From Dove to Falcon: Obama and Syria

World War I began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, at the hands of Bosnian Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip. World War II started on September 1, 1939 with the German invasion of Poland, Hitler’s first aggressive step toward creating a European empire. World War III is at risk of starting up by accident: Obama’s decision to discuss attacking Syria in Congress — a much more democratic decision than Bush made, to be sure — is turning the Damascus crisis into a “chatty” war.

The pre-war with Syria is taking place on TV: Academics in silk ties, politicians with perfect smiles and analysts with every opinion on the benefits of liberating Syria. Here there is no hate, only fear and televised cruelty. Behind the cameras is a country that still has not recovered from economic crisis and is reluctant to support war.

“If we enter into conflict with Syria it will be to manipulate people, to scare them, to demonstrate our power. Obama brought this before Congress to show that he’s doing a good job,” said Clarin Alan, 29, a middle class resident of Bakersfield.

“Obama wants his own war. That’s why he’s considering entering the conflict,” said Salvador, a 28 year old blue collar worker.

“Even if Syria used chemical weapons, the U.S. shouldn’t feel obligated to act as peacemaker,” added a 22 year old middle class woman from West Hollywood.

CNN is bombarding viewers with images of chemical warfare, although the polls aren’t going up: the latest from the Washington Post and ABC stated that 59% of citizens were against the attack, and only 29% support it. Those who oppose the attack are convinced that the consequences will be worse with U.S. involvement (74%), that an attack will result in more conflicts (61%), and that U.S. objectives won’t be met (51%).

“I don’t like the idea of an armed attack, I don’t know where Syria is or why they want to drop bombs, but in war everyone loses. There are no humanitarian wars,” said a salesperson more concerned about meeting their daily quota than about Al-Assad’s murders.

Obama’s transition from Nobel Peace Prize to televised war-cry can be summed up in two paragraphs.The first is from Obama’s speech in New Hampshire, an icon of his electoral campaign: “And when I am president of the United States, we will end this war in Iraq and bring our troops home. [Applause] We will end this war in Iraq. We will bring our troops home. We will finish the job — we will finish the job against Al Qaida in Afghanistan. We will care for our veterans. We will restore our moral standing in the world. And we will never use 9/11 as a way to scare up votes . . .”

The second is from a more recent speech, one from this past Tuesday: “Franklin Roosevelt once said, ‘Our national determination to keep free of foreign wars and foreign entanglements cannot prevent us from feeling deep concern when ideals and principles that we have cherished are challenged.’ Our ideals and principles, as well as our national security, are at stake in Syria . . . .”

“America is not the world’s policeman . . . . But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act.”

America’s “humanitarian” interest in a foreign territory has been questioned by some, including Obama’s current UN ambassador Samantha Power during her time as a Harvard professor. In “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” Power argues that her country has never gotten involved in global politics for humanitarian reasons, but only in service to American interests. She recalls the words of President Bush at the beginning of the war in Bosnia: “The U.S. doesn’t have a dog in this fight.”* In El País, Guillermo Altares recalls that “after years of horror in former Yugoslavia, an incredible outrage — Srebrenica, the greatest war crime committed in Europe since stalinism — triggered military action in the East. Four years later, Milosevic unleashed a wave of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, and finally the Clinton administration decided that doing nothing was the safest option.”

Only 16% of Americans are “sure” that Assad’s regime used poison gas against civilians, and 67% only consider it “probable.” They have less confidence today in the idea that Syria used chemical weapons than they once had in a total lie: that Saddam Hussein hid weapons of mass destruction in 2003.

In this chatty war conspiracy theories flourish: Associated Press correspondent Dale Gavlak claims that, according to interviews conducted with residents and rebels in the Ghouta neighborhood and in other areas of Damascus, the chemical weapons that went off Aug. 21 were in the hands of the rebels and came from Saudi Arabia.

The bloodstains on the chess board aren’t new: the conflict with Syria started two and a half years ago, and has resulted in 110,000 deaths, two million refugees and 4 ½ million internally displaced persons.

While the war was debated on air conditioned sets by theorists in white shirts and light blue ties, the Jobar rebels put up a video online in which a local doctor speaks out: “In the name of Allah, this is a statement from Jobar Medical Point in reference to the events that are occurring today at dawn. This is a great catastrophe,” the doctor says in the video.

“The death toll is massive. We have exhausted our supply of atropine and hydrocortisone in Jobar. The number of dead and wounded children and civilians is enormous. I myself passed through my hands 50 dead children (sic) . . . . Other huge errors arose from citizen strategies formed in ignorance of how to respond to this attack. The effects of the gas only lasted a half hour, but unfortunately many people went down to the basement; the gas is heavy, so it sank to the lower floors, which increased the number of injuries and deaths . . . I can’t talk anymore. You can film what’s going on around you, what you see in the evening. You can go and record some of the martyrs in other places. May Allah reward you.”

“Why the silence?,” one of the refugees asked. “Is it because we’re Muslim? Is our blood cheaper than yours?.”

*Editor’s Note: The famous phrase was actually, “we got no dog in this fight,” and was not spoken by President George H.W. Bush, but by his Secretary of State, James A. Baker, in 1991.