Why Does Assad Get A Pass?
Lee Smith writes in Tablet Magazine:
What a strange season this has been. As Washington encouraged the fall of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and continues to press allies in Bahrain and Yemen to accommodate demands for democratic change, one Arab dictator has gotten a free pass to murder his political opponents: Bashar al-Assad of Syria. To date, Assad’s government has killed 75 peaceful protesters in the streets of Damascus, Deraa, Lattakia, Homs, and Douma, among others, with some estimates running higher than 200 dead. Why no criticism for the Syrian regime?
Official silence over the killings in Syria is the fruit of America’s very weird love affair with one of the world’s leading state sponsors of terror. This emotional attachment, shared by U.S. policymakers, diplomats, and our intelligentsia, has been going on for decades, but it has reached a kind of apotheosis during the Obama Administration, during which officials have rushed to podiums across Washington to apologize for a regime that is picking off its own people with sniper fire.
“Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week. Caught by critics in that absurdity, Clinton tried to ameliorate her comments by explaining that she was merely relaying the opinions of others. But even then, she went back to the well of fantasy one more time. “We’re also going to continue to urge that the promise of reform will actually be turned into reality,” Clinton said.
Maybe it’s because Sen. John Kerry is a likely replacement for Clinton as secretary of State that he veered in the other direction and criticized Assad last week. Or maybe it’s just because he’s finally come to realize that he’s been made to look like a fool over the last few years by hawking a pro-Syria line. Even as recently as March 16, Kerry praised the Syrian president for the generosity he personally extended to the former Democratic presidential candidate during his half-dozen visits to Damascus over the last half-decade. And at the State Department, there’s Syria hand Fred Hof who, according to former Washington policymakers, doesn’t like hearing ill spoken of this murderous regime lest it shatter his dreams for an Israeli-Syrian peace deal—and his pet project, a “peace park” in the Golan Heights.
Still, self-delusion regarding Syria has been going on for years in Washington—regardless of which party is in office. The George W. Bush Administration spent several years trying to offer inducements to get the Syrian regime to alter its behavior, before it finally withdrew the U.S. ambassador to Damascus over Syria’s suspected involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. When Bush’s rivals wanted to take him on, Syria was one of their favorite venues. Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, for example, made a memorable shopping tour through the charmed arcades of Damascus’ markets while the Syrians were killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
Even in the 1980s and ’90s, Syria occupied a privileged position in Washington—immune to rational calculations or moral revulsion about the behavior of its leaders. President Bill Clinton’s secretaries of State, Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, wore themselves out with shuttle diplomacy trying to placate then-president Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father. And George H.W. Bush’s secretary of State, James Baker, turned a blind eye to Syrian-backed terror to kick-start the Arab-Israeli peace process.
That self-abasement of U.S. diplomats in Damascus is a longstanding habit of American Middle East policy doesn’t explain why they keep behaving this way. Our government does lots of bad things in the Middle East on behalf of what it says are U.S. interests. Some of them are done intentionally, like backing the ruling regime in Bahrain even as it brutally represses a peaceful Shia majority. Some are done absent-mindedly, like when George H.W. Bush’s administration encouraged Iraqi Shia and Kurds to rebel against Saddam Hussein and then did nothing to protect them from his retaliation.
But just because Washington’s willingness to give a free pass to the Syrians can be well-documented doesn’t make it any less weird; in fact, none of the oft-cited reasons for U.S. support of the Syrian dictatorship make any sense at all.
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