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Posts Tagged ‘Bashar al-Assad’
September 6th, 2013 at 2:31 am
Syrian Resolution Looks Doomed to Failure
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Earlier today, Rick Klein, Political Director for ABC News, tweeted out that 217 members of the House of Representatives have gone on record “as likely to oppose authorizing military force against Syria,” giving those opposed to the resolution a majority in the lower chamber (if we have any pedants in the audience shouting about the fact that it takes 218 to reach a majority, note that Alabama and Massachusetts both currently have one vacant seat).

Now, “likely to oppose” isn’t the same thing as definitely voting no, but anyone who’s staking out territory this early in the process is disproportionately likely to to stick to his guns. And it’s clear that the momentum on this is all going in one direction — and it’s not the president’s.

That’s remarkable, but not particularly surprising. Sometimes you can get a member to vote against his political interest for the sake of ideology. Sometimes you can get him to vote against his ideology for the sake of his political interest. But when both are imperiled simultaneously, the whipping gets much harder. That’s precisely the case with a potential military offensive that polls terribly and hits intellectual pressure points for liberals and conservatives alike.

One dispiriting aspect of this debate is the chorus of conservative voices such as Jennifer Rubin, Hugh Hewitt, and Bret Stephens who’ve conflated opposition to feckless, limited airstrikes in Syria with “isolationism.” It may be fair to say that nearly all isolationists are opposed to taking action in Syria. It does not follow, however, that all who are opposed to taking action in Syria are isolationists. The scope of opposition is far too large to be constituted entirely (or even primarily) of those opposed to American action overseas in all but the most limited circumstances.

I suspect that there are a fair number of conservatives like me — as far removed from the reflexive international reticence of Rand Paul as we are from John McCain’s “anytime, anywhere, for any reason” school of intervention — who just don’t see the strategic payoff here, especially given the manner in which the Obama Administration would be likely to conduct the fight.

America has played too fast and loose with defining our national security interests in recent years. Doing so again — especially when it’s clear that the Obama Administration has no plan that will actually result in a change of circumstances on the ground in Syria — is an exercise in futility. The measure deserves defeat.

May 31st, 2012 at 12:07 pm
On Evil and Limitations: The Situation in Syria
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Throughout the year, I’ve repeatedly been critical here at CFIF of the atrocities occuring in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and the feckless Western response they’ve engendered. What I haven’t done, however, is called for regime change.

There’s a reason for that. In the hornet’s nest that is the Middle East, even regimes seemingly superlative in outright evil (such as Assad’s Syria and Gaddafi’s Libya) can’t be displaced with any certainty that the successor regime will be better. Writing for the Texas-based private intelligence firm Stratfor (of which he is and founder and CEO), George Friedman gives an excellent summary of why that is, using Egypt and Syria as examples:

What was misunderstood [in the West] was that while there was in fact a democratic movement in Egypt, the liberal democrats who wanted a Western-style regime were not the ones exciting popular sentiment. What was exciting it was the vision of a popularly elected Islamist coalition moving to create a regime that institutionalized Islamic religious values.

Westerners looked at Egypt and saw what they wanted and expected to see. They looked at Egyptians and saw themselves. They saw a military regime operating solely on brute force without any public support. They saw a mass movement calling for the overthrow of the regime and assumed that the bulk of the movement was driven by the spirit of Western liberalism. The result is that we have a showdown not between the liberal democratic mass and a crumbling military regime but between a representative of the still-powerful regime (Shafiq) and the Muslim Brotherhood.

If we understand how the Egyptian revolution was misunderstood, we can begin to make sense of the misunderstanding about Syria. There seemed to be a crumbling, hated regime in Syria as well. And there seemed to be a democratic uprising that represented much of the population and that wanted to replace the al Assad regime with one that respected human rights and democratic values in the Western sense. The regime was expected to crumble any day under the assaults of its opponents. As in Egypt, the regime has not collapsed and the story is much more complex.

Syrian President Bashar al Assad operates a brutal dictatorship that he inherited from his father, a regime that has been in power since 1970. The regime is probably unpopular with most Syrians. But it also has substantial support. This support doesn’t simply come from the al Assads’ Alawite sect but extends to other minorities and many middle-class Sunnis as well. They have done well under the regime and, while unhappy with many things, they are not eager to face a new regime, again likely dominated by Islamists whose intentions toward them are unclear. They may not be enthusiastic supporters of the regime, but they are supporters.

It’s long past time that those of us in the West allow the Jeffersonian reveries that accompanied the genesis of the Arab Spring to fade. In most nations in the region, we are faced with one of two choices: secular dictatorships or Islamist totalitarianism. In general, the former will be preferable to the latter, though only marginally less despicable. In Syria, the brutality of the Assad regime — combined with its alliance with Iran — makes the situation virtually unnavigable.

These are loathsome choices. But that fact shouldn’t lead us to the delusion that they are false ones.

April 11th, 2012 at 12:50 pm
UN Human Rights Chief Inserts Herself into Trayvon Martin Case
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Last month, I posted here on the blog about the U.N. Human Rights Commission’s risible-if-it-wasn’t-so-deplorable failure to deal with the enormous human rights violations occurring in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. But be not worried — if those fearless defenders of human rights can’t bring justice to Damascus, they’ll be happy to settle for the Orlando suburbs. From Breitbart:

UN Human Rights chief Navi Pillay has called for an “immediate investigation” into the death of Trayvon Martin.

Leaving aside the matter of the despicable record of the UN on human rights, what kind of record does Pillay herself have on human rights, and does she have any moral leg to stand on when interfering in the domestic affaris of the United States?  According to Freedom House, between September 2008, when she became the Human Rights Chief, and June 2010, Pillay made no comment whatsoever on the victims in 34 countries rated “Not Free.”  Some of the countries not criticized were: Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Vietnam.

Your United Nations, ladies and gentleman. Cost to American taxpayers: approximately $3 billion a year.

The Trayvon Martin case remains an ambiguous tragedy. Certainly someone was in the wrong, but the available facts give us no clarity as to who. At the moment, only one thing is certain: justice will be less likely with the UN involved.

March 29th, 2012 at 5:47 pm
The Price of Resisting Tyranny in Syria
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I’ve written in this space before about the human rights atrocities being committed by the Assad regime in Syria, which are limited only by the perverse imaginations of the state-employed sociopaths who are carrying them out. Unfortunately, media coverage of these injustices are few and far between given that Syria is a closed society and most victims never live to tell the tale. A report in the Jerusalem Post, however, has some new (and grisly) details:

Under investigation, detainees would be regularly beaten amid continued insults and threats to family members.

“They would threaten me to rape my sisters and wife if I didn’t cooperate. It was a true nightmare,” says Islam [a Syrian dissident], who detailed methods of torture practiced that included sleep deprivation and mysterious injections that cause anxiety.

London based Amnesty detailed in its report 31 types of torture, including ‘crucifixion’-type beatings, electric shocks, use of pincers on flesh, sexual assaults with broken bottles or metal skewers. The scale of torture and other ill-treatment in Syria has risen to a level not witnessed for years and is reminiscent of the dark era of the 1980s and 1990s, said Amnesty.

The brave dissidents of Syria are, as ever, deserving of our thoughts and prayers. Their tormentors are deserving of the devil’s lash. And the whole nation is deserving of a regime change that will bring this evil epoch to an end.

March 8th, 2012 at 4:03 pm
The UN: Feckless on Syria
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In my new column this week, I profile President Obama’s manifest weakness in responding to Syria and Iran — a weakness that belies the reputation for hawkishness that he seems to have been cultivating in the press for the last week.

If the president is in the market for a foil to make him look like a saber-rattler by comparison, he couldn’t do much better than the United Nations, as the Washington Post reports today:

A UNESCO panel on Thursday avoided tackling the issue of whether Syria should be ousted from a committee that deals with human rights.

Instead, the commission of the executive board of the U.N. cultural agency voted 35-8 Thursday to condemn the crackdown on civilians in the Arab state.

The U.S. and several other countries want to unseat Syria from the Committee on Conventions and Recommendations, which has a strong human rights component. But there apparently is no precedent to remove a nation from a UNESCO committee.

Syrian President Bashar Assad’s crackdown on an opposition movement has left thousands dead in the past year.

So beware, Syria, the UN is unsheathing its weapon of choice: parchment.

The depths of intellectual and moral dishonesty in the United Nations would be funny if the subject matters to which they are applied weren’t so gravely serious. The body can’t oust Syria from a human rights committee? This is the nation where the Assad regime stacks political prisoners in shipping containers and dumps them at sea.

It’s a good thing the UN is intrinsically powerless. Otherwise it’d be an accessory to murder.

January 3rd, 2012 at 5:00 pm
Tyranny, Thy Name is Syria
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Over the weekend, Nick Cohen in the UK Guardian provided halting testimony to just how macabre the  abuse of human rights by the Assad regime in Syria has become. From the piece:

To grasp the scale of the barbarism, listen to Hamza Fakher, a pro-democracy activist, who is one of the most reliable sources on the crimes the regime’s news blackout hides. “The repression is so severe that detainees are stacked alive and kicking in shipping containers and disposed off in the middle of the sea,” he told me. “It is so bad that they’ve invented a new way of torture in Aleppo where they heat a metal plate and force a detainee to stand on it until he confesses; imagine all the melting flesh reaching the bone before the detainee falls on the plate. It is so bad that all demonstrators have opted for armed resistance. They know it is about survival now, not about freedom any more. This needs to be highlighted: Syrians are fighting for their lives now, not for freedom.”

Looking back on 2011, remember that the Obama Administration pressured Hosni Mubarak to step down in Egypt despite the fact that it was clear that the upshot would damage American national security interests. We also intervened in Libya despite the fact that our interests there were peripheral at best. Now comes Syria: an ally of Iran, a sponsor of terrorism, and, as this article attests, an utterly wicked regime. Rarely is the confluence of our strategic interests and our moral interests so unambiguous. Let us hope that the administration doesn’t miss this opportunity, as it did in Iran in 2009.