November 01, 2013
The American peace movement has been celebrating a
Pyrrhic victory on Syria. “The U.S. is not bombing Syria, as we certainly would
have been if not for a huge mobilization of antiwar pressure on the president
and especially on Congress,” writes Phyllis Bennis Institute for Policy Studies,
a progressive think tank in Washington. This represents “an extraordinary,
unforeseen victory for the global anti-war movement,” she goes on, one that “we
should be savoring.”
This turn of events is “something extraordinary—even
historic,” writes my
friend Stephen Kinzer, the
author of Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii
to Iraq. “Never in modern history have Americans been so
doubtful about the wisdom of bombing, invading or occupying another country,” he
continues. “This is an exciting moment,” he rhapsodizes, “the start of a new,
more realistic approach to foreign policy.”
I completely understand this jubilance. Yet it
leaves me feeling uneasy.
Let me be clear: I too was against the Obama administration’s proposed military
strike on Syria. How strange that the White House, after two and a half years
of doing essentially nothing about the deepening crisis in Syria, decided to
act with a sense of urgency. Washington was even unwilling to wait for the
United Nations team to complete inspections—as if the world should simply trust
American claims about weapons of mass destruction. (Fool me once...)
After two and a half years of Syrian President
Bashar Al-Assad’s crimes against humanity, chemical weapons were
exactly the wrong issue
for the Obama administration to center its policy on. To paraphrase Shadi
Hamid of the Brookings Doha Center, why draw a ‘red line’ at the use of
chemical weapons but not at 100,000 dead? The vast majority of civilians have
died by means of conventional, not chemical, weapons.
Hinging its case on chemical weapons turned out to be a huge strategic mistake
as well. Russia cleverly short-circuited the Obama administration, taking
advantage of the thinness of its case. So Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles
will be removed from the equation. Yet the Assad killing machine can continue
unfettered on its rampage. Chemical weapons issue: solved. Syria’s killing
fields: no end in sight.
Given this horrific picture, it’s hard for me to share the peace movement’s
triumphalism. Yes, a U.S. military attack was thwarted. But is that where the
story ends? For libertarian isolationists like Senator Rand Paul (Republican,
Kentucky), paleo-con America-firsters like Pat Buchanan, and Realpolitik Tories of the sort who long
dominated the Republican foreign policy apparatus, the story indeed ends in
Washington. People in far-flung lands are not their concern, unless vital
strategic or national security interests of the United States are at stake.
But for progressives, especially ones who profess
the values of solidarity and internationalism, the story surely cannot end at
America’s shores. Struggles around the world for justice and dignity matter to
us. We believe that we have a stake in them and their outcomes. We take sides.
In the early weeks of 2011 progressive
internationalists emphatically supported popular struggles abroad: the Tunisian revolutionaries who
rose up against the dictatorship of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali; the Egyptian
protestors in Tahrir Square who demanded the ouster of tyrant Hosni Mubarak;
and the Bahrainis who demonstrated against the tyranny of the US- and
Saudi-backed monarchy. Our position as progressive internationalists in those
cases was not primarily about the U.S. We were against authoritarianism and for
human dignity.
The Syrian uprising began very much in the
same spirit and as part of the same wave of revolts across
the Arab world. But the response of Western progressives to the Syrian case has
been quite different. “Where have these people been the past two years?” asks the
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights in London. “It’s a bit late,” the
organization inveighs, “to start marching for ‘no war in Syria.’”
The peace movement is emphatically against U.S.
intervention, but where does it stand on the struggle to topple Assad’s
murderous dictatorship? “What is emerging in the United States and United
Kingdom now is a movement that is antiwar in form but pro-war in essence,” said
the Syrian Observatory. That may sound harsh and seem overstated, but it
reflects a frustration that many Syrians share. The specter of a U.S. military
attack sucked all the oxygen out of the room, imposing a kind of tunnel vision
on progressives.
How does it propose the bloodshed be brought to an
end? There are no clear-cut answers. But only having a position on what shouldn’t be
done, while avoiding the question of what should be done, is a
cop out and a betrayal of the tradition of internationalism. The question of
what should be done is much thornier. Of course there are many progressives,
especially in the peace movement, who are uncomfortable supporting an armed
rebellion or advocating the delivery of arms to one. But the point is to place
the plight of the Syrian people front and center on the agenda and to think
seriously about how to resolve it. More than 100,000 Syrians have been killed
and nearly seven million displaced from their homes, with an average of 5,000
fleeing into neighboring countries every day. The humanitarian horror is
colossal. It demands serious thinking.
Back in 2000 I chaired a panel on Kosovo
at a conference of the Radical Philosophy Association in
Chicago, and the Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Žižek was among the panelists. During question-and-answer
period, an audience member began to articulate a widely-held position on the
Left: Although Serbian forces had committed horrible atrocities in Kosovo,
foreign military intervention would only make things worse and must be opposed.
Žižek,
having heard this argument before, interrupted his interlocutor just as the
word “but” was on its way out.
“And what do you propose should have been done about it?” Žižek thundered. The room went
silent. An uneasy moral clarity had been imposed on the discussion. It was a
forceful statement, yet it was not a rhetorical question. Žižek
demanded an answer to the problem. It’s not enough to stand against;
we must also stand for, and think through what that means
concretely, on the ground, where lives are at stake.
I want to put Žižek’s
question to antiwar activists vis-à-vis Syria.So you opposed a U.S. strike on
Syria. I did, too. And that battle has been won. Mission accomplished, the
peace movement seems to be saying as it takes its victory lap. But should
antiwar activists feel quite so satisfied, as the death toll in Syria continues
to mount with no end in sight?
To be fair, some antiwar organizations point in the right direction, at least
rhetorically. Peace Action calls for “real
alternatives and solutions based on serious multilateral diplomacy, adherence
to domestic and international law and massive humanitarian aid…as well as an
arms embargo and a cease-fire.” But for the last two and a half years such
calls have gone unheeded.
“Dialogue, civil resistance, out-of-the box alternatives that no one expects to
succeed—there are always other options,” reads an e-blast from
the American Friends Service Committee. To its credit, the AFSC is partnering with the UK-based organization Responding to Conflict “to
support a network of courageous Syrian peacemakers who are working on the local
level to build a future in which all Syrians can co-exist safely and
peacefully.” This is important work but it is unlikely to stop the carnage.
What if progressives devoted just a fraction of the
energy and effort that went into mobilizing against a U.S. military strike to
the cause of bringing Syria’s nightmare to an end? It might not make a concrete
difference. (In fact all the efforts to resolve the conflict thus far,
including those of Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi, have come to naught.) But
the effort would at least be an expression of solidarity and internationalism.
Factoring the Syrian people, who have been largely absent from the progressive
discussion, prominently into the equation would represent a welcome departure
from the solipsistic, U.S.-centric tendencies of the American peace movement.
Danny Postel is associate director of the
Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel
School of International Studies. He is the author of Reading "Legitimation Crisis" in Tehran and
co-editor of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle
for Iran’s Future and The Syria Dilemma. On Twitter:
@dannypostel.