Human rights? Just another political soccer ball to be kicked around by the Mike Barnicles out there.
Saturday was the "International Day for Human Rights", a day that the UN has done everything to render meaningless.
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| Anti-Assad fighters in Aleppo. This endlessly confusing conflict was used for media capital by MSNBC during the election. Not so much to say about it now. |
If you think that this means that the dignity of people is meaningless, you're missing the point. I'm sorry if people want to act like it's a fully defined issue, but who the hell are you kidding? In September on MSNBC Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson was laughed at by Mike Barnicle when he reacted to a question about the siege of Syria's largest city by asking "What is Aleppo"? Now that the city is in the final stages falling to the Syrian-Iranian-Russian forces besieging it, the question that the media is asking is "Aleppo? What about it?" Now that the year's almost over, I'll be reviewing this year's real human rights issues in a different article, ones that the media both overhypes as well as those that it consistently ignores or misrepresents. But first thing's first, we should address not only Aleppo but the Syrian war in general.
Using tragedies as ratings fertilizer
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| The Hama Massacre: Wholesale death and destruction in Syria was not an issue for the news media in the 1980s, and it isn't now. Oh sure, they may report it, but they have no insights into it, and they never draw the correct conclusions about it. (NPR) |
The fall of Aleppo may be a compelling and depressing event, but it isn't the first one that American media have ignored in the context of the Syrian conflict. First of all let's address the problem that this is a WAR that began in a country that until 2011 had been ruled by the same family since 1970. The Assad family had put down a smaller but still bloody uprising in the 1980s led by the Muslim Brotherhood that ended in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in the mid-sized city of Hama, which had a nominal population of around 180 thousand at the time.
For decades the USA took a stance of arms-length opposition to the Assads which meant limited trade ties with it, and some behind-the-scenes cooperation with it, including covert and clandestine cooperation by the George W. Bush administration during the War on Terror. The fact that Syria is a major sponsor of terrorism in Lebanon, Israel, and possibly Turkey as well was irrelevant because Bush only cared about fighting Al-Qaeda, whatever the price and whoever the strange bedfellows may be. Assad's secular Arab nationalist Ba'ath Party may have been against Al-Qaeda's Sunni Muslim terror, but it had absolutely no problem with the better armed and trained Hezbollah, a deeply pro-Iranian group that has been the real power in Lebanon since the early 1990s. As a matter of fact, Iran was the first nation in the modern era to embrace the jihad ideology through and through in 1979.
So what have we done about Assad?
Pres. Bush had a dishonest and corrupt foreign policy towards Syria, and his successor Barack Obama has had a demented and idiotic one. In Feb. 2010 Obama announced that the two nations would restore full ties after Bush had reduced the US delegation in Damascus by recalling his ambassador in 2005 as a result of suspected Syrian involvement in the murder of Lebanese politician Rafik Hariri. The reopening of the embassy by Obama was done without any change on the part of Syria's internal policies, but rather as part of his reordering of US policies toward the Arab and Muslim world.
Unfortunately, Obama failed to discern that reopening relations with Arab regimes was not the same thing as improving our ties with their people. By early 2011, many of these secular Arab nationalist regimes, most of them ruled by Cold War-era anachronisms began to fall apart due to popular uprisings. Unlike Egypt, where Obama at first supported the regime before he withdrew his support and allowed it to fall, and Tunisia which fell like a house of cards, three other countries erupted in total war. These were Yemen, Libya, and Syria. Of those three, Yemen and Libya had no powerful geopolitical allies and eventually the dictators there were forced out of power. Not so in Syria, where Iran and Russia had an express interest in preserving the Assad regime.
The most famous event that would have changed US-Syria relations since the outbreak of protests in that country in 2011 is the statement Obama made about a "red line" that he gave on Aug. 20, 2012 during remarks before the press, a statement that he would begin to back away from on Sept. 4, 2013 when he actually claimed that it wasn't him that made this statement. That statement pertained to the use of chemical weapons, a contingency that did indeed come along in August 2013 when Syrian government forces are alleged to have used them against rebel areas in the Ghouta area. Rather than take a stand, Obama melted away, apparently due to
a lack of British backing.
Is the blame game appropriate?
Yes it is. This failure is attributable to Pres. Obama, and to some extent his predecessors like Bush and Bill Clinton, along with Obama's policies that enabled this to happen such as his withdrawal of US forces from Iraq despite the recommendations of numerous military commanders including Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno. This withdrawal was a statement to both Islamic terror groups and their opponents in the Muslim world that the USA might get into a mess in the Middle East, but it sure as hell would not stay to clean up that mess. This decision to withdraw all troops in 2012 is now known to have allowed the cancerous tumor that became ISIS to regain the initiative against the Shia dominated Iraqi government. One-by-one his administration's projections on its plans in the region went awry. Obama may have also eschewed intervening in Syria due to the botched aspects of the US air campaign and aftermath to topple Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya.
Why are presidents Bush and Clinton included in this? They set the precedent of allowing a major atrocity to occur unchecked while intervening in a less critical situation. In Bush's term it was his decisions to invade Iraq that was followed a few years later by his lack of action in the much bloodier Darfur conflict. Under Clinton, US forces were deployed to Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Haiti, but not to prevent the Rwandan Genocide.
But even if you distribute some of the blame to Bush and Clinton, Obama's role in allowing these atrocities to occur is his responsibility, not there's. Until early 2013, prior to the Ghouta chemical attack Mr. Obama would have had a fairly clear path to intervening in Syria against Assad, as ISIS was still largely in Iraq only. During the years 2011-13 Assad's forces may not have been gassing civilians, but their troops and paid fighters (the "Shabiha" or ghosts) were committing mass murders all across the country. Yet Iran's role in the combat was at the time not yet official, and Russia had not even discussed entering the conflict as it would do in September 2015. Furthermore, Russia's bold decision to intervene in Syria irrespective of international public opinion has only gained it admirers. This is not a statement of endorsement for their merciless killing of the Syrian people, but it does recognize that Putin accomplished what he set out to do, whereas Obama's vision has been completely dashed.
During that period (2011-13) Obama would have had bipartisan support for intervening in Syria, including both Sec. of State Hillary Clinton and Senate Foreign Affairs Committee chairman and his 2008 election opponent John McCain. There's no guarantee that this would have succeeded, but only later in 2014, once ISIS had in fact become a major military threat, did the USA begin to assess the fact that its "moderate" alternatives lack the muscle to defeat either Assad or ISIS. Instead of inserting the USA at the proper juncture, Obama let the problem fester, such that if you thought it was a bad idea to respond militarily in Syria (by air or otherwise) in 2012, in 2016 you think it's an awful idea.
Their Stalingrad? I would hope not.
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| Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Unlike Obama, Iran has gone in and gotten what it wanted out of Syria, whereas he only talked. So how can we blame them? (NOW.) |
And indeed, I'm sorry to the people of Syria, but the USA missed the best opportunity to intervene long ago. Had the American fighters and bombers been allowed to attack Assad's forces directly involved in Ghouta, we may never have arrived at a juncture where Syria's largest city, Aleppo, became in effect Putin and Assad's Stalingrad (which it is militarily speaking). It may become an issue someday, depending how the rest of this sad saga turns out, where historians paper over this chapter as being a triumph of one noble yet brutal group over the ultimate evil in ISIS/Al-Qaeda/Wahhabism. But who gifted them this repulsive present just in time for the holidays?
Obama, globalist leaders are all talk, and Trump's not the first to say so
Aleppo may go down as the most obvious human rights atrocity in Syria. . . for a while. But have we not noticed the stream of refugees coming out of Syria? Those people were never absorbed by Turkey, or the other Arab states, so what does the West do? They paper over the problem by letting them come to western countries, as opposed to actually addressing the source of the problem. What do you expect to happen, for the entire civil population of these parts of Syria to leave and then the problem will disappear? We're already talking about possibly more than 6 million people, and no one admits that the problem is just getting progressively worse. People were saying enough killing in 2011 before this was a war and it was just demonstrators getting shot and raped, so how bad did it have to get? In February 2014 Robert Ford, the same ambassador that Obama sent in 2010 for no apparent purpose, left his post and resigned, later admitting to PBS that he could no longer defend his own administration's policy.
The great Arab "allies" in the region of the USA and the west, be they Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or the Gulf principalities, were all too happy to fund jihadist fighters in Syria and Iraq including ISIS. What did they do for the civil relief of the refugees of the war they helped fund? This was another failing of Obama; allowing rich entitled monarchies to shirk responsibility for housing refugees of a war they were all to happy to encourage. It's now become obvious that the optimal destination for Muslim refugees from the Middle East is not European democracies with problems of their own and welfare states that are already poorly run and full of financial and structural problems.
The future will determine how we view the past
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| Trevor Noah, a South African comedian, interviewed Obama on Monday, and cleverly avoided any foreign relations issues. It was appropriate for this delusional victory lap. |
It's no coincidence that as a president, every time that Obama has gone out and dropped the ball on an issue that covers his responsibilities beyond his own narrow support bases, there was always an apologist media and entertainment personality sitting across from him and copping out of it for him. This week it wasn't even a real journalist, but Daily Show host and comedian Trevor Noah, who conducted the full interview as if indeed he was a real journalist. Well sorry people of Syria, but there's no not forgiving of Obama if people are not willing to attribute to him the responsibility in the first place. This winter while Assad's forces are mopping up, I fully expect him to be watching the Bulls with court-side seats as he embraces his new role as celebrity-in-chief.
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