Anne-Marie Slaughter had a short but bombastic WaPo op-ed on Syria and chemical weapons use that requires comment:
Obama should remember Rwanda as he weighs action in Syria
….The Clinton administration did not want to acknowledge that genocide was taking place in Rwanda because the United States would have been legally bound by the Genocide Convention of 1948 to intervene to stop the killing. The reason the Obama administration does not want to recognize that chemical weapons are being used in Syria is because Obama warned the Syrian regime clearly and sharply in August against using such weapons. “There would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical-weapons front or the use of chemical weapons,” he said. “That would change my calculations significantly.”
….But the White House must recognize that the game has already changed. U.S. credibility is on the line. For all the temptation to hide behind the decision to invade Iraq based on faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, Obama must realize the tremendous damage he will do to the United States and to his legacy if he fails to act. He should understand the deep and lasting damage done when the gap between words and deeds becomes too great to ignore, when those who wield power are exposed as not saying what they mean or meaning what they say.
This is remarkably poorly reasoned advice from Dr. Slaughter that hopefully, President Obama will continue to ignore.
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The President,
on the basis of advice very much in the spirit of this op-ed,
drew a public “red-line” about chemical weapons use for
Bashar Assad, or some variation of that, on six occasions, personally and through intermediaries. On the narrow point, Slaughter is correct
that this action was ill-considered, in that the President wisely does not seem to have much of an appetite for jumping into the Syrian conflict. Bluffing needlessly is not a good practice in foreign policy simply to pacify domestic critics, but it is something presidents do from time to time. Maybe the POTUS arguably needs better foreign policy advisers, but doubling down by following through with some kind (Slaughter fails to specify) military intervention in Syria is not supported in this op-ed by anything beyond mere rhetoric.
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First, as bad as the Syrian civil war is in terms of casualties it does not remotely approximate the
Rwandan Genocide in scale, moral clarity, military dynamics or characteristics of the major actors. This is a terrible analogy designed primarily to appeal to emotion in the uninformed. Syria is engaged in civil war, not genocide.
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Secondly, the “credibility” argument has been lifted by Slaughter from it’s Cold War historical context where the United States capacity to provide a nuclear umbrella and effective deterrent for allied states was tied to the perception of our political will to assume the appropriate risks, which in turn would help avoid escalation of any given conflict to WWIII. This psychological-political variable of “credibility” soon migrated from the realm of direct US-Soviet nuclear confrontation in Europe to all manner of minor disputes (ex. –
Quemoy and Matsu,
civil unrest in the Dominican Republic) and proxy wars. It was often misapplied in these circumstances and “credibility” assumed a much greater exigency in the minds of American statesmen than it it did in our Soviet adversaries or even our allies, to the point where
American statecraft at the highest level was paralyzed by groupthink in dealing with the war in
Vietnam. By 1968, even the French thought we were mad.
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Absent the superpower rivalry that kept the world near the brink of global thermonuclear war, “credibility” as understood by Johnson, Rusk, Nixon and Kissinger loses much of it’s impetus. If “credibility” is the only reason for significant US intervention in Syria it is being offered because there are no good, hardheaded, reasons based on interest that can pass a laugh test.
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The historical examples President Obama should heed in contemplating American intervention in Syria is not Rwanda, but
Lebanon and
Iraq.
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May 1st, 2013 at 2:53 am
Zen, the DC consensus is drunk with the desire to intervene militarily in Syria. So soon after Iraq and Afghanistan still playing out. And many championed military cuts and furloughs, too. The interventionists don’t show half the passion for helping the refugees as they do for military intervention, either.
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I mean, Frederic Hof is pushing for intervention and he was the one who wrote the report on the Beirut bombing? Shouldn’t he know better?
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“In 1983, as a US Army officer, he helped draft the “Long Commission” report which investigated the October 1983 bombing of the US Marine headquarters at Beirut International Airport. Both reports drew considerable international praise for fairness and integrity.” – The Atlantic Council.
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It’s not just Anne-Marie Slaughter, it’s the whole State Department ‘world’, including Vali Nasr:
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“Once a transition plan is worked out, it will be important to remember this: No such plan will be credible without committing foreign troops to enforce the cease-fire and protect the defeated minority communities that have backed Mr. Assad. Until the United States and its allies get down to business with Russia and Iran, and get serious about how they will manage Mr. Assad’s fall, the conflict will only grow — and so will the threat to the region. ” – Vali Nasr, NYT.
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Understood, but easier said than done.
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????
May 1st, 2013 at 2:55 am
Oh, maybe I am misunderstanding Dr. Nasr’s point?
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“But there is still time to prevent the worst from happening in Syria. It will require difficult decisions and recalculating what is possible. Even in the face of vetoes from Russia and China, which feel that the West overstepped its United Nations mandate in Libya, the United States and its allies are still focusing on international pressure and support for the opposition to bring down Mr. Assad. That is the wrong goal, because it will not end the fighting.
Instead, the aim of diplomacy should be to devise a post-Assad power-sharing arrangement that all sides could sign on to. That, rather than more pressure on the government and more bickering among the outside powers, could finally persuade Syrians who are still in Mr. Assad’s corner to abandon the fight.” – NYT
May 1st, 2013 at 3:01 am
So, what if Assad hangs on? What’s the plan then? I’m sorry, I’m still sore about his pretending that the Holbrooke/Clinton diplomacy in “AfPak” was anything other than a mistake, a non-starter, utterly laughable. The late Holbrooke was just an old Clintonian and Bosnia guy. He knew nothing about South Asia and I’m not sure I trust the State Department Nasr line on the region, either.
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It seems nothing makes me happy on these subjects….
May 1st, 2013 at 3:29 am
Wanna see something hilarious? 1992 NYT article on the “Big Chill” Clintonian gang from Cambridge or Oxford or whatever that s&*t was….
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“Strobe Talbott, who wrote about his two roommates in a Time essay defending Clinton’s explanations of his draft avoidance, described their flat at 46 Leckford Road as a “permanent, floating, teacherless seminar on Vietnam.” Aller, who was writing his thesis on Mao Zedong’s Long March, would argue that to the Vietnamese, Communism was merely a vehicle to overthrow centuries of imperial rule, be it Chinese, French or American. Clinton, who had worked for Arkansas Senator J. W. Fulbright’s Foreign Relations Committee, brought his insights on America’s Southeast Asia policy into the mix. Talbott wrote that during one Thanksgiving dinner, his two roommates became so engrossed in a discussion of the war that they stayed talking in the kitchen for four hours while basting the turkey.
It wasn’t all war and no play. There were big, noisy parties, with wine, marijuana and casual sex. It was a time of revolving-door relationships, and Clinton pursued a lot of women, his friends remember, including the girlfriends of his friends. He even once tried to seduce a girlfriend of Aller’s, according to a Clinton friend, but this seems to have had no effect on their friendship.” – NYT, 1992.
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If you go down this rabbit hole and look up the names in that article and match them up to 90’s events in SA, er, well….
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In all the words written about Iraq and Afghanistan and 9-11 and drones and ‘we abandoned Afghanistan’, no one goes down the old Big Chill Sandy Berger other names here 1993/4 China, South Asia State Department desk stuff.
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And Tom Donilon at State around that time as well? Interesting.
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Real good investigating, mil and other COIN and FP bloggers!?
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I’m annoying, aren’t I? Even I see it, but I can’t stop, can’t help it, it’s addictive….
May 1st, 2013 at 3:41 am
Hi Doc Madhu
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The noise to signal ratio is very high because the Beltway think tank elite class wish to push the President and the military brass where neither have any desire to go. Israel is not too sure they want the US to go either, a rare moment where the Israeli government (the intel and military) might be lined up with the POTUS. They have to live next door to the mess in Syria long after Obama heads back to Chicago. The GOP will demand the White House retreat on defense cuts to vote for an AUMF and Obama will worry that his legacy might be “Who Lost Egypt?” and an al Qaida emirate in Syria.
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If intervention were in the offing, the WH would be leading the choir. Right now it is not.
May 1st, 2013 at 12:49 pm
I know you’re right but the noise still freaks me out 🙁