Day: August 8, 2013

Syria has dropped off the screen

The White House justifications for backing out of a bilateral summit with President Putin lack one important one:  Syria.  The list is a long, citing (in addition to the asylum for Edward Snowden):

our lack of progress on issues such as missile defense and arms control, trade and commercial relations, global security issues, and human rights and civil society.

Some might hope that this presages progress in convening the proposed Geneva 2 meeting on Syria, but there is no sign of that.  The more than 100,000 people killed in Syria in the past 2.5 years, the 1.5-2 million who are refugees, the 4 million who are displaced inside Syria and the 7 million in humanitarian need have dropped off the radar of an administration that promised to anticipate and prevent mass atrocities.

A colleague deeply immersed in Syria asked the other day whether watching the Bosnian implosion was this bad.  I answered that it was worse, because the crisis was on the front pages daily.  And it went on for 3.5 years before President Clinton carried out the threat he had made during his first campaign for the presidency to bomb Serb forces.  That is why it is not on the list of reasons for canceling the Obama/Putin meeting.

Why was it on the front pages every day?  The proximate causes were two:  the Bosnians had forceful and effective spokespeople, mainly their ambassador to the UN in New York and their wartime prime minister.  Ambassador Mo Sacirbey was on CNN daily strumming the heartstrings of ordinary Americans.  Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic would whip himself into a lather bemoaning the latest atrocity.  Students organized against the war on college campuses, Congress held hearings, Foreign Service officers resigned and newspapers ran daily accounts of a war in which little of strategic significance was happening.

While Senator McCain and a few others have raised their voices about Syria, mobilization today against the atrocities in Syria extends little beyond the Syrian American community, which is doing its best to funnel in humanitarian assistance but has found no resonance in the broader US population.  There is no recognizable and consistent Syrian voice speaking out daily on US television.

Part of the reason is political instability in the Syrian opposition, which has gone through three or four “presidents” in a couple of years, none of whom became a welcome figure in the American media.  Divided international sponsorship–the Qataris backing the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudis backing less Islamist forces–underlies this instability.

The Bosnians faced similar divisions among their international sponsors:  their money and weapons came from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others.  But the government in Sarajevo had from the first a stable leadership:  the laconic Alija Izetbegovic was the more or less uncontested first among equals, accepted even by his rivals as the legitimate president of the beleaguered Bosnian state.  There was stolid consistency at the top, which helped to paper over the differences among the international donors and reduce the perceived significance in Washington of the jihadi fighters who joined the Bosnian cause.

In Syria, the Saudis, perhaps emboldened by the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, are now trying to play a leadership role by offering  to buy off the Russians.  They have managed to install one of their favorites as president of the Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces.  What they have not managed to do is counter the growing significance of the extremist fighters, who have frightened Washington away from embracing the revolutionary cause.

The Syrians are not lacking in rhetorical power:  sister and brother Rafif and Murhaf Jouejati here in DC do a great job trying to bring the latest atrocity to our attention.  But they are doing it essentially as civil society activists rather than as official representatives of the Syrian opposition.  And they are heard mostly in a narrow circle of Syria-watchers and expatriate Syrians, none of whom carry much weight in the broader American body politic.  Syria really has dropped off Washington’s screen.

 

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