Here we go again. A Baathist dictatorship
is widely suspected and pointedly accused of an
indefensible act. The United States, backed strongly
by a European ally on the UN Security Council,
is pressing the “international community” to
penalize and isolate that regime until it makes “a
strategic decision to fundamentally change its
behavior.” Off the record, US officials allude
to a more far-reaching agenda. As one “senior
US policymaker” told the Washington Post on
October 23: “The big question is: Is there
anything to indicate that [Syrian President Bashar
al-Asad] would show any deviation from past behavior?
We’re certainly not trying to save the regime.”
Taking the hint, Russia and China
have so far resisted US pressure to sanction Syria
for its grudging and partial acquiescence in the
demands of Detlev Mehlis, the UN-appointed investigator
of the February 2005 assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri,
ex-premier of Lebanon. But their signatures are
on the unanimous UNSC Resolution 1636, which leaves
open the possibility of “further action” if
Mehlis is not satisfied. The Syrian president,
also reading the tea leaves, has indicated the
regime might comply with the investigator’s
requests, but with a caveat: “Whatever we
do, and no matter how much we cooperate, after
a month, the result will be that we did not cooperate.
We should appreciate this fact.”
This observation came halfway through
a speech at Damascus University in which Asad identified
Syria as “targeted” by an enemy whose
message is: “Kill yourself or I will kill
you.” There is no difference between these
two options, the Syrian leader continued, except
that “if you kill yourself, the enemy deprives
you…of the honor of defending yourself.” He
warned students in the audience that the “theorists
of the war [against Syria] are pinpointing our
youth” because youths did not live through
the decades when Syria remained “steadfast
in the face of tornadoes.” Now Syrians should
hunker down for a protracted confrontation, because
in the present circumstances “resistance
and steadfastness” are the only alternative
to chaos. Here Asad was clearly referring to post-Saddam
Iraq, and perhaps echoing Deputy Foreign Minister
Walid Mu‘allim’s complaint reported
in the October 26 edition of the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat.
The Mehlis investigation, Mu‘allim said,
is a “tool” for implementing a master
plan: “The Arab region is threatened by a
second Sykes-Picot that will divide us on the basis
of ethnicities and religions.”
Of course, Washington’s bones
of contention with Damascus do number more than
the regime insiders fingered in the unredacted
version of the October 21 Mehlis report. The Bush
administration, which pronounced itself “appalled” by
Asad’s speech, probably was glad to hear
it and may even have aimed to produce it. The letter
of demarche delivered by Ambassador Margaret Scobey
upon leaving Damascus after Hariri’s killing,
the summertime cross-border raids that reportedly
killed several Syrian soldiers, the rebuff of Syria’s
offer to resume post-September 11 intelligence
sharing on al-Qaeda, and now the cutoff of nearly
all bilateral ties have all been attempts to erect
hurdles upon which Syria will stumble as it comes
before the Security Council. The US does not need
to entertain the Libyan-style deal that Syria hopes
for because of the strength of the international
consensus behind Mehlis. As with Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq, Washington is meanwhile signaling to Asad’s
regime that it faces an existential threat, counting
on the regime, in turn, to lash out in response.
Damascus, so far, has obliged.
Undoubtedly, the Bush administration’s
belligerent policy should be resisted, but the
question is how. As the UN awaits the second installment
of the Mehlis report, due on December 15, the danger
is that blowhard rhetoric from both Damascus and
Washington will create the illusion that the choice
is between damaging sanctions (or worse) and defense
of a sclerotic dictatorship with a dangerous siege
mentality. The Clinton and Bush administrations
played expertly with the terms of this false choice
vis-à-vis Iraq, with the painfully ironic
result in the spring of 2003 that much of the anti-war
and anti-sanctions left applauded a French initiative
to roll over sanctions as a way of averting war.
The choice is not between punishing
all of Syria and shoring up the regime. Sanctions,
if they are warranted by the evidence and made
necessary by regime intransigence, should be directed
carefully at those who are shown to be culpable—and
only them. The experience of Iraq in the 1990s
proves that more extensive measures not only lead
to humanitarian crisis, but also fail to achieve
either “behavior-changing” or regime-changing
objectives, since they debilitate the very people
who presumably are supposed to impel the regime
to change. This much, by now, ought to be common
sense.
One would think, moreover, that
the experience of Iraq in the 2000s would caution
even the self-styled revolutionaries in the Bush
administration to think more modestly about what
their version of regime change can bring. It may
usher in a different authoritarian regime: Knight
Ridder has reported on a classified study commissioned
by the office of Director of National Intelligence
John Negroponte concluding that a coup in Damascus
would install a harder-line junta than Asad’s
inner circle. Or, as in Iraq, regime change may
induce the collapse of the entire state—a
development that an old-school realist like Negroponte
must have regretted during his tenure as ambassador
in Baghdad.
Of course, sociologically and historically,
the Bush administration’s initial vision
of regime change was a sheer fabrication. Simply
ridding a country of a dictator and his top 54
lieutenants is not destined magically to institute
a liberal democracy, one that can be marketed and
consumed across the region like any other American
product. However, to the extent that war critics
now blame the US for failing to institute “real
democracy” in Iraq, they too are trapped
in, and thereby lend credence to, the discourse
of instant democratization. The Bush administration
has certainly trumpeted each “milestone” in
the post-Saddam political transition to demonstrate “progress” to
skeptical Americans. But the problem with US-sponsored
democratization is precisely that, for Iraq itself,
each of these “milestones” has been
considerably more than a public relations exercise.
Each stage of the transition, though arguably making
Iraq more democratic, has served to further polarize
the country along sectarian and ethnic lines, suggesting
that a more deliberate and less ambitious process
might have been better for all concerned. But this
was not to be: despite the vocal dissent of (at
least) 22 percent of the voters, the draft constitution
that passed the October 15 referendum will decisively
shape the new Iraqi reality.
The Iraqi constitution was written
on a US timetable, and partly by Iraqi politicians
with US bodyguards, but in very few respects is
it the document Washington would have drafted.
While the language is vague, articles on the economy
seem to commit the nascent state to providing universal
health care and free higher education. Muslim clerics
and religious scholars could assume a role in the
highest court in the land, and the federalism provisions
mean that personal status matters in some parts
of the country could be adjudicated in religious,
rather than civil, courts. The form of federalism
established by the constitution is so loose that
Baghdad might never really govern the whole country
again. That fact in itself is innocuous, but since
it was imposed by the Kurdish and Shi‘i religious
parties rather than agreed upon by consensus, it
is fueling the low-grade civil war that has intensified
in 2005. From the official US point of view, therefore,
the constitution greatly complicates the exit strategy.
Knowing full well that the constitution would sharpen
Iraq’s internal divisions, and in particular
would confirm anti-federalist Sunni Arabs in their
suspicion that participation in formal politics
would not equate to an actual voice, the US scrambled
throughout to soften its terms. A phone call from
Bush himself did not dissuade the Supreme Council
for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq from its newfound
embrace of federalism. While a last-minute deal
set up a committee for revising the constitution
after the December 15 elections for a permanent
government, actually revising the document would
require a complete turnaround in the present balance
of political power.
Despite yet more polls showing that
Iraqis believe the US presence to be a cause of
the insurgency rather than its remedy, the de facto
exit strategy is therefore to assist the Kurds
and the Shi‘i religious parties in defeating
their political opponents, as well as the insurgents.
The victors in the January 2005 elections do not
yet believe they can secure the gains of the constitution
without their foreign protector, who is also winking
at such “facts on the ground” as the
rapidly “Kurdifying” vicinity of oil-rich
Kirkuk. At the request of the transitional prime
minister, Ibrahim Jaafari of the Da‘wa Party,
and the transitional president, Jalal Talabani
of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, on November
8 the Security Council very quietly authorized
an extension of the mandate of the “multinational
force” in Iraq until December 31, 2006. Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice appeared before Congress
to present a new strategy to “clear, hold
and build” towns controlled by guerrillas,
and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) took a break from his
advocacy of a ban on torture by US forces to plead
for deployment of 10,000 more US soldiers to Iraq.
The pieces are in place for the indefinite, steady
escalation of the war—a trend that is closely
related to both the US isolation of Syria and Bashar
al-Asad’s yelp of defiance.
The best-laid plans for regime change
in both Syria and Iraq, of course, may very well
be derailed by belated democratic upheavals in
the United States. Three years after the fact,
Bush’s Iraq adventure is now completely entangled
in the web of falsehoods the administration spun
to frighten Americans into backing the invasion
of a country that posed no conceivable threat to
them. A mid-November Washington Post poll
reveals that 60 percent of Americans now believe
the invasion of Iraq was not “worth it.” Nearly
3 in 5 voters in the poll think that Bush himself
is dishonest. Slowly, this outpouring of discontent
is trickling into the collective consciousness
of Democrats, some of whom now realize they need
to say something about Iraq besides insist that
they would prosecute the war more effectively if
they were in charge.
Egged on by McCain and the war’s
inveterate cheerleaders at the Weekly Standard,
Bush is trying to fight back, reminding audiences
of how many Democrats voted for his October 2002
war resolution and smearing those who didn’t
as people who “didn’t support the liberation
of Iraq.” But these rearguard tactics will
not work. The White House’s wild and willful
distortions of the danger of Saddam Hussein’s
illicit arsenal are on trial in the court of opinion,
even if they are never aired in the courtroom of
the prosecutor investigating the leaked identity
of ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame. After the prosecutor’s
indictment of Scooter Libby, former chief of staff
for Vice President Dick Cheney, on charges of perjury
and obstruction of justice, there is no perfuming
the smell of a rat. Why would this most secretive
of aides to the most secretive of government officials
blow Plame’s cover? The White House had something
to hide and it wanted to make sure no one else
inside government lifted the curtain.
In light of everything else the
Bush team has gotten away with, the prospect of
penalty for just one of them, and for such a minor,
sordid offense, offers only the grimmest of satisfaction.
Libby is charged with participating in a cover-up
of a cover-up of the real crime—the manufacture
of a “mortal threat” to justify an
illegal and unnecessary war. Much more than the
long promised second phase of the Senate Intelligence
Committee report is necessary to ensure that others
in the venal crew in the White House are eventually
held to account. Meanwhile, rattled as they are
by the scandals of their second term, the Bush
administration is still pursuing the first term’s “transformational” Middle
East policy, though thus far by different means,
as if it has been a success. On the questions of
Syria and Iraq, as well as Israel-Palestine and
other issues, the imperative is therefore not just
to hope for more indictments and another tumble
in the polls, but to articulate clear, principled
alternatives as well.
