Red State Paranoia Can’t Hide Obama’s Failures in Syria

Mindless Pontificating: America’s toughest problems are rooted in a decline in civil society

Mindless Pontificating: For the soul of the party: darkness and hope in the trenches of the New Hampshire Primary

I often spoke to Trump voters who scarcely mentioned immigration or terrorism. They were anxious about their retirement, finances and health care. They felt totally abandoned by a corrupt Washington elite. Their support for the candidate was driven less by excitement over Trump than despair at our nation’s political life.
We surely cannot deny the importance of racial prejudice in Trump’s ascendency. But New Hampshire reminded me of the folly of self-righteous, mean-spirited and simplistic denunciations of Trump supporters. We would do well to remember Solzhenitsyn’s insight that the “line dividing good and evil” passes not easily along any political division but “right through every human heart.”
Perhaps the most tragic (or pathetic) moment I witnessed of the Republican Party’s internal conflicts in New Hampshire was a town hall meeting with Bush. It was hard not to cringe throughout his address. Painful attempts to show more energy. Awkward body language. Giving a child a toy tortoise symbolizing his campaign. Ancient, flat jokes (“In Florida, they called me Veto Corleone …”). But I left feeling a great, sad respect for Jeb. His unabashed policy wonkiness was not a great communications tactic, but it revealed him clearly as the most intellectually engaged candidate in the Republican race (Kasich included). His concerns about education reform, poverty and immigration clearly came from the heart and were not superficial, marketing ploys to make the GOP look more “nice” and “diverse.”
The populist instinct within the American mind enjoys denouncing members of the establishment. But what if these establishment figures in both parties are more than caricatures of elite corruption and actually take the call of public service seriously? Should we not lament when such people are replaced by figures like Trump and Cruz seizing “the mantle of anger,” reflecting the worst pathologies of a debased democracy?
Now where was the hope in all this again? It arose out of numerous conversations with Republican voters disgusted by the party’s apparent descent into demagoguery, anger and nativism. It came from town hall meetings where voters’ questions to candidates showed their sense of responsibility to the entire nation as participants in the nation’s first primary. The greatest hope came from the character of the full-time, paid staff I worked alongside.
They broke every progressive stereotype of conservatives as either well-intentioned, naive, “useful idiots” or slimy, privileged villains. Coming from far less privileged family backgrounds than my own, they saw in Kasich, himself a man of humble beginnings, a candidate devoted to conserving and expanding the American Dream. They accepted the challenge of climate change and ranted about the prejudice and ignorance peddled by many party leaders and showmen. They were still conservative, of course. I heard more than enough passionate defenses of the Second Amendment and free market capitalism throughout my three weeks. But the spirit of the campaign gave me confidence that there is far more thoughtfulness, optimism and integrity left within American conservatism than progressives in journalism and the Academy assume.
Is my hope purely delusional in our age of angry, divisive populism? Perhaps. Maybe my coworkers’ labors in New Hampshire were a final eulogy for the Republican Party, honoring the past achievements of a party now forever lost and discredited. Or perhaps they were building up a renewed, modern conservative party guided “by the better angels of our nature,” as Abraham Lincoln would have said. Starting next Tuesday night, and in the months or years to come, we will come to know the answer.

Mindless Pontificating

Red State Paranoia Can’t Hide Obama’s Failures in Syria

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

December 10, 2015

It is common in discussions at Bowdoin and in progressive circles to denounce the Republican response to the refugee crisis. And the outrage is no doubt warranted after Donald Trump described a mere 10,000 Syrian refugees as a potential ISIS “Trojan Horse,” Ben Carson compared them to rabid dogs and 30 GOP governors refused their entry under highly questionable claims of “security.”

But ultimately (and thankfully), people like Trump, Carson and Maine Governor Paul LePage have not been conducting our foreign policy since 2008. Far fewer progressives, with the notable exception of Hillary Clinton, are willing to ask the harder question: what do we make of Obama’s decision-making so far through the Syrian civil war, which cost Syria more than 250,000 lives and displaced half its citizens? Bear with me as I admittedly embark on some armchair foreign policymaking and Monday Morning diplomacy.

From the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Bashar al-Assad showed his true colors as the “Butcher of Damascus,” in a government reign of terror through sieges by starvation, barrel bombings, torture and chemical weapons. The Syrian Network for Human Rights reported that Assad’s government forces were responsible for seven times more civilian deaths in Syria than ISIS so far in 2015.

Throughout this time, Obama ignored calls for more decisive action against Assad, not from the world’s Cheneys and Rumsfelds, but from his own foreign policy team. He turned down calls from his then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, CIA Director General David Petraeus and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta for a more interventionist approach through empowering moderate Sunni rebel groups and creating no-fly zones. This was all the more tragic, since, in 2011 and 2012, groups like the Free Syrian Army were driving opposition to the regime in comparison to al-Qaeda and ISIS. Obama’s insulation from critical administration voices continues to this day. A Politico September investigation found a “demoralized Obama national security team” in the aftermath of Putin’s escalation in Syria. Obama’s inaction even drove the U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert S. Ford in February 2014 to resign.

I admittedly take Obama’s cautious realism over much of George W. Bush’s first-term neoconservatism most days. A third major American war in the mold of Afghanistan or Iraq would be wrong and receive no backing from an exhausted public. Nevertheless, Obama was mistaken in neglecting a harder move against Assad beyond meaningless “red lines” and bland statements that “Assad must go” or, even more banal, that he is “on the wrong side of history.” A more confident, stronger Syrian opposition would have held a greater voice at the negotiating table for a postwar settlement that might have removed Assad without totally excluding Alawite, Shiite and Iranian interests in Syria. It could have created pockets of safety and order as the foundations of a new state. Most of all, Sunnis might not have found extremist groups like al-Nursa Front and the ISIS, given their resources and military skill, to be their last resort of defense.

The latter danger actually came to fruition in Syria as David Ignatius described in a perceptive Atlantic critique of both Bush and Obama’s Middle Eastern policy. As Sunni communities found themselves at the mercy of Assad with little Western assistance, it is no surprise that extremist jihadist groups became more attractive. And the prospect of a dual conflict of ISIS and Assad is playing into the dictator’s hands, allowing him to partially rehabilitate his image in the West as the last hope of stability against ISIS.

Today, the world faces the greatest refugee crisis since World War II. The European Union confronts a humanitarian challenge that could test its very survival; one need only see an explosion of far-right populism stretching from Sweden to France. Syria’s historic religious pluralism and ancient Christian communities unravel. Hope for a lasting peace, or perhaps just a decent one along the lines of Lebanon or Bosnia, looks ever bleaker.

It would be absurd to cast blame on Obama for this extremely complex crisis, but Obama’s foreign policy requires some serious reconsideration in the light of these horrors. Peter Beinart wrote that historians will record Obama’s work on the Syrian refugee crisis “among his finest hours.” On that question, Beinart is right. On the deeper issue of the Syrian civil war, short of Providence’s unexpected surprises, Obama’s legacy is hardly so clear.

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