President Obama likes to beat up on allies but he doesn't know how to handle enemies. Elliott Abrams rips him to shreds for his inaction on Syria.
First, where is the President? This statement carefully avoided using the word “I” and was handed out by the White House. The President’s appearance on camera, delivering such words personally so that they can be carried into Syria on al Jazeera and YouTube, would be much more effective. With hundreds now dead in the streets of Syria, it is past time for him to speak.
Second, the Friday statement continues to appeal to Assad: “We call on President Assad to change course now, and heed the calls of his own people.” That might have been acceptable 300 deaths ago, but it is now absurd. The President called on Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, a long-time American ally, to leave; why the reticence about Assad, a long-time American enemy?
Third, the White House statement is just words. It does not promise, suggest, or announce any actions. This Administration has spent two years engaging with the Assad regime and loosening U.S. sanctions on it. “The World Trade Organization’s 153 members granted Syria observer status after the U.S. dropped its opposition in a sign the Obama administration is softening its stance toward the Middle Eastern nation,” Bloomberg reported a year ago, noting also that “President Barack Obama’s administration has already loosened export-license curbs on aircraft repairs for state-owned Syrian Arab Airways.” So this Administration, having followed a foolish policy of engagement with this barbaric regime, has a special obligation to correct its course. The first action should be recalling our ambassador to Syria, who should never have been given his recess appointment to the post last year. Second, the United States should be calling immediately for special meetings of the UN Security Council and Human Rights Council, to bring additional focus on the murders of peaceful protesters in Syria and seek sanctions against the regime, in the hope that this attention will constrain its bloody hand.
Incredibly, it's the Europeans who are pushing for a Security Council condemnation of Assad. Obama is apparently going to vote present and wait to see if Russia or China casts a veto.
There's a lesson here for Israel. Stand up to Obama. There's a much better chance that he'll back off if we stand up to him than there is if we continue to try to please him.
With word that his regime murdered dozens - if not hundreds - more this weekend, when will the world stop defending Bashar al-Assad?
Three weeks and hundreds of casualties into the Syrian uprising, longstanding concerns about whom and what will replace Assad are resurfacing. So too is the atavistic attachment to a regime that not only has killed thousands of its own citizens, but contributed to the deaths of dozens if not hundreds of U.S. troops and contractors in Iraq. Support for the regime goes beyond the standard “devil you know” rationale. To wit, one commentator in The National Interest recently opined that “Washington knows [Syrian President] Bashar well and it knows how rational and predictable he is in foreign affairs.” No doubt, Assad hasn’t killed millions like Stalin. But he has spent his first decade in power recklessly dedicated to undermining stability—and U.S. interests—in the Middle East.
Here’s the devil we know: Since 2006 alone, Assad’s Syria has exponentially increased the capabilities of the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah, providing the organization with advanced anti-ship and highly accurate M-600 missiles, top of the line anti-tank weapons, and has allowed the organization to establish a SCUD base on Syrian soil. At the same time, Assad continues to meddle (and murder) in Lebanon, harbor and support Hamas, and subvert Iraq. Damascus remains a strategic ally of otherwise isolated Tehran. And in 2007, it was revealed that Assad’s Syria was progressing toward building a nuclear weapon. Given the pernicious effect of Assad’s policies on U.S. interests and the region, it’s difficult to imagine that a successor or replacement regime could be worse.
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It perhaps goes without saying that the United States should not be in the business of regime removal in Syria. Yet it’s time to revise the assumption that Washington somehow has a vested interest in Bashar Assad’s political survival. As the brave Syrian people do the hard work and pay a high price to rid themselves of a corrupt, capricious, and brutal dictator, America should not be throwing him a lifeline.
Years ago when I was working in the Bush administration, I was tasked to write an options paper on Syria. Prior to putting pen to paper, I sought the sage counsel of the late Peter Rodman, who, in typical fashion quipped, “Kissinger tasked me to write the same paper in the early 1970s.” Today, 40 years and seven presidents later, the United States is still seeking an effective policy to contend with the Assad regime. Paralyzed by concerns of what comes next, the Obama administration—like the Bush administration before it—continues to cling to the status quo. Regrettably, if the Assad regime weathers this storm, hamstrung by ongoing fears of worst-case succession scenarios in Damascus, decades from now Bashar—or his own son Hafez—will remain a policy challenge for the United States.
I would say the Obama administration is completely blinded to Assad. What is its ambassador doing there? Why was he sent in the first place?
It's impossible to look at what's going on in Syria today and not compare it to what's going on in Libya. In Syria, the stakes for the United States are higher, the dictator is equally as brutal and the danger of a doomsday scenario where the leader murders thousands of his own people is much more imminent.
Syria, however, is the more urgent crisis — one that could pose a thorny dilemma for the administration if Mr. Assad carries out a crackdown like that of his father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad, who ordered a bombardment in 1982 that killed at least 10,000 people in the northern city of Hama. Having intervened in Libya to prevent a wholesale slaughter in Benghazi, some analysts asked, how could the administration not do the same in Syria?
Though no one is yet talking about a no-fly zone over Syria, Obama administration officials acknowledge the parallels to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Some analysts predicted the administration will be cautious in pressing Mr. Assad, not because of any allegiance to him but out of a fear of what could follow him — a Sunni-led government potentially more radical and Islamist than his Alawite minority government.
Still, after the violence, administration officials said Mr. Assad’s future was unclear. “Whatever credibility the government had, they shot it today — literally,” a senior official said about Syria, speaking on the condition that he not be named.
In the process, he said, Mr. Assad had also probably disqualified himself as a peace partner for Israel. Such a prospect had seemed a long shot in any event — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shown no inclination to talk to Mr. Assad — but the administration kept working at it, sending its special envoy, George J. Mitchell, on several visits to Damascus.
Mr. Assad has said that he wants to negotiate a peace agreement with Israel. But with his population up in arms, analysts said, he might actually have an incentive to pick a fight with its neighbor, if only to deflect attention from the festering problems at home.
“You can’t have a comprehensive peace without Syria,” the administration official said. “It’s definitely in our interest to pursue an agreement, but you can’t do it with a government that has no credibility with its population.”
Indeed, the crackdown calls into question the entire American engagement with Syria. Last June, the State Department organized a delegation from Microsoft, Dell and Cisco Systems to visit Mr. Assad with the message that he could attract more investment if he stopped censoring Facebook and Twitter. While the administration renewed economic sanctions against Syria, it approved export licenses for some civilian aircraft parts.
And yet the Obama administration cannot let Assad go, cannot recognize him as an enemy of the American people, and will not save his people from his murderous and brutal regime. And for this, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blames... Congress (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).
“No,” Clinton said, when asked on the CBS “Face the Nation” program if the U.S. would intervene in Syria’s unrest. Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s security forces clashed with protesters in several cities yesterday after his promises of freedoms and pay increases failed to prevent dissent from spreading across the country.
Clinton said the elements that led to intervention in Libya -- international condemnation, an Arab League call for action, a United Nations Security Council resolution -- are “not going to happen” with Syria, in part because members of the U.S. Congress from both parties say they believe Assad is “a reformer.”
A reformer? Assad? She expects us to believe that Congress believes Assad is a reformer? When it was Congress that held up the appointment of an ambassador to Syria that Obama wanted?
A great summary of the United States' Syria policy
Shavua tov, a good week to everyone.
Representative Gary Ackerman (D-NY), of all people, does a great job of summing up what's wrong with President Obama's Syria policy (Hat Tip: Jennifer Rubin).
"Regarding Syria, I have a simple question: Is our policy ‘passive consistency,’ or ‘consistent passivity?’ Or don’t we have any Syria policy at all? I’m glad Ambassador Ford is in Damascus. I just wish he was doing more than conveying the usual feckless messages to the Syrians and reporting their contempt back to Washington."
We told you that's what he would be doing there, didn't we?
'Israel sends agricultural carcinogenic medicine and AIDS girls'
In this video, Hizbullah MP Ismail Sukariyya accuses Israel of sending Egypt "agricultural carcinogenic medicine" and "AIDS girls." He also accuses Israel of downing an American plane with 90 Egyptian generals on it. The video was shown on Syrian television on December 19, 2010.
Let's go to the videotape.
I wonder if new American Ambassador Robert Ford - who is scheduled to be in Syria by the end of January - will take up this broadcast and others like it with his Syrian hosts. Don't hold your breath.
You might be wondering since when Hezbullah is so concerned about the welfare of Egypt. I guess this is part of the improvement in their bilateral ties - yet another thing we can chalk up as a result of the Obama administration's weakness in this region.
Clueless Obama makes 'remarkably foolish' appointment
In an earlier post, I explained that the problem with President Obama's recess appointment of Robert Ford as US Ambassador to Syria is not Ford, but the very fact that any ambassador to the Assad regime is being appointed.
The Beirut Star's Michael Young agrees with me. He calls the appointment 'remarkably foolish' and the White House 'clueless' for making it. Here's why.
Against congressional opposition, the administration offered a lukewarm defense of Ford’s appointment, with officials stating that it would allow Washington to get its message to Damascus more clearly. Nonsense. There are plenty of ways to transmit messages to Syria without legitimizing the fact that in the five years since the previous ambassador was withdrawn, following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the Assad regime has not budged on issues the US considers important—whether Lebanon, inter-Palestinian affairs, Iraq, Syrian cooperation with Iran and Hezbollah, and negotiations with Israel.
But worse, if Cousseran is right, namely that the US must not overreach by asking Syria to cut its ties to Hezbollah and Hamas, that only begs the question: What is the Obama administration entitled to ask of Syria? No explicit answer whatsoever has come out of the White House and State Department. And with uncertainty filling the thick Potomac air, what is Washington’s broader Syria strategy anyway? If Ford is a mailbox, what specific ideas will he be relaying?
There really are none. Obama has a wish list. He still hopes for a breakthrough in Arab-Israeli negotiations, and wants someone in Damascus to ease the process. But the president has done things in reverse. He should have sent Ford to Syria in exchange for a solid concession from Assad—perhaps Syrian acceptance of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections, which Damascus has refused to sanction; or maybe Syrian consent to the return of direct negotiations with Israel; or at least participation in a high-profile event that would help inject life into the Syrian-Israeli talks. The problem is that neither Syria nor Israel is keen to engage in bilateral moves, because the Syrian-Israeli track is moribund. Alive or dead, it made no sense for Obama to throw away a card he should have made Syria pay for.
It is not as if the US is unaware of Syrian intentions. Last week, an American official issued a pointed warning to Syria and Saudi Arabia that they should not reach any accord over Lebanon that might undermine the tribunal formed to indentify and punish Rafik Hariri’s killers. Syria has fought tooth and nail to obstruct the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which Washington supports, and recently intensified those efforts. And yet at the same moment, Obama sends Ford to Damascus, as if to say that whatever the Assad regime does, even taking measures that America opposes, it will be rewarded.
Obama would answer that he had a small window of opportunity in which to put Ford on a flight to Syria, before Congress reconvened, so he took his shot. A laudable rationale for an important decision: Let time pressures, and sneakiness, guide your foreign policy. Here’s a wager: Ford will cool his heels in Damascus without achieving much, because Assad got what he wanted, and is now in a position to stall Washington interminably. He won’t have to forfeit anything, because Obama has not a clue about what he really expects from Syria.
I guess Young missed the part about the 'fierce moral urgency' of appointing Ford so that the US can 'engage' with Syria.
Because he was appointed while the Senate is in recess, Robert Ford will not need Senate confirmation. But he can serve only until the end of the next session of Congress, which will likely be in December 2011.
“Ambassador Ford is a highly accomplished diplomat with many years of experience in the Middle East,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said.
“His appointment represents President Obama’s commitment to use engagement to advance U.S. interests by improving communication with the Syrian government and people.”
And of course the Syrians are thrilled.
A Syrian diplomatic source, in response to the appointment, told Ahram Online that Damascus was glad to hear that America will send an ambassador to Syria.
“Such a move will reinforce Washington’s credibility in the region and open the door for serious cooperation between the two countries on regional and local issues,” he added.
President Obama has used the Congressional recess to appoint Robert Ford as the ambassador to Syria (among six appointments he made in this manner). That's nothing against Ford - I just don't believe the US should have an ambassador to Syria right now.
I'm not happy about this, but keep in mind that George Bush did the same thing to appoint a guy named John Bolton as the ambassador to the United Nations.
The appointment doesn't last forever, and Congress could surely refuse to fund it.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
President Obama likes to beat up on allies but he doesn't know how to handle enemies. Elliott Abrams rips him to shreds for his inaction on Syria. 
