Syria and gas are today’s most intriguing discussion points. Who’d a thought it? The Soviets say that the gas attack on Damascus was the work of rebel forces trying to get us to invade Syria or at least give them more and better weapons. Sure they are. Secretary of State Kerry tells us that it has been proven that Assad is the one who ordered and carried out the gas attacks. Sure he did. German intelligence tells us that Assad had on a number of occasions turned down his officers when they requested permission to use gas and it is those officers and not Assad who perpetrated the gas attacks. Are they all lying or is one of them actually telling the truth, or doesn’t anyone really know the truth? At this point it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that, for the time being, Obama has halted the rush to attack Syria and is allowing Putin’s plan to make Assad get rid of his chemical weapons to move forward. Of course even that doesn’t make everybody happy.
All the Republicans are screaming and yelling about Obama giving up our power to Russia and Putin. That’s pure bullshit and if they don’t realize it, they are dumber than they appear. Russia has finally admitted what the whole world already knew but couldn’t bring itself to care about; that helping the U.S. against the Muslim terrorists is in their own best interest. Putin doesn’t want either al Qaeda, which is fighting for the rebels or Hezbollah, which is fighting for Assad to get an upper hand and be able to establish a solid Islamic base in Syria. Either case would be bad for Russia, which has a lot of problems with Muslims.
But American pundits just don’t seem to get this. Paul Gigot, Wall Street Journal writer, and spokesman for neocoms certainly doesn’t buy it. He was blustering all over, This Week With Whoever Shows Up, trying to make us believe that this whole plan of Putin’s is a farce and that our only course of action must be to bomb Syria back into the stoneage. He sees no reason why Putin would want to reign in Assad or why Assad would relent to Putin’s plan. That’s because he misses the entire point. Putin wants peace in Syria just as much as we do. NO, his reasons aren’t his reasons aren’t altruistic but then neither are ours, at least not very often. He’s willing to throw Assad under the bus if Assad doesn’t go along and Assad knows it.
Putin, through this deal will raise his and Russia’s prestige in the world and make himself, look less like a thug and more like a statesman. All it will cost him is nothing. Assad will still be beholden to him for the arms and support Putin gives and will continue to give him. Assad will have to give up his chemical weapons, weapons that according to German intelligence sources he has already declined to use, weapons that were probably used by front line commanders without his permission, weapons he will gladly give up to get America and the rest of the world off his back. It’s a small price to pay to be allowed to keep fighting his war in peace.
Of course the Right is whining that this deal will make Obama lose face and that it will make Putin look like a winner and Obama look like a loser. That’s just stupid, but what else is new?
Why would this make Obama lose any face? He will, drawn out he whole time frame and allowed the problem to solve itself, a classic negotiating tactic. All that’s actually happened is to show all those hardheaded neo coms that a little negotiation goes a lot further toward enhancing the cause of peace than all the anti-dictator strikes in the world. If Bush/Chaney had tried just a bit of negotiation maybe thousands of American kids would be alive and unharmed, maybe Iraq would still be a nation and not the messed up slaughterhouse it currently is, and maybe we would now have Iraq’s oil, which is, after all, what that war was really about.
Of course George Stephanopoulos has to ask, if this deal doesn’t work out will that make Assad a winner and Obama a loser? It may be the dumb question of all time. Why would it make either of them a winner or loser? We aren’t at war with Syria. If the deal doesn’t work, we will probably bomb them, even if nobody really wants to. How does that make Assad a winner? And if nothing at all happens why would that make Obama a loser? And why would we care about winners and losers in this situation? Is this some kind of childish game, or is it just those who think in those terms that are dim-witted children?
Gigot the unabashed war-monger just doesn’t want to hear anything about the possible success or benefits of negotiation. Is he so closed minded that he can’t see why Assad will look at the immediate history of the USA and realize that if he goads us into a war with his regime that he will end up just like Hussein and Kaddafi, the two leaders before him, who made the same mistake, whereas if he gets rid of the chemical weapons we will leave him alone to solve his own problems.
The fact is that no mater how one feels about Obama, and the general thinking is that if anything, he has failed upward in this matter, the one mistake he hasn’t made despite all the rhetoric is that he hasn’t bombed anyone, yet.
Watched two crafty old warhorses, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski agree that although Russia may not have our interests at heart, our interests may still be compatible with theirs. They both claimed that Putin has to fear a victory by Islamists on either side because Islamists have been causing him trouble in Chechnya and all along Russia’s borders.
The one thing that is clear from this whole mess, is that negotiation, rather than action, is something that seems to have been lost from the international scene and that Putin has reintroduced it, probably by accident but possibly with great success.
I don’t know why Obama didn’t just go ahead and attack. Maybe it was because he really wasn’t sure that an attack was the right thing to do. Maybe it was because he didn’t think it would be politically expeditious. Possibly the White House has finally come to the conclusion that we can’t just go around bombing everyone who whose decisions we don’t agree with. Hopefully it’s because he realizes, that we really can’t be the world’s policeman. We already have an organization that has that in its charter. It’s called the United Nations. It’s that big complex of buildings over by the East River that costs us a fortune each year, gets in the way of many people who live in the city and seems, most of the time to do absolutely nothing about anything.
Sure it’s a gutless, toothless bunch of hypocrites but it’s our gutless, toothless bunch of hypocrites and we are, as a world, spending a lot of money and sending a lot of people to its big building on the east side of Manhattan. If we aren’t going to use it, we should just tear it down and use it for a park or luxury housing, That part of town will never produce low-income housing. Instead of spending all the money involved in waging these small wars and instead of spending all our energy, trying to get the UN to get off its butt and do something, we should be spending that money and energy to get the UN to reorganize itself into a functional organization.
The UN should be doing what we have been doing ever since 1993 and the only way to get it to function is to reorganize its charter. The idea that anyone in the Security Council can veto anything that everyone else wants, is ludicrous. The fact that every nation in the world regardless of size or civilization has an equal vote is ludicrous. The UN charter, in an attempt to create a democratic organization, has created a non-functional organization and the only way to fix that is to change all the voting rules to illustrate, by some new formula, the relative importance of each nation in respect to the other nations. Maybe it’s just a matter of enlarging the Security Counsel and changing the vote system so a majority vote rules and no one can veto it.