1. The Assad Regime's Long Con transki letter
It is hard to say whether Obama won or lost in the showdown over Syria, because we don't really have any idea what he was trying to do. Even the most cynical answer, that he was looking for a way to save face while backing off from his "red line" on chemical weapons, doesn't count as a win, because he didn't save face: this is pretty widely regarded as a diplomatic debacle for his administration.
He could perhaps claim victory on the very narrow goal of getting Syria's chemical weapons stockpiles under international control. But this depends, not on his brilliance as a deal-maker—the administration backed into this idea by accident—but on the hope that this is one issue on which the Russians actually share our interests.
Here, we have to read very selectively from Vladimir Putin's triumphalist op-ed in the New York Times. All of the offensive stuff poking America about our "exceptionalism" is just yadda-yadda-yadda—it's Putin playing to a global audience with recycled Cold War psychological warfare. The part of his op-ed that was actually interesting was this:
"Mercenaries from Arab countries fighting there, and hundreds of militants from Western countries and even Russia, are an issue of our deep concern. Might they not return to our countries with experience acquired in Syria? After all, after fighting in Libya, extremists moved on to Mali. This threatens us all." That tells us that Putin's interest in backing Assad is not just about supporting a fellow member of the dictators' club. Putin is also concerned about the Islamist threat against Russia, and he doesn't want Syrian jihadists getting ahold of Assad's chemical weapons. It's common to talk, with 20/20 hindsight, about the blowback from U.S. support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s. But the blowback is ten times worse for Russia. Throughout the Cold War, they supported Middle Eastern radicals in order to stoke anti-Americanism and cause trouble for the West, only to realize later on that Russia has its own very significant Muslim population and long borders with Muslim countries in central Asia.
So maybe Putin has an interest in pushing Assad to get rid of his chemical weapons. But Putin also has an interest in keeping his ally in power and in making Russia once again a consequential power in the Middle East. After this deal, is there anyone who is thinking that they benefited from being an ally of the United States? Certainly not, and you can bet that the Syrian rebels now think they were fools when they tried to keep jihadists at arms length and play up their moderate agenda in the hope of getting support from the West. By contrast, is there anyone who thinks they benefited from being friends with Vladimir Putin? You bet, starting with Bashar Assad.
And that's the real loss. If Obama's goal was to punish the Assad regime for using chemical weapons, he achieved the opposite. Assad has been rewarded with a guarantee of immunity from American action. He was pretty much getting that already in practice, but it's nice to have it in writing.
More broadly, Assad emerges from this deal, not just untouched, but indispensible.
Jeffrey Goldberg spells out the implications.
"By partnering with Russia and the West on the disarmament process, a process that is meant to last into 2014 (and most likely won't be finished for years, even if it is carried out in good faith, which is a big 'if'), Assad has made himself indispensable. A post-Assad regime wouldn't necessarily be party to this agreement, and might not even go through the motions. Syria, post-Assad, might very well be more fractured and chaotic than it is now, which is to say, even less of an environment in which United Nations weapons inspectors could safely go about their work. The U.S. now needs Assad in place for the duration. He's the guy, after all, whose lieutenants know where the chemical weapons are." If this whole deal is going to work, Assad is the guy we have to work with. He has gone from being the partner and tool of our geopolitical adversaries, Iran and Russia, to now being accepted as our partner and de facto ally—while still maintaining his alliance with our enemies.
Which is to say that we have been bamboozled into supporting our strategic opponents.
From the perspective of the Obama administration, this idea, that the Syrian dictator is the indispensible man whom we have to support or else everything is chaos, is a clumsy accident. From the perspective of the Assad regime, it's no accident at all. It's the long con the Assad family has been running for decades. The con game is pretty straightforward: they create chaos, which they then pretend to "stabilize." They set fire to everything, then show up dressed as the fire brigade and offer to keep the blaze under control.
A few months back, Michael Totten quoted Lebanese scholar Nadim Shehadi about what he learned from the Assads about "how to become a dictator."
"'What you should do,' he said, 'is establish the idea that you're indispensible, that you're irreplaceable, that beyond you is the abyss of sectarian civil war, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and the breakup of the state. Create problems that only you can resolve. That's the mind game Bashar al-Assad is playing with you. As long as you can't see beyond him, he's safe.'" So Assad develops chemical weapons, stockpiles them, uses them against his own people, and disperses them around the country—and that makes him the indispensible man we need to protect us from the threat of chemical weapons!
This is the Assad regime's long con. It's a low-down dirty lie and an affront to the intelligence of the civilized world. And it has now been endorsed and made into official Western policy by the president of the United States.
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