Just after President Obama spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about his decision to seek authority from Congress to attack Syria, the president enthusiastically and aggressively lobbied lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Likewise, he reached out to the heads of states of several countries and pressed them to support his war efforts. Experts in Washington and other major capitals attributed such drive to the blessing he had received from the Israeli leader and Israel lobby in Washington.
Since the most powerful Israeli lobby, AIPAC, issued a statement that an attack on Syria would “protect American security interests,” members of Congress and major American media outlets have been waging a relentless campaign to persuade the skeptical American public to go along with the war plan. Leading Christian Zionists in the Senate, such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham, along with some other House and Senate members, have intensified their call that attacking Syria leads to peace in the Middle East. Like the president and his secretary of state, lawmakers have repeated the AIPAC talking points that attacking Syria sends a powerful message to Iran and serves American interests.
While many international affairs analysts agree that the Obama administration harbors a strong resentment of Syria, much as the Bush administration did, they argue that unlike the Bush administration, the Obama administration will not accept less than the total submission of Syria, the people and the regime, to Washington’s design for the region. The puzzling question that these international analysts face is “why?” On this point, there exist several reasons.
There are those who believe that since President Obama has surrounded himself with neoconservative Democrats, like Joe Biden, John Kerry, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice, along with hard line neoconservatives in the administration, such as Benjamin J. Rhodes and Marin Indyk, Obama has no choice but to heed their advice. These advisors have made a powerful argument that attacking Syria serves Israeli interests and will obliterate forever the last strong professional Arab army.
On the other hand, there are those who advance the notion that Obama has to present himself as a powerful commander in chief in order to compete with hard line Republicans and powerful neoconservatives who have accused him of being weak in international affairs. Syria, the Obama advisors believe, provides an easy venture that will add clout and strengthen Obama’s image as an assertive president who does not hesitate to take action abroad on behalf of Israel and Arab authoritarian regimes.
Moreover, Middle East and international affairs experts underscore the potency of the prevailing notion among Christian Zionists and other fundamentalist groups that Israel is God’s Kingdom on earth. This notion has strong support in Washington, especially among many lawmakers and members of the Obama administration. Obama cannot afford to ignore this camp and their belief that those who defy Israel defy God’s will. Syria has always been identified as a country which persistently defies God’s will by refusing to abandon its rights to Syrian land that was forcefully occupied by Israel. The Wall Street Journal (September 4) indicated that, “Support for Israel has been a unifying theme in U.S. foreign policy—an issue that binds Republicans and Democrats alike.”
Likewise, President Obama and senior members of his administration, including his secretary of state, John Kerry, have forged strong personal relations with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The latter, since 2006, has made it clear that the Syrian regime has defied his design for Lebanon and that Syria’s relationship with Iran and patriotic Arab movements constitutes a serious obstacle to normalizing relations with Israel. President Obama understands King Abdullah’s concerns and is encouraged by the king‘s willingness to cover all military expenses for an attack on Syria. In his recent appearance before the House Foreign Affairs committee, Secretary Kerry indicated that the offer to bear the cost of the war was “quite significant.”
And lastly, the powerful Israeli lobby has been active in pressuring members of Congress and the administration to seek ways to perpetuate instability and chaos in the Arab world. This lobby, tragically in cooperation with some oil-rich Arab Gulf regimes, advocates three primary notions: Arab cultural and intellectual revivalism is a threat to the West, instability in the region is necessary for Israeli security and its allies among the Arab Gulf states, and Israeli interests and American interests are one and the same. Long before the start of the “Arab Spring,” powerful neoconservative think tanks, like the American Enterprise Institute, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, among others, called for an attack on Syria as a strategic move to weaken Iran.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz (Sep. 6, 2013) reported that AIPAC has decided to storm the halls on Capitol Hill to convince members of the House of Representatives to support President Obama’s plan for a U.S. military strike on Syria. Haaretz stated that AIPAC has strongly argued that “A defeat for the administration could turn into a significant and potentially negative milestone for Israel and [that] Americans . . . may be turning their backs on Israel.”
In its cover story on September 9, Time magazine claimed that Obama was a reluctant and unhappy warrior who would be dragged into a war with Syria. This is inaccurate. President Obama, since the start of his first term, has been determined to make the Middle East a docile place where Israel acts as it will in ensuring the Arab’s masses and regimes’ complete submission and obedience to its design. His intensification of the drone war in the Arab World, the invasion of Libya, destabilization of Lebanon and Yemen, and ignoring the daily atrocities in Iraq that are committed by terrorists who are sponsored by Washington’s allies in the region demonstrate that President Obama is a war driven president.
Since the early months of it first term, the Obama administration has quietly and calculatingly engaged in strategic maneuvers to incapacitate Syria. It has never promoted genuine democratic transformation, either in Syria or the region. In fact, it has sought to humiliate the Syrian people and deplete their resources. For example, the Wall Street Journal (September 2) quoted former and current members of the administration saying that for months the administration did not want to solve the Syrian issue.
According to The New York Times (Sept. 5, 2013) this policy is consist with Israeli current aim. The Times argued that the “Israelis have increasingly argued that the best outcome for Syria’s two-and-a-half-year-old civil war, at least for the moment, is no outcome.” It quoted a former Israeli officer, Alon Pinkas, saying, “This is a playoff situation, in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don’t want one to win—we’ll settle for a tie . . . Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there’s no real threat from Syria.”
Before the insurgency started in Syria in 2011, the administration imposed several sanctions against Syria, pressed other Arab authoritarian states to isolate and destabilize it, and encouraged neighboring countries to train and deploy extremists into Syria. It has quietly made it possible for Israel and a powerful Arab oil producing state to cooperate in destabilizing Syria. At the same time, Washington has asked the European Union to take punitive measures against Syria for its refusal to abandon its national rights to the land Israeli seized from it by force.
The Obama administration’s rational for the destruction of Syria is built on certain qualities that put Syrian society apart from other Arab states: it is the only existing secular Arab entity where women have unconstrained access to all kinds of professional and scientific opportunities; the only Arab country that is a net exporter of agricultural, pharmaceutical, and textile commodities; the last Arab state where minorities used to live in peace and harmony with the rest of the population, and the only country that openly promotes Arab national expression. Unlike other Arab States, Syria, too, is the home for energetic entrepreneurs and a highly skilled workforce. These qualities do not fit well with the image that Washington and the Israeli lobby seek to project about Arabs.
The Obama administration has cleverly fooled the liberal and the peace camps to go along with its early international adventures. It has misguided the Arab masses into believing that Washington this time is serious about ensuring peace, stability, and sound utilization of economic resources in the region. Instead, the Obama administration has engaged in dangerous games that will lead the region into chaos and misery, open widely the gates of terror, deplete the region’s resources, and incite sectarian war that intensifies the clash within the Islamic civilization, while devastating one Arab state after another.
The Obama administration is venturing onto a road which further deepens bloodbaths and catastrophes. Instead of waging war, destabilizing the region, and risking the lives of innocent people, responsible leaders must seek ways to stop the flow of weapons and extremists into Syria and encourage peaceful negotiation between the Syrian opposition and the government in order to find an exit strategy that safeguards Syria, the people, and the land, and ensures the safety of future generations.
Abbas J. Ali is a professor and director at the School of International Management, Eberly College of Business and IT, Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Dear professor Ali and dear friends,
I always enjoy your analysis and interpretation of the most complex middle east situation.
I was reminded of a problem in engineering design, and solution of a truss, in my undergraduate days of statics.
The equilibrium was of importance and a method of sections was suggested as of of the methods.
Or, alternatively method of joints was viable too.
Both of them gave precise results of equilibrium by non-destructive testing and design.
In political equilibrium, the only alternative now left is the method of destruction.
If Russia was as powerful as it was before, as the only deterrent to the US, an equilibrium analysis would have worked in international affairs by two axis power method.
Alternatively, the political hawks here are applying the method of sections, and the section is passing through Syria alone and not through Israel.
When the fulcrum is Syria, then the Israeli forces are not only producing an undue “moment” in that region, but that “moment” of a force is felt in the US also.
And we in the US do welcome that the small “moment” produced by Israel due to its small lever, and those are heavily exaggerated by the US with its ‘long lever and big force.’
That is called political leadership with a biased purpose by method of destabilization, that has been tried in Pinochet and Indira Gandhi.
I wish even that the Jewish God, Himself would like to establish peace in that part of the world.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable- John F. Kennedy
It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war -John F. Kennedy