dictator in the Middle East. Writing in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem, New York Times reporter (and quondam Iraq War cheerleader) Thomas Friedman once observed that Hafez Assad played by so-called Hama Rules: the ruthless use of overwhelming force to crush even the slightest dissent. Friedman coined the phrase “Hama Rules” to refer to the so-called Hama massacre of February, 1982, when Syrian forces swept into the city of Hama to crush an uprising of the Muslim Brotherhood. An estimated 40,000 were slain by Hafez Assad’s security forces. From then until now, the Assad family has never been afraid to play by Hama Rules.
But if the Assad family remains willing to play by Hama Rules, using chemical agents to suppress dissent, it also remains uniquely poised to insulate itself from accountability. Any US intervention in the Civil War now raging in Syria would inevitably be spun by the Assad family, by its water carriers, and by the Kremlin as an American assault upon the so-called Arab Nation. It may be paradoxical that Arab dictators who have historically looked to the United States as either a convenient prop or a useful enemy find this country so integral to the maintenance of their regimes, but it remains so. Bashar Assad won’t go because we ask him to, or even because we tell him to; Bashar Assad will go the way so many Baathist dictators have gone. He will go in a coup; he will either go out at gunpoint into a cushy exile or he will go down in a hail of bullets, presumably taking the rest of his family with him; it is the Baathist way.
Indeed, for Bashar Assad’s minority, Alawite government, the best possible guarantee of its continued existence may well be the enmity of the United States. If Sergei Viktorovich’s plan produces some kind of non-military resolution, under which the Assad regime agrees to turn over its chemical assets, presumably to the United Nations, the regime will necessarily have to remain in place and retain sufficient power to ensure the successful implementation of any kind of negotiated settlement. For the United States, the paradox of Syria may be that to secure the elimination of the dictator’s arsenal, we may find ourselves obliged to tolerate for the time being the continued presence of the dictator.
And Americans on both the left and the right should be considerate in their utterance as the parties attempt to resolve this issue short of hostilities. Americans on the right do their cause no favors by lionizing Russian president Vladimir Putin, whose malodorous reputation has only gotten worse as a result of the mindless pursuit and persecution of Russia’s queerfolk by Putin’s government and its wholly owned subsidiary, the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. American conservatives like Newt Gingrich, who appear to have forgotten that politics should end at the water’s edge, need to moderate their transports and discontinue their unhelpful, partisan attacks on the President. When significant foreign-policy issues are implicated, critics on the American right need to understand that their constant sniping at the President has completely undermined whatever international credibility they once possessed.
By the same token, left-wing critics of the President need to examine their own rhetoric, critically assessing whether their words have a tendency to send signals of encouragement to the Assad regime. There is something more than a little disturbing about seeing protest signs reading “hands off Syria.” Are the carriers of such signs adopting and advocating the Syrian/Bashar Assad point of view, or --- to be charitable--- are they simply intemperate in their choice of words? Too many of our friends on the so-called progressive side of the aisle often appear disturbingly eager to allow the perfect be the enemy of the good. Sadly, there are no perfect solutions to what has happened in Syria.
Yet, if there are no perfect solutions, or even terribly good solutions, to the Syrian Question, some solution must nonetheless be found. Certainly, under the circumstances, we should not adopt the George W. Bush administration’s preference for reaching the military option first. The President was probably wise to pull back from the threshold of unilateral military action. In this case, military intervention should be very much a “reach me last” option. Nonetheless, pace my friends on the left, we cannot afford to categorically foreclose any military option. Paradoxically, it may prove to be in the national interest of the United States that the Syrians shoot first.
Of course, if a diplomatic solution is found, nobody has to shoot at all, and we would be foolish to throw unnecessary, gratuitous obstacles in the way of such an outcome. Still, the Syrian Question remains a set of nested paradoxes out of which we will be lucky to find a least bad solution, embracing as we do the consolations of Soviet naval mastermind Sergey Georgiyevich Gorshkov’s philosophy that, in the end, “good enough is best.”
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. The views contained herein are his own, and not necessarily those of any entity with which he is associated. They are not intended as, and should not be construed as legal advice. In the end, good enough usually is best.
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