Category: Syria

THE FIRE AND FURY OF AN IMPLODING PRESIDENCY

What we need in this country right now is a slow news day.  Headlines limited to the latest Kardashian pregnancy, or Felicity Huffman’s community service, would be welcomed comfort food for our overtaxed brains.  Small chance of that happening anytime soon.  Instead, we are bombarded with almost hourly reports of a perpetual presidential implosion, stories of such spectacular incredulity that there is barely time to unpack them before another one breaks.

The Trump presidency is looking very much like the grand finale of a fireworks display, those closing moments in which the pyrotechnician tosses up one spectacular explosion after another.  We were bug eyed when the president linked Ukraine’s security to that country’s ability to help Trump’s reelection campaign. Then, poof – before the shock wore off, before we could so much as exhale, the next one exploded. Our president, rejecting unanimous pleas of his military and intelligence advisors, pulled our troops out of Syria, abandoning the Kurds who led our battle against ISIS.

While we tried to absorb the catastrophic results of that move, along came another poof. State Department officials said Trump’s political shenanigans in Ukraine went down only after career diplomats were pulled back so that the president’s private lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, could call the shots.  Then another poof: Four of Giuliani’s associates on the Ukrainian caper  were indicted on charges of conspiring to circumvent federal laws against foreign influence. While pondering the mug shots and bios of the first two arrests – Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman – yup, another poof.  Giuliani himself was reported to be under criminal investigation.

On one level, all this news seems overwhelmingly cumulative and confusing. Who has the time to do endless Google searches on Lev, Igor, the Kurds and Ukraine? Yet, there is a very simple common denominator. Donald Trump is so singularly focused on himself and his interests – petty and large – that he has forsaken everything else. Absolutely nothing outside of himself matters, not the Constitution or the laws of the land, not truth or integrity, and certainly not the welfare of the American people.  To him, this presidency has always been about one thing and one thing only: the needs of Donald J. Trump.

We’ve known since January 20, 2017 that the solipsism of our 45th president would dictate his every action, tweet and utterance. Hours after promising to “faithfully execute” his office, the Donald concocted a lie about how his inauguration crowd was the largest in American history.  That very same day, he filed papers with the Federal Election Commission launching his reelection campaign.  From that day forward, the very essence of his first term was about winning a second term. For the 44 men who preceeded him, winning the presidency meant an opportunity to make a difference in the world.  For Trump, winning was all that mattered, an end unto itself, validation for a dangerously insecure man.

Unfortunately, the articles of impeachment are likely to be narrowly constructed, directed at the president’s attempt to obtain campaign assistance from foreign countries and then obstructing the House’s investigation into the matter.  As odious as those actions were, the circumscribed prosecution is reminiscent of nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. The fact of the matter is that every single dark moment of this presidency, every injury he has inflicted, has come about through a single course of conduct, namely Trump’s consistent propensity to promote himself, with reckless disregard for the harm inflicted on others. 

Republican leaders in Congress were incredulous over Trump’s cut-and-run in Syria, calling it a foreign policy disaster that will haunt the United States for years. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of the president’s chief enablers, called it a “grave mistake” and a “strategic nightmare”.  Yet, until and unless the Republican base decides to give up the ghost on this president, the party’s leadership will continue to view him privately as their worst albatross while publicly opposing impeachment.

They choose, charitably, to view the Syrian disaster as a foreign policy disagreement.  It is anything but.  Donald Trump doesn’t have a foreign policy. All he has is a Donald policy. He does whatever he thinks is best for himself, with utterly no regard for the consequences.  He leveraged Ukraine’s security on digging up dirt on the Democrats because the 2020 election is an existential crisis for him. The strategic nightmare in Syria was a product of the same Donald-centric dynamic. He wants to campaign on bringing the troops home.  Because that’s all that mattered to him, he pulled the plug without a single strategic thought about the consequences of such sudden action.

Sadly, we would need at least another 20 Vietnam Walls to list all of the victims of Trump’s it’s-all-about-me approach to governing.  For example, he instituted a ban on transgender Americans serving in the military and has asked the Supreme Court to strike down employment discrimination protection for the entire LGBTQ community, both moves aimed at garnering affection from evangelical Christians and the homophobic portion of his base. 

To keep the love coming from that base, Trump has: 

REDUCED or eliminated food stamp assistance for millions of poor families.

ENDANGERED the economic security of American farmers through his trade wars.

ELIMINATED teen pregnancy programs that provided access to contraception and education.

REFUSED, as part of his anti-regulation political pitch, to ban a pesticide linked to birth defects in children of farm workers.

SEPARATED migrant children from their parents to show how tough he is on immigration.

PROMOTED racism and xenophobia by appealing to forces that fear the loss of white privilege.

The list, of course, goes on and on.  In each instance, the force at work here is not the president’s ideology.  He has none.  It’s all about feeding his base, positioning himself for his next tweet or rally or election.  It’s all about making himself a winner, a legend in his own mind.

That’s why we need a more expansive view of impeachment.  It’s about so much more than trying to get other countries to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.  It’s about a president who, despite his sloganeering, has never once put America first. It’s about  a president clinging so obsessively to a pathological power of self-absorption that nobody outside of himself is safe.

Most importantly, it’s about a president who, for the first time in our country’s history, represents the biggest threat to America’s democracy.

ONE TOKE OVER THE RED LINE, SWEET SYRIA

If the first casualty of war is truth, surely the second must be moral clarity. In the case of Syria’s civil war, both Presidents Obama and Trump, men with wildly disparate world views, drew the same “red line” of morality. Here’s their shared ethical standard: Killing and maiming thousands of noncombatant men, women and children with guns, bombs and explosives is acceptable, but if chemical weapons are used to accomplish the same results, there will be hell to pay.

Three times now in recent years, we’ve gone through the to-bomb-or-not-to-bomb drama of responding to Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad’s decision to leap over that red line. The first was in 2013 when Obama pushed for a missile attack to punish Assad for using chemical weapons. Congress, however, declined to authorize the bombing. There were similar gas attacks in 2017 and earlier this month. On both occasions, Trump sent the bombs dropping on Syrian military facilities as a way of denouncing the regime’s “evil and despicable” use of chemical warfare. Both actions won him more bipartisan praise than anything he has done in office.

Most of the news coverage these past few days has focused on the narrow issue of whether Trump’s punitive air attacks were effective. The general consensus of military leaders is that Saturday’s bombing might have put a dent in Assad’s chemical arsenal, but is unlikely to hold the regime back from making and using new ones. Scant attention has been given to the broader matter of whether we are drawing the red line in the right place. In other words, do we really want a moral imperative that limits evil to one category of weapons? Is it a greater wrong to kill civilians with gas than it is to shoot or bomb them to death?

What started as anti-government protests seven years ago, quickly evolved into full scale civil war in Syria. There is no end in sight. More than a half million people have died, and the vast majority of them were civilians, including tens of thousands of young children. Yet, it’s only the chemical attacks that show up on Trump’s outrage meter or Twitter feed. In the most recent incident, 70 civilians died from Assad’s use of what is believed to have been sarin, a chemical nerve agent that can cause agonizing death in minutes.

Here’s what Trump said in justifying the retaliatory bombing: “The evil and the despicable attack left mothers and fathers, infants and children thrashing in pain and gasping for air. These are not the actions of a man. They are the crimes of a monster instead.” In calling Assad a monster, Trump was uncharacteristically without hyperbolae. Yet, the president’s moral offense was aimed at the specific method of the dictator’s mass murder, not the broader act of having spent seven years killing his own people.

There is, of course, a case to be made that chemical weapons are more evil than their conventional counterparts. As Obama noted in 2013, the weaponization of poisonous gases conjures up dark moments of thousands of American GIs dying from mustard gas in World War I and, of course, the Nazis’ use of gas in the Holocaust during World War II. The civilized countries of the world have agreed not to use chemical weapons. In arguing for a punitive strike after Assad’s 2013 chemical attack, Obama said such action would reinforce the taboo of chemical warfare.

Yet, in the context of this ongoing Syrian massacre, limiting our moral outrage to the relatively small number of deaths caused by chemical weapons is a de facto acceptance of the other 500,000 murders at the hands of weapons just as lethal and painful as gas. NPR reported that the regime has used crude but deadly barrel bombs almost exclusively on civilians. An international team of scientists found that 97 percent of the deaths from these devices have been noncombatants, mostly women and children. Another report found that at least 14,000 children have been killed in Syria by snipers, machine guns, missiles, grenades, roadside bombs and aerial bombs. Another 1,000 children have been executed and more than 100 have been tortured and then executed. None of those atrocities, however, are included in our government’s outrage and punitive air strike over Assad’s use of chemical weapons.

Leaving the battlefield for a moment, let’s apply the same moral relativism to a pair of terrorist attacks. In 1995, a religious cult used sarin to kill 12 people on the Tokyo subway. In 2005, terrorists set off bombs in the London subway, killing 52 and injuring more than 700. Are we really prepared to view the latter as more morally acceptable than the former? Steve Johnson, an academic expert on chemical weapons, says he “can understand why (chemical warfare) feels emotive to us – it is insidious, there is no shelter, it is particularly effective on the young, elderly, and frail, and can be a violent and excruciating death. When one breaks it down ethically, though, it seems impossible to say that it is more acceptable to kill 100 people with explosives than with nerve agent.”

This is much more than a mere intellectual exercise in moral philosophy. It’s about adopting a coherent and meaningful standard with respect to regimes that murder their own people. Trump’s Tweetstorm about the evil of killing children with chemical weapons, followed by tough talk and a quick act of cruise missile theater, does absolutely nothing to address the daily atrocities faced by the Syrian people. As George Washington University professor Stephen Briddle put it, “That’s not a Syria strategy. It’s a psychodrama.”

Although Trump boasted that his response to Assad’s chemical weaponry reflected his “concern for humanity,” that concern is no larger than a pin prick. By the end of Obama’s presidency, the U.S. welcomed 15,479 refugees from Syria into the country. These were men, women and children, literally fleeing for their lives. Under Trump’s travel ban, however, the door slammed shut for Syrian refugees. So much for humanity. A moral code that rejects chemical weapons but gives a dictator a pass at killing by any other means – and offers no safe shelter to his victims – is anything but moral.