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.
— Hillary Clinton on Bashar al-Assad, March 27
Few things said by this administration in its two years can match this one for moral bankruptcy and strategic incomprehensibility.
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First, it’s demonstrably false. It was hoped that President Assad would be a reformer when he inherited his father’s dictatorship a decade ago. Being a London-educated eye doctor, he received the full Yuri Andropov treatment — the assumption that having been exposed to Western ways, he’d been Westernized. Wrong. Assad has run the same iron-fisted Alawite police state as did his father.
Bashar made promises of reform during the short-lived Arab Spring of 2005. The promises were broken. During the current brutally suppressed protests, his spokeswoman made renewed promises of reform. Then Wednesday, appearing before parliament, Assad was shockingly defiant. He offered no concessions. None.
Second, it’s morally reprehensible. Here are people demonstrating against a dictatorship that repeatedly uses live fire on its own people, a regime that in 1982 killed 20,000 in Hama and then paved the dead over. Here are insanely courageous people demanding reform — and the U.S. secretary of state tells the world that the thug ordering the shooting of innocents already is a reformer, thus effectively endorsing the Baath party line — “We are all reformers,” Assad told parliament — and undermining the demonstrators’ cause.
Third, it’s strategically incomprehensible. Sometimes you cover for a repressive ally because you need it for U.S. national security. Hence our muted words about Bahrain. Hence our slow response on Egypt. But there are rare times when strategic interest and moral imperative coincide completely. Syria is one such — a monstrous police state whose regime consistently works to thwart U.S. interests in the region.
During the worst days of the Iraq War, this regime funneled terrorists into Iraq to fight U.S. troops and Iraqi allies. It is dripping with Lebanese blood as well, being behind the murder of independent journalists and democrats, including former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. This year, it helped topple the pro-Western government of Hariri’s son, Saad, and put Lebanon under the thumb of the virulently anti-Western Hezbollah. Syria is a partner in nuclear proliferation with North Korea. It is Iran’s agent and closest Arab ally, granting it an outlet on the Mediterranean. Those two Iranian warships that went through the Suez Canal in February docked at the Syrian port of Latakia, a long-sought Iranian penetration of the Mediterranean.
Yet here was the secretary of state covering for the Syrian dictator against his own opposition. And it doesn’t help that Clinton tried to walk it back two days later by saying she was simply quoting others. Rubbish. Of the myriad opinions of Assad, she chose to cite precisely one: reformer. That’s an endorsement, no matter how much she later pretends otherwise.
And it’s not just the words; it’s the policy behind them. This delicacy toward Assad is dismayingly reminiscent of President Obama’s response to the 2009 Iranian uprising during which he was scandalously reluctant to support the demonstrators, while repeatedly reaffirming the legitimacy of the brutal theocracy suppressing them.
Why? Because Obama wanted to remain “engaged” with the mullahs — so that he could talk them out of their nuclear weapons. We know how that went.
The same conceit animates his Syria policy — keep good relations with the regime so that Obama can sweet-talk it out of its alliance with Iran and sponsorship of Hezbollah.
Another abject failure. Syria has contemptuously rejected Obama’s blandishments — obsequious visits from Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry and the return of the first U.S. ambassador to Damascus since the killing of Hariri. Assad’s response? An even tighter and more ostentatious alliance with Hezbollah and Iran.
Our ambassador in Damascus should demand to meet the demonstrators and visit the wounded. If refused, he should be recalled to Washington. And rather than “deplore the crackdown,” as did Clinton in her walk-back, we should be denouncing it in forceful language and every available forum, including the U.N. Security Council.
No one is asking for a Libya-style rescue. Just simple truth-telling. If Kerry wants to make a fool of himself by continuing to insist that Assad is an agent of change, well, it’s a free country. But Clinton speaks for the nation.
The Syrian government is a thug government and has been for many, many years. They have horrible prisons. Syrians tell me you just go underground, and are lucky if your loved ones even hear where you are.
But for some reason our diplomats and politicians have always let themselves be charmed out of their pants by the Baathist junta.
I am a frequent visitor there. It is a charming place and the people are very nice. But our diplomats are supposed to be able to get through all that. Instead they are just their normal obsequious derriere kissing selves.
Clinton's disregard for the truth and the free pass she receives by most media states so much about the complacency of so many citizens and a sheer lack of awareness.
This is outrageous and flat out wrong not to reject Syrian President Assad.
Just another confirmation why, upon learning that Hillary was our Secy. of State, I figured that the mom next door would be just as good!
Thanks, Charles - excellent commentary.
"The same conceit animates his Syria policy — keep good relations with the regime so that Obama can sweet-talk it out of its alliance with Iran and sponsorship of Hezbollah."
Or perhaps driven by weakness. Perhaps the administration seeks to paint as positive a government which it would rather not confront.
When this Administration expresses admiration for the Syrian government, it should amplify one's concern about the Obama Administration's intentions toward American citizens.
The more odious the regime, the blinder our eye.
Why? Because the administration believes these states were created as a defense against America’s imperial sins. To reform we must convenience them we are a new benevolent United States apologetic for past errs and only when such regimes see that the US is no longer a threat they will voluntarily come to the light and transform to open democratic societies.
How anyone could imagine this woman to be of Presidential caliber is beyond me. She's the ultimate example of the Peter Principle, except that she fullfilled it years ago and at an even lower level. Par for the course for Obama appointees, though; he can't surround himself with anyone smarter than He, and that criteria leaves us with the barrel and the bottom of the barrel.
I read somewhere that armies have prospered under commanders who made unwise decisions, but never under an indecisive commander. In our current Commander-in-Chief, we have both worlds: an indecisive commander who eventually makes unwise decisions.
I'd like to know exactly how the administration can believe that our alleged sins have caused police states. So many people want to come here, and yet we are evil? We try to help poorer nations by modernizing them and encouraging a freer form of government, and then leave, and we are imperialists?
Of course, by letting their people know it is possible to have a government that doesn't wantonly kill dissenters, and supports opportunities for economic success, we have undermined the claims of totalitarians that repressive regimes are the only way to go. In that case, the increasing governmental regulations will eventually make our nation as rigid as the police states. Then the only problem will be if we are not professing to be Muslim, so they will still hate us.
Over at Realclearpolitics, this article has the headline: "Why is WH Nice to Our Enemies?" This captures Dr. Krauthammer's puzzled tone nicely. Where does his confusion come from? It's quite clear why Obama is nice to our enemies. He is nice to them because he is one of them. He allies himself with anyone trying to bring America down a peg because that is his highest ambition both at home and abroad. This is so glaringly simple that our more sophisticated thinkers just can't seem to understand it.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I find that picture of Assad on the NRO homepage chilling - he has that Himmler look - a cold bureaucrat, lacking in empathy, who views human life and suffering as mere statistics.
I am constantly amazed at how many people view Mrs. Clinton as one of the smartest women in the world. I see nothing but failure in her life.
Private Law Practice. As a lawyer in private practice, she was sufficiently incompetent to be passed over by most Little Rock law firms, was held at arm's length by the Rose law firm, and she still managed to enmesh herself, husband, and firm in the Whitewater Scandal and the scandal involving futures trading.
First Lady. As first lady, she completely botched the health care reform initiative in 1993 and 1994 and nearly destroyed her husband's presidency. She also was also the driving force behind the travel office firings scandal and FBI files scandal. These two scandals showed her to be an extraordinarily vicious person who was willing to destroy little people for trivial reasons.
Presidential Candidate. She managed to fritter away being the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate in 2008 and lose to a then relatively unknown opponent. She didn't bother to understand the importance of party caucuses to gain the nomination, and allowed President Obama to build up such an early delegate lead that her later primary victories were meaningless.
Resignation of U.S. Senate Seat. Mrs. Clinton compounded her error in running for president by resigning her U.S. Senate seat, and separate power base, to become Secretary of State. She clearly does not enjoy the confidence of her president, and her position prevents her from considering a Democrat Party presidential nomination challenge in 2012.
Wife and Mother. She clearly does not know how to keep a husband happy at home. President Nixon met with the Clintons several times before his death and he remarked on the warm relationship between President Clinton and their daughter. Whereas, he noticed that the daughter was clearly afraid of Hillary Clinton. There is some kind of a story there. I suspect Hillary Clinton was as bad at being a mother as she is at being a wife and everything else she has done.
The only major success I can think of in her life was getting elected as a U.S. Senator from New York. That first N.Y. campaign was also scandal plagued but the media overlooked it.
The bottom line is that Hillary Clinton is a walking mediocrity who has nothing but a lifetime of failure in everything she has done. She would be a mid-level beauracrat in a state government agency somewhere or working as a staff attorney for a legal aid office were it not for her marriage to Bill Clinton. Hillary knows this about herself and that is why she has stayed married to him despite his numerous open and notorious affairs.
Hillary Clinton only attended one college, not four, and graduated at the top of her class. She only went to the best law school in America and got a job at the biggest law firm in the city she was forced to work in due to her husband's political ambitions. Her daughter failed to get knocked up by a moron and now leads a miserable yuppie life instead of dancing with stars.
The party that condones the criminal behavior of unions and Syrian repression has no lived objective morality. Their morality is based on subjectivity and is purely situational, only enforced when it has to do with conservatism or Republicans or Christians they don't like. Morally bankrupt is their "let's get along with anyone except those with traditional western values" approach. Our country has fallen so far.
The same "world community" that excoriates the Israelis for firing rubber bullets at rock throwing looting, vandalizing burning Palestinians, turns a blind eye when young Assad fires real bullets at peaceful protestors. Sick
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