America and the Press 'Stay Out of Syria!'

My colleague, Mishary Al-Dhaydy, recently published an article entitled, “Nasrallah … the liberator of the people.” In it, he made reference to the alliance between a number of progressive and activist writers siding with the Assad regime and Nasrallah, against the Syrian people. However, to counterbalance that collusion and deception, another party helped him in the Western media, particularly in America. If the Arab side were allied publicly with the Assad regime and blessing its crimes, then the Western side — which naturally justifies Assad’s crimes — would do what it could to prevent an American intervention, which would mean prolonging the Syrian suffering.

A large number of articles, dialogues and lectures have persistently adopted one thought and that is blessing the previous position of President Obama: the refusal to provide any support to the rebels to overthrow Assad. The Western side is more serious and more effective than the unbelievable propaganda of Assad’s supporters and Nasrallah, which is based on the opposite of what is needed. It consists of double the number of sympathizers with the Syrian people. However, American celebrity reports have provided a long series of repeated arguments about the seriousness of U.S. participation. The miscarriage of any general public or press opinion might press down on the U.S. administration and force it to change its calculations. Despite the atrocity of the crimes undertaken by the Assad army and his Shabiha and the death of more than 100,000 people, the general interaction with this human tragedy through American intervention is very weak. All this is thanks to the media, which encouraged Obama to persist in ignorance and provided him with justification, and which violently attacked whomever criticized his positions — like the angry attack on the brave Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who alone played a big role in accumulating the pressure on Obama until he finally changed his position.

One of the worst journalistic examples is the cover story for the penultimate issue of The New York Review of Books. The headline directed at President Obama followed this format, “Stay out of Syria!” The writer of the story did not stop repeating one piece of advice for Obama, “Don’t do anything.” President Obama naturally has not been doing that over the last two years. He did not change his decision until after the pressure on him increased — former President Clinton finally hinted at this provocative title when he said, “Stay out of Syria … That is a big mistake.”

However, this story reflects only one of the reasons that the reporters took to build their arguments. It clearly relies on fallacies. Among the most famous of these repeated and deliberate fallacies makes Syria a copy of Iraq — thus [we should] have nothing to do with the whole issue — and stresses the importance of the U.S. not getting involved in this “quagmire.” This is also the favorite fallacy of the famous writer Thomas Friedman. Nearly two months ago, I went to a Friedman conference in the U.S. capital, Washington, D.C. His principal argument, which he continued to repeat throughout the lecture, was “Iraq and Syria are twins,” as he set forth in the title of one of his articles.

It is clear to any observer the difference between what happened in Iraq and what is happening now in Syria. The famous writer Leon Wieseltier recently published an article in The New Republic, entitled “The American Left Turns Away from Syria’s Agony.” In it, he rebukes those writers who believe that history ends at Iraq. They argue that it is on America to abstain from entering, if its entering does not achieve something good. He adds, “Would it be ‘good’ to stop the worst butchery of our day and prevent jihadists from coming to power in Damascus and return the refugees to safety and secure Syria’s neighbors against disintegration?”

The issue does not stop at the fallacies, mixing of theories and weird comparisons. Rather, there is another trend, and it is the deliberate manipulation of the meanings of some important words in the context of the debate about the Syrian crisis. For example, the word “intervention” does not intend a U.S. military intervention on Syrian land, but rather, support for the Free [Syrian] Army fighters through arms, training and imposing a no-fly zone. No one demands American or international presence in the battlefield. Although this is understandable, the word “intervention” has become, according to these journalists and writers, intervention or U.S. military involvement on the ground. Certainly an intentional fallacy — why? Because it easily restores the painful memories of dead American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those are disturbing memories for the American psyche. The same thing is true in regard to recalling the memories of the reason the Syrian people rebelled: the terrible repression and killing of innocent children and civilians, which began in Daraa and did not stop until this moment. But the opposition deliberately forgets all that and focuses its discussion on the sectarian cause — which did not emerge until recently — on specific groups and on the failure of the international community in stopping the hell of genocide.

Another trend is the use of some news as events isolated from the general context, which actually explains what happens. Young broadcaster Christopher Hayes on MSNBC reiterated as news the execution of a teenager by a terrorist group in Syria — macabre news, certainly — but the broadcaster used it only to shuffle papers. It struck at the credibility of the moderate Syrian opposition, and all that, to emphasize the logic of nonintervention through the argument, “What does the United States do with all these extremist groups?” This broadcaster did not address every innocent child the security forces killed and dragged in public. He also does not realize that the elimination of these terrorist organizations, which can do the worst, cannot be done but with the support of the moderate Syrian power. The “stay out” and “don’t do anything” policy is what rekindles these extremist groups more than anything else.

From another angle, there is also a large number of American intellectuals, writers and journalists, who put forward factual arguments about the importance of saving Syrians from the massacres that are committed against them, and they truly understand that neglecting the Syrian situation will result in a devastating impact on the entire region. We remember those writers, Fu’ad Ajami — who published a whole book about the Syrian revolution — Vali Nasir, Leon Wieseltier, Robert Keegan and, before them, the courageous writer Anne-Marie Slaughter, who used every possible platform to expose the seriousness of the drift around these fallacious theories at a time when whole cities were being subjected to systematic cleansing.