How many times will we help liberate freedom-loving Arabs only to watch them peel away the mask of democracy and reveal tyranny before we learn not to do that anymore?
George W Bush closed the US embassy in Damascus (Syria) because of the sponsorship of terrorism by Pres Bashar Assad. He also did it to continue a long-standing American policy in the Middle East, about its tyrants:
1) Give no appearance of approval to ruthless Middle Eastern dictators;
2) Things are never as they appear in the Middle East, so when two types of tyranny oppose one another there, never choose sides.
We have not stationed a diplomat in Iran since 1979. Not did we have one in Iraq from1991 until a new democratic government was installed in 2005 after Saddam was deposed.
Before Obama, American policy was based on the general idea that while those nations are filled with democracy-loving citizens, the rebels who take to the streets never represent their interests in the end. This has been proved at least twice in the past two years.
In February 2011, Barack Obama, as a part of the Arab Spring “democracy” initiative in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and eventually Libya, re-established diplomatic relations with Assad in Damascus.
This was a horrible mistake, and may have been the match that may well light the entire region afire, even as the world is looking for that fuse to be lit further east.
You see, Obama was not reaching out to Assad so much as to poke a thumb in George Bush’s eye for having closed the embassy in the first place. A common vanity with Obama, he wanted to show the world that meekness in diplomacy works, while at the same time reaching out to Assad’s arch-enemies, the Muslim Brotherhood, just another brand of radical Islam, but who Obama’s inner circle and the State had made common cause with in Egypt (and later Libya).
What was he thinking? Can’t they tell the difference?
Early in the Reagan term a scholar named Jeanne Kirkpatrick wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs laying out the differences between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. This has guided US policy as to who we can, and cannot work with bi-laterally since the 1980s.
Authoritarians
Authoritarians are heads of state who essentially are strong-man bosses. They and their cronies control all the key elements of a country and its economy; military, ports, media, etc, and take a cut of virtually every enterprise in the country. If there is any great profit to be made in any trade, they are a 10% partner.
But generally speaking authororitarians allow the people to arrange their society pretty much as they want. Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was such an authoritarian, so was the Shah of Iran. Most of the old Latin American banana republic el presidentes were also of this kind, such as the Trujillo family and Batista in Cuba. (Chavez is more like Assad, Jr.) They had no interest in delving into the personal affairs of citizens. On matters of religion they were generally ecumenical, as Mubarak (and even Saddam) protected Christians.
Of course they could be ruthless, but never with tanks in the streets and mass death. They all had secret police, used torture, and had no problem sending people off to prison, or just have them disappear. But you could count these in the dozens, certainly fewer than the men Georgetown Law co-eds sleep with each year, which truly is “moderate” in that part of the world. Mubarak’s reaction to the riots in Tahrir Square last year was about the limit of how far an authoritarian will go with armed reaction to street demonstrations. (And now he faces a firing squad for having done it.)
Totalitarians, One, Two and Three
At the other end of the spectrum are three rather distinct types of totalitarian dictators, best personified, at the lowest end, by Bashar el-Assad of Syria, as a “moderately-ruthless tyrant”, especially when compared to his dad, Hafez al-Assad, or Saddam Hussein, both of whom were old school middle eastern despots. They would think no more of killing twenty thousand of their own citizens as stepping on a bug.
It’s against this history that relatively recent “moderate” ruthless dictators, like Qaddafi and Assad Jr have arisen. In 1982, during another uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, Assad’s dad killed 20,000-40,000 in the city of Hama, then used the bodies for landfill to build a new road. Bashar, unlike dad, is holding back, just to prove to the world that he no longer drives his dad’s Oldsmobile, having “only” killed 5000 or so in over a year of constant revolt. “And this is all the thanks I get from Obama, Clinton and Barbara Walters?” he must be thinking.
But at the top of the heap of even these ruthless tyrants, who kill this way because they are oriental barbarians who have been doing this sort of thing for 1500 years, way atop, in fact, are the systematic killers. Here we find the committed totalitarians, who mostly went by the name “communist,” Stalinist and Maoist, Pol Pot, (the list goes on), and also the true-believing Nazi. All these giants of history killed, starved, imprisoned, relocated, and separated millions not because of any personal hatred, but simply because they needed to remove from any impediment from their planned paths of progress. They killed because “process” required it. They are indifferent to the suffering and pain. (And today we hear Occupy kids speak in the same sterile terms.)
They all had a cause, and that cause included peering into the innermost privacy of people’s lives. While mere dictators wanted to fleece the people and to receive tribute from them, they had to own them. These tyrants are the ones who will come into your house in the dead of night because, on the day when everyone was supposed to wear red socks, you wore green.
They rule without remorse, and are mean when it was not necessary to be mean.
And today, kids still wear t-shirts in their honor.
It is from this last group of dictators, that we also find Islamists such as Al Qaeda, Taliban, and the Muslim Brotherhood, the first, purported enemies of Obama, the last, his friends.
It is from the ruling sentiment of the MB, of absolute control over mind, body and spirit, we find Barack Obama and many others in his inner circle. This is a sentiment that runs deep and binds them..
So, once you see the kind of control the Muslim Brotherhood hopes to extend over the Middle East, and how compatible it is with the kind of control the White House wishes to spread across America, except by ostracizing people from their churches instead of burning them out, you might see Syria today a little more clearly.
What I can’t understand, after being stung in Egypt and Libya by the same people (fascists) who are rising up in Syria, and in the name of democracy-seeking citizens who will see those dreams burned to cinders just as they were in Iran, is why in-the-loop insiders like John McCain and Beltway conservative media types like Fred Barnes still don’t know the real name of this game.
Obama’s mistake is that Syria game isn’t just about human rights, as he proclaimed in Libya.
Obama and the American media have painted themselves into a corner because of all the “Bush lied and people died” catcalls leveled at GWB in 2004. Obama knows there are all sorts of WMD’s in Syria, many likely transferred to Syria by Saddam, (which means Bush didn’t lie.), but forgot I think, or misassessed Assad’s intentions to hold onto power.
They (Obama and MSM) can’t put themselves in the position of having to acknowledge that.
The fact of these WMD’s exacerbates the creation of a safe no-fly zone for rebels in Syria, as many suggest, where rebels can congregate and train safely, for they are dispersed all over the country and no one seems to know where. (Mossad probably does.)
There is fear those WMD’s may fall into the hands of Iran or Hezbollah or other terrorists should Syria fall too chaotically (so enter the Arab League, and Kofi Annan, probably offering Assad a nice house in Costa Rica). Few know the mind of Assad himself or that he may well use those WMD’s himself. Mubarak listened to Obama and now he faces a firing squad.
What is especially galling is the notion by right-thinking critics of the Obama Middle East policy that once again, a popular uprising is being ruthlessly put down by yet another murdering dictator, and the only way to save those innocents is to send them aid by giving them guns, sanctuary and air cover.
I interject only to say that the Muslim Brotherhood promises to be a far more insidious dictatorhip that Assad ever hoped to be…with WMD;s to boot.
In truth Assad didn’t start this. The MB did…with the help of the US State Department, Obama, and a couple of social media organizations. Assad, nor for that matter, his daddy, is like the concentration camp commander from Schindler’s List, who could wake up grouchy any morning and just go out to the balcony and start picking off Jews walking across the courtyard for no good reason. Men like Assad are not psychopaths. They don’t go looking for citizens to kill because their underwear fits too tightly.
We have made common cause with the psychopaths.
The Muslim Brotherhood brought this fight on in Syria, and, Barack and Hillary lent a hand to start it. I don’t think Obama really knows what he’s unleashed, but now that it is getting out of hand, they need to cover their tracks.
And as it unfolds, conservatives ought not participate in the cover up.
