Better the Despot You Know

Someone who was wiser than I about almost everything once told me: In life, as in politics, promising and not delivering guarantees losing. This maxim, beyond its philosophical depth, remained etched in my memory and it has been years since then. I see its validity reflected in many news events since then; what is happening in Syria is as valid an example as any other.

We have already said a thousand times that the same family has been ruling in that country for decades, supporting their Western lifestyle on the traditional way of suffering of many countries in what we call the third world. Bashar al-Assad, after enduring several military defeats at the beginning of a conflict that has already claimed over 150,000 lives and displaced many more from their homes, has hit his stride after starting to hand over his chemical weapons to the West — everything seems to indicate he did so after having used them against the civilian population — and seeing how radical groups linked to al-Qaida joined the struggle against his regime. This calmed tempers in the United States, which had threatened to take action and decorate Assad’s mansion with missiles launched from its silent drones. Because the Russians, who have been good friends with the Assads since the time of the wars against Israel, were not inclined to let anything pass in the U.N. Security Council, it seems like Barack Obama is content at the moment with having the tyrant hand over some drums containing lethal gases. Conveniently selling the story to his country’s news media, it will look as if he has made Syria’s weapons of mass destruction disappear — something that his predecessor in the job also achieved in Iraq, so much so that nobody knows yet where they ended up. Surely they must have been lost at some airport, like luggage.

Seeing the proliferation of these fanatical groups who have entered Syria with the excuse of liberating it to impose Islamic law — as they understand it — and their alleged terrorist connections, Obama has pulled back his finger from the launch button. If instead of threatening, he had hit hard without compassion when men, women and children were falling under Assad’s bombs and chemical poison, today we probably would not be lamenting the jump these combatants have made into Iraq, where they have taken a couple of cities by force. Obama is promising but not delivering, and thus is losing any chance of a democratic solution in Syria and putting to the test the battered stability of another country, Iraq, in which the echoes of the American war machinery are still heard. Let’s hope this is not just the tip of the iceberg and Obama has decided that Assad will make a good lapdog if he promises to keep Islamic radicals in check. Foreign policy requires sacrifices, even of one’s own principles.