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Home > Brain-Dead Diplomats: Why Did 51 American State Dept. Officials
'Dissent' Against Obama and Call for Bombing Syria?
________________________________________
Brain-Dead Diplomats: Why Did 51 American State Dept. Officials 'Dissent'
Against Obama and Call for Bombing Syria?
By Vijay Prashad [1] / AlterNet [2]
June 18, 2016
Close to half a million people are dead in Syria, as the country falls
further and further into oblivion. Data on the suffering of the Syrians is
bewildering, but most startling is that the Syrian life expectancy has
declined by over 15 years since the civil war started. On the one side, ISIS
holds territory, while on the other a fratricidal war pits the Assad
government against a motley crew of rebels that run from small pockets of
socialists to large swathes of Al Qaeda-backed extremists. No easy exit to
this situation seems possible. Trust is in short supply. The peace process
is weak. Brutality is the mood.
What should America do? In the eyes of 51 U.S. diplomats who still haven't
grasped the negative outcomes of the disastrous wars launched since 2002,
the solution is to bomb the world into America's image. In an internal
dissent [3] cable addressed to Barack Obama, seasoned diplomats have urged
airstrikes on the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
Chas Freeman, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf
War, told me he found the cable "unusual" in two respects. First, it
garnered a large number of signatures. Most of those who signed the cable, a
State Department official told me, were "rank and file" diplomats, such as a
deputy to U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford and a secretary in the Near
East Bureau. They had a good understanding of the current situation in the
region. The second reason this cable is unusual, said Ambassador Freeman, is
that the signatories "are arguing for rather than against the use of force."
Over the past 40 years, diplomats have used the "dissent channel" to caution
against a rush to war. Now these diplomats are asking for an intensification
of war.
Push Obama, Elevate Clinton
Why did the diplomats write their dissent now, and why was it leaked to the
press? A former ambassador, with deep experience in the Middle East, told me
it was an error to leak the cable.
"Someone decided to leak it," he said, "for whatever irrational reason, an
action as blatantly incorrect as it is most certainly politically and
diplomatically counterproductive."
Why is it counterproductive? The cable will not produce the outcome desired
by the diplomats. But even so, it serves to bring U.S. politics into the
domain of diplomatic procedures.
Do the diplomats expect that President Obama would read their cable and rush
to a bombing raid, which he has resisted? No one assumes that Obama would
hastily send in the jets to bomb Damascus. He has been cautious because he
seems to recognize that the outcomes of such interventions could be worse
than the reasons for them. It is now well established that in 2011 Obama was
loathe to enter the Libyan conflict. It was the French who were most eager,
and it was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who carried the French message
to Obama. She and U.S Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power convinced Obama to
endorse the NATO move into Libya. There is little indication that Obama
wants to expand the chaos in Syria by bombing the Syrian Arab Army and the
institutions of state in Damascus.
A former ambassador told me that many of the diplomats have great fealty to
Hillary Clinton. Could they have leaked this cable to boost Clinton's
narrative that she wanted a more robust attack on Damascus as early as 2012?
Is this a campaign advertisement for Clinton, and a preparation for her
likely Middle East policy when she takes power in 2017? Clinton certainly
advocated tougher military action in Syria. She joined CIA chief David
Petraeus to push for a U.S.-backed rebel army in 2012, and she argued for
air strikes when there was no appetite for this in the White House. Last
year, Clinton called for the creation of a no-fly zone, a seemingly
innocuous term that would have provided the pretext for Syria to hit either
U.S. or Turkish aircraft and then escalate the conflict into full-scale war.
If anyone carries the torch for these diplomats, it is Hillary Clinton. Her
sensibility toward regime change seems shared by these people. War, for
them, is not the breakdown of diplomacy; it is an instrument of diplomacy.
Multi-polarity
Ambassador Freeman says that the diplomats, in their cable, "embrace the use
of force without linking it to any diplomatic strategy and accept the
oft-disproven assumption that regime change will produce peace rather than
additional political complexity or anarchy." This is the most curious part
of the cable, which does not have a detailed assessment of what would come
after Assad.
Where are the Syrian liberals, the preferred instrument of American regime
change? They are not in the picture. The Muslim Brotherhood and the
Saudi-backed proxies dominate the Syrian opposition leadership in Istanbul.
Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey back them to the hilt. They are not amenable
to the niceties of American liberalism. The most ferocious rebel fighters in
Syria are under the ambit of Al Qaeda and its many offshoots. The
U.S.-backed rebels are weak, while the Kurdish-backed Syrian Democratic
Forces has less commitment to the United States than to its own Kurdish
ambitions. To believe that the small bands of fighters from towns like
Kafranbel would be able to control the dynamic after U.S. jets strike
Damascus is naive. The beneficiary of such strikes would most likely be the
most bilious of the forces in the rebel camp.
What is most astounding about the cable is that it mistakes objective shifts
in geopolitical relations for subjective errors. This is an elementary error
for observers of international relations. The cable blames Obama for not
striking Syria earlier and asks that he do so now. But Obama did not strike
Syria in 2013 because he recognized, correctly, that the Russians, Chinese
and most of the major countries of the Global South (including India) deeply
opposed regime change. It was to finally stop any consideration of regime
change that the Russians directly intervened in 2015. The deployment of
Russian S-400 surface-to-air missiles would put any U.S. bombing raid into
direct confrontation with the Russians. This is a very dangerous situation.
Older habits of U.S. uni-polarity, developed from Gulf War 1 in 1990, no
longer apply to an increasingly multi-polar world. It is not Obama's
timidity that led to the failure of aerial bombardment in Syria, as the
diplomats contend, but it has been the rising confidence of certain world
powers to confront U.S. preponderance. That this is not evident to the
diplomats suggests they have a poor understanding of the world.
Ambassador Freeman suggests that the diplomats are making a "moral case,"
which would mean that they are simply washing their own hands off of the
disaster in Syria. They perhaps want to say, we are not responsible for the
destruction of Syria, and if you had bombed Syria earlier, the situation
would not be so dire. Since the diplomats "put forward no argument for why
their approach would yield a particular outcome," says Freeman, it is hard
to take them seriously. There is nothing wrong with a cry from the heart,
but it is dangerous to make policy based entirely on frustration and anger.
Dissent Channel
The most important internal criticism of U.S. policy came in 1971 from
Dhaka, when the U.S. Consul General Archer Blood sent a telegram to
Washington critical of U.S. backing of Pakistan over its massacres in (what
was then) East Pakistan. "Our government has evidenced what many will
consider moral bankruptcy," he wrote on behalf of 19 other diplomats in what
would later be called the Blood Telegram. It was an indictment of U.S.
power. The Blood Telegram suggested that the U.S. backing for Pakistan gave
it confidence to continue with its massacres in its eastern province. It
called upon the U.S. to put pressure on Pakistan not to act in this way.
Secretary of State Kissinger was furious. Blood was recalled to Washington
and sidelined. It was more important to cultivate Pakistan as the doorway to
China, which is indeed what happened in 1972. Those who died in East Bengal
had to be sacrificed for a large goal-the U.S. rapprochement with China
against the Soviet Union.
Blood understood that the U.S. government had leverage over Pakistan. The
U.S. 7th Fleet sailed up the Bay of Bengal to put pressure on India, with
Soviet backing, not to intervene. (I was a young boy in Calcutta at the
time, putting up black paper on our windows, waiting for the U.S. ships to
come within range.) India nonetheless intervened and helped to end the
massacres. Blood had been correct, as he wistfully told me on the telephone
from his home in Fort Collins, Colorado, a year or so before his death. It
was in response to the Blood Telegram that the State Department created the
"dissent channel" (not in response to the Vietnam War, as Mark Landler says
in the New York Times).
The "dissent channel," said the former ambassador who worked in the Middle
East, should work as "an internal means of presenting ideas and opinions to
the leadership." But this action, with the move to publicity, will not help
the aims of U.S. diplomacy. Nor will it help the Syrian people.
Vijay Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity College in
Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of 18 books, including Arab Spring,
Libyan Winter (AK Press, 2012), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of
the Global South (Verso, 2013) and the forthcoming The Death of a Nation and
the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016).
His columns appear at AlterNet every Wednesday.
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Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Brain-Dead Diplomats: Why Did 51 American State Dept. Officials
'Dissent' Against Obama and Call for Bombing Syria?
Brain-Dead Diplomats: Why Did 51 American State Dept. Officials 'Dissent'
Against Obama and Call for Bombing Syria?
By Vijay Prashad [1] / AlterNet [2]
June 18, 2016
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Close to half a million people are dead in Syria, as the country falls
further and further into oblivion. Data on the suffering of the Syrians is
bewildering, but most startling is that the Syrian life expectancy has
declined by over 15 years since the civil war started. On the one side, ISIS
holds territory, while on the other a fratricidal war pits the Assad
government against a motley crew of rebels that run from small pockets of
socialists to large swathes of Al Qaeda-backed extremists. No easy exit to
this situation seems possible. Trust is in short supply. The peace process
is weak. Brutality is the mood.
What should America do? In the eyes of 51 U.S. diplomats who still haven't
grasped the negative outcomes of the disastrous wars launched since 2002,
the solution is to bomb the world into America's image. In an internal
dissent [3] cable addressed to Barack Obama, seasoned diplomats have urged
airstrikes on the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
Chas Freeman, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf
War, told me he found the cable "unusual" in two respects. First, it
garnered a large number of signatures. Most of those who signed the cable, a
State Department official told me, were "rank and file" diplomats, such as a
deputy to U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford and a secretary in the Near
East Bureau. They had a good understanding of the current situation in the
region. The second reason this cable is unusual, said Ambassador Freeman, is
that the signatories "are arguing for rather than against the use of force."
Over the past 40 years, diplomats have used the "dissent channel" to caution
against a rush to war. Now these diplomats are asking for an intensification
of war.
Push Obama, Elevate Clinton
Why did the diplomats write their dissent now, and why was it leaked to the
press? A former ambassador, with deep experience in the Middle East, told me
it was an error to leak the cable.
"Someone decided to leak it," he said, "for whatever irrational reason, an
action as blatantly incorrect as it is most certainly politically and
diplomatically counterproductive."
Why is it counterproductive? The cable will not produce the outcome desired
by the diplomats. But even so, it serves to bring U.S. politics into the
domain of diplomatic procedures.
Do the diplomats expect that President Obama would read their cable and rush
to a bombing raid, which he has resisted? No one assumes that Obama would
hastily send in the jets to bomb Damascus. He has been cautious because he
seems to recognize that the outcomes of such interventions could be worse
than the reasons for them. It is now well established that in 2011 Obama was
loathe to enter the Libyan conflict. It was the French who were most eager,
and it was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who carried the French message
to Obama. She and U.S Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power convinced Obama to
endorse the NATO move into Libya. There is little indication that Obama
wants to expand the chaos in Syria by bombing the Syrian Arab Army and the
institutions of state in Damascus.
A former ambassador told me that many of the diplomats have great fealty to
Hillary Clinton. Could they have leaked this cable to boost Clinton's
narrative that she wanted a more robust attack on Damascus as early as 2012?
Is this a campaign advertisement for Clinton, and a preparation for her
likely Middle East policy when she takes power in 2017? Clinton certainly
advocated tougher military action in Syria. She joined CIA chief David
Petraeus to push for a U.S.-backed rebel army in 2012, and she argued for
air strikes when there was no appetite for this in the White House. Last
year, Clinton called for the creation of a no-fly zone, a seemingly
innocuous term that would have provided the pretext for Syria to hit either
U.S. or Turkish aircraft and then escalate the conflict into full-scale war.
If anyone carries the torch for these diplomats, it is Hillary Clinton. Her
sensibility toward regime change seems shared by these people. War, for
them, is not the breakdown of diplomacy; it is an instrument of diplomacy.
Multi-polarity
Ambassador Freeman says that the diplomats, in their cable, "embrace the use
of force without linking it to any diplomatic strategy and accept the
oft-disproven assumption that regime change will produce peace rather than
additional political complexity or anarchy." This is the most curious part
of the cable, which does not have a detailed assessment of what would come
after Assad.
Where are the Syrian liberals, the preferred instrument of American regime
change? They are not in the picture. The Muslim Brotherhood and the
Saudi-backed proxies dominate the Syrian opposition leadership in Istanbul.
Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey back them to the hilt. They are not amenable
to the niceties of American liberalism. The most ferocious rebel fighters in
Syria are under the ambit of Al Qaeda and its many offshoots. The
U.S.-backed rebels are weak, while the Kurdish-backed Syrian Democratic
Forces has less commitment to the United States than to its own Kurdish
ambitions. To believe that the small bands of fighters from towns like
Kafranbel would be able to control the dynamic after U.S. jets strike
Damascus is naive. The beneficiary of such strikes would most likely be the
most bilious of the forces in the rebel camp.
What is most astounding about the cable is that it mistakes objective shifts
in geopolitical relations for subjective errors. This is an elementary error
for observers of international relations. The cable blames Obama for not
striking Syria earlier and asks that he do so now. But Obama did not strike
Syria in 2013 because he recognized, correctly, that the Russians, Chinese
and most of the major countries of the Global South (including India) deeply
opposed regime change. It was to finally stop any consideration of regime
change that the Russians directly intervened in 2015. The deployment of
Russian S-400 surface-to-air missiles would put any U.S. bombing raid into
direct confrontation with the Russians. This is a very dangerous situation.
Older habits of U.S. uni-polarity, developed from Gulf War 1 in 1990, no
longer apply to an increasingly multi-polar world. It is not Obama's
timidity that led to the failure of aerial bombardment in Syria, as the
diplomats contend, but it has been the rising confidence of certain world
powers to confront U.S. preponderance. That this is not evident to the
diplomats suggests they have a poor understanding of the world.
Ambassador Freeman suggests that the diplomats are making a "moral case,"
which would mean that they are simply washing their own hands off of the
disaster in Syria. They perhaps want to say, we are not responsible for the
destruction of Syria, and if you had bombed Syria earlier, the situation
would not be so dire. Since the diplomats "put forward no argument for why
their approach would yield a particular outcome," says Freeman, it is hard
to take them seriously. There is nothing wrong with a cry from the heart,
but it is dangerous to make policy based entirely on frustration and anger.
Dissent Channel
The most important internal criticism of U.S. policy came in 1971 from
Dhaka, when the U.S. Consul General Archer Blood sent a telegram to
Washington critical of U.S. backing of Pakistan over its massacres in (what
was then) East Pakistan. "Our government has evidenced what many will
consider moral bankruptcy," he wrote on behalf of 19 other diplomats in what
would later be called the Blood Telegram. It was an indictment of U.S.
power. The Blood Telegram suggested that the U.S. backing for Pakistan gave
it confidence to continue with its massacres in its eastern province. It
called upon the U.S. to put pressure on Pakistan not to act in this way.
Secretary of State Kissinger was furious. Blood was recalled to Washington
and sidelined. It was more important to cultivate Pakistan as the doorway to
China, which is indeed what happened in 1972. Those who died in East Bengal
had to be sacrificed for a large goal-the U.S. rapprochement with China
against the Soviet Union.
Blood understood that the U.S. government had leverage over Pakistan. The
U.S. 7th Fleet sailed up the Bay of Bengal to put pressure on India, with
Soviet backing, not to intervene. (I was a young boy in Calcutta at the
time, putting up black paper on our windows, waiting for the U.S. ships to
come within range.) India nonetheless intervened and helped to end the
massacres. Blood had been correct, as he wistfully told me on the telephone
from his home in Fort Collins, Colorado, a year or so before his death. It
was in response to the Blood Telegram that the State Department created the
"dissent channel" (not in response to the Vietnam War, as Mark Landler says
in the New York Times).
The "dissent channel," said the former ambassador who worked in the Middle
East, should work as "an internal means of presenting ideas and opinions to
the leadership." But this action, with the move to publicity, will not help
the aims of U.S. diplomacy. Nor will it help the Syrian people.
Vijay Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity College in
Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of 18 books, including Arab Spring,
Libyan Winter (AK Press, 2012), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of
the Global South (Verso, 2013) and the forthcoming The Death of a Nation and
the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016).
His columns appear at AlterNet every Wednesday.
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Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/world/brain-dead-diplomats-why-did-51-american-state
-dept-officials-dissent-against-obama-and-call
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/vijay-prashad
[2] http://alternet.org
[3]
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/world/middleeast/syria-assad-obama-airstri
kes-diplomats-memo.html?_r=0
[4] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Brain-Dead Diplomats:
Why Did 51 American State Dept. Officials 'Dissent' Against Obama
and Call for Bombing Syria?
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