Tomorrow, president Obama will once more get grilled by his national security team to finally order an utterly insane strike against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, despite the clear warning that a nuke-brandishing Vladimir Putin has now given him that this would certainly draw Russia into direct military conflict with the US.
In some sense, this isn't at all surprising. With the Syrian regime - aided by stepped-up Russian airstrikes - closing steadily on liquidating the last rebel urban stronghold of Aleppo, it's becoming obvious that Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus want to deal Mr. Obama the devastating defeat of the virtual final eradication of the Syrian revolution by the time American voters choose their 45th president on November 8.
Where he had earlier hoped that either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would be left to deal with the Syrian mess come January 20 - or at the very least he himself wouldn't have to until after Hillary secured the White House with her probable win next month - now Obama is staring down the very real prospect of a catastrophic strategic defeat that could reverberate thousands of miles beyond the ruins of a shattered historic Levantine city.
What makes his choice doubly more nerve-racking is the growing (day by day) ugliness of the US presidential election, as the deepest darkest dirt of both candidates is systematically unearthed by the two sides to further feed the flames of partisan polarization and acrimony. Perhaps for the first time ever, Obama is feeling a small bug nagging existential threat to his very psyche: a fear that a Trump victory now means nothing less than the utter evisceration of his legacy.
Defeat in Syria could give the election a considerable eleventh-hour jolt in that appalling direction. It would end US hopes of fostering a democratic alternative to the authoritarian brutality of Assad and his ruthless sponsors, Putin and Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei. By default, that's a huge victory for ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other violent jihadist extremists across the entire Middle East and potentially the wider Islamic world, as well.
So will Obama finally risk it all? On balance, it's highly unlikely - at least tomorrow. Hillary's lead over Trump seems big enough to not lose sleep. A new round of Syrian ceasefire talks this weekend (in a new regional-multilateral as opposed to US-Russia bilateral format) can buy some more time. With just 26 days to go until decision '16, Obama and Hillary alike will now try to run down the clock.
But the Syrian vise may be closing on the Democrats even faster. Given the intensified Russo-Iranian-Syrian assault on Aleppo as we speak, it's difficult to avoid the impression that the West and its Sunni Muslim regional allies will simply be asked to effectively capitulate Aleppo in order to save civilians this weekend. Leaked pro-Russian and pro-Syrian reports are claiming that on-the-ground talks are already underway between the regime and less fanatical militants to evacuate the latter and their families out of the city's besieged eastern sector; if true, the weekend truce discussions will likely involve Russian pressure on the US and its Western allies to throw their weight behind the proposal. The problem? Even if Washington finally surrenders - a big if in itself - its Saudi and other Gulf Sunni allies who with arch-nemesis Iran form the Syrian conflict's most intractably partisan foreign fomenters will probably scuttle it.
That's where the latest developments in the third front of the Sunni-Shia regional sectarian war (the first two being Syria and Iraq) - Yemen - are particularly alarming and potentially a destructive powder keg.
As of yesterday, the US has officially entered the civil war in Yemen on top of the civil wars in Syria and Iraq, throwing its firepower behind the Gulf Sunni coalition led by Saudi Arabia against the Shia Iranian-backed Houthi rebels by launching cruise missiles against coastal Houthi radar installations that had earlier directed anti-ship attacks on US destroyers. Iran's response? The enraged ayatollahs have dispatched two warships to patrol the neighboring Gulf of Aden.
Even as the prospects of US-Iranian hostile engagement remains low - both sides have too much riding on the 2015 nuclear deal - it's now obvious that the Saudis have recently intensified their own brutal air campaign against heavily civilian Houthi targets in Yemen in revenge for the humiliations that Sunni Arab civilians have suffered in Syria at the hands of Russian and Syrian regime air power. So obvious a rat race to kill noncombatants has this become - you bomb my friends' hospitals, and I'll bomb your buddies' funeral processions - that the US is now torn between standing by its Saudi allies and trying to avoid the appearance of double standards that would taint the whole Western coalition.
So even though a US-Iran blowup in Yemen is unlikely, not only does this escalation to the far south give Secretary John Kerry that much less maneuvering room as he tries to restrain Saudi vindictiveness over Syria this weekend, but quite dangerously it opens the door to a hitherto much muted Western assertiveness against Tehran. And that's where all hell could break loose.
As the lack of Western mainstream media coverage of Iran's regional role has made clear, the Western policy and ruling elite have become so preoccupied with Russian actions and something of a negative obsession with Putin specifically that they've badly neglected the ayatollahs' calculus. Few in Washington or Western European capitals seem aware that Tehran may now be driving Moscow's regional policy more than the other way around. And all along it has actually been Iran - not Russia - which has most dramatically restricted American freedom of action in the region along with that of its allies. A tipping point may finally be approaching: having delayed (by no means truly eliminated) the Iranian bomb, the West and Western-aligned Sunni powers are now finding the price of this extra time possibly intolerably high to pay - as it gives the ayatollahs far too much leverage to escalate their sectarian agenda throughout the Middle East with only ineffective pushback.
The mere fact that the very possibility of military confrontation with Damascus and thus Moscow is back on the table in the White House betrays how dangerously the whole regional situation could be reaching the threshold of just boiling over. Barack Obama himself - the community organizer whose whole presidency has been premised on the principle that there are no military solutions in geopolitics - is perhaps finally being confronted with a stark choice. If he doesn't act decisively now - for peace or for war - then whatever peace or war comes to the Middle East will not be determined by liberal democrats or reformers, but by sectarian extremists and cutthroat Machiavellian strongmen who alternately bargain with and war with them. Either way, democracy and human rights suffer and regress; either way, the danger of a newly retrograde world existentially threatens his legacy.
If you're an optimist, you could say that the newest war talk is just that - talk. And better yet, prudent contingency planning: no good leader waits until military action is actually absolutely necessary to plot it. But with Obama, this must be weighed against something more troubling: an apparent indecisiveness that has come to define his entire foreign policy record.
In the past, great American statesmen on the world stage - think Kennedy or Reagan - staved off destructive war and achieved great victories for global stability and cooperation precisely because they did not shy away from armed confrontation, even nuclear confrontation. That's because they effectively convinced their counterparts in the Kremlin that whatever terrible price America would pay for an actual direct military conflict, Moscow's empire would suffer even more and likely far more. Without this leverage, they simply could not have dialed down the standoffs they navigated in a way that secured, let alone promoted, vital American interests.
Obama, however, projects the image of an American and general Western society that to many cynics has fundamentally lost any sense of higher ideals or values worth shedding even a single drop of blood for, let alone buckets or rivers of it. Reduced to minimalist "extend and pretend" tactics without any grand strategy of peace through strength, this ironically makes it more likely - however improbable still - that the streak of luck will finally run out; namely, that at long last a halfhearted response to crisis is judged as preferable to continuing to do nothing at all. If and when such a devastating miscalculation occurs with the outgoing 44th president, he will have nudged the free world he leads over onto a slippery slope that can only end in judgement by fire.
No comments:
Post a Comment