Authors: Kim Ghattas
“I wish that people inside Syria were responding as people inside Libya responded,”
she said. “They are not, at this point, perhaps because of the firepower and the absolute
intent that we’ve seen by the Assad regime to kill whomever.”
But what about her criticism of Russia and China; surely their obstructionism made
it easy to avoid action that no one wanted anyway?
“No. If they had joined us in the Security Council, I think it would have sent a really
strong message to Assad that he needed to start planning his exit, and the people
around him, who are already hedging their bets, would have been doing the same. [But]
they know they’ve got Iran actively supporting them, Russia selling them arms and
diplomatically protecting them, and China not wanting anybody to interfere with anybody’s
internal affairs. So that gives them a lot of comfort.”
The extent of her disappointment at the conference became more and more apparent as
the interview went on.
“I would not be doing my job if I were not looking at the complexity. I mean, I could
come on and I could do an interview with you and I could say, ‘Oh, we’re all for them.
Let’s go get them.’ But what would that mean? Because clearly I know how complex this
is, and anybody who is thinking about it and having to actually consider what could
happen next understands it.”
As a reporter, my job was to grill her with tough questions and never be satisfied
with the answers. As a woman who had grown up during a war, this was the kind of frank
and human response I wished American leaders gave more often. The truth was painful
but I felt it was better than empty promises of help.
But on a policy level, Clinton’s candor was often a double-edged sword. This was not
the message that the administration wanted to put out, but this is where she was in
her head that morning. Her words were seen as a blow to the opposition—was the United
States abandoning them? Pundits warned that Clinton’s statement would be comforting
to Assad.
Calibrating a message in this day of instant news was a struggle. Should American
officials be up front about the limits of their power and make clear to those waiting
for help that they should help themselves? Part of the responsibility to protect people
in danger was perhaps to admit to them that the cavalry wasn’t coming and that they
had to do a better job organizing and helping themselves. A hard message to send to
people under fire, but then they also deserved better than the poor excuse of a leadership
in exile that they had ended up with.
* * *
Clinton also had little by way of facts to deliver to Obama. When she had gone to
Paris just over a year prior, not fully decided about military action in Libya, she
had methodically crossed off every item on her political shopping list. She spoke
to the French and the British, who assured her that they were on board and understood
that more than a no-fly zone was needed. The Arabs had promised her face-to-face that
they would put their money where their mouth was. The Libyan opposition chief looked
like someone you could do business with. A year later, Libya was not exactly a shining
example of democracy, but at least the dictator was gone and people had tasted the
freedom of their own power. The rest was up to them, this was their country, and they
had to drive it. Soon, parliamentary elections would be held that would be touted
as historic with Mahmoud Jibril’s centrist coalition in the lead.
But at the Tunis conference on Syria, Hillary hadn’t been able to cross off anything.
The French didn’t want to do anything too close to the presidential elections. The
British didn’t want to mount any sort of coalition. Some of the Arabs wanted to arm
the opposition, and others didn’t. The Arab League hadn’t called for action, neither
had the Gulf Cooperation Council. Turkey talked a lot but didn’t actually want to
do anything. The Syrian opposition was useless. The bar was not high—no one was trying
to organize a coalition for a military intervention—but Hillary had nothing to work
with: no international unity, no unity within the Syrian opposition. She didn’t even
have something in her hands that she could sell to Lavrov. There were no clear answers;
the diplomatic stars weren’t lining up, not yet. But the longer the fighting continued
in Syria, the messier it was going to become. I began to see echoes of Lebanon.
* * *
Back in Washington, I continued to watch the footage coming out of Syria. More reporters
were finding their way into the country, but most of the pictures were from activists
and citizen journalists. Their unverified footage made it hard to confirm what was
happening exactly on the ground, and there was no doubt that a propaganda war was
under way as well, with the anti-Assad rebels keen to show the extent of the regime’s
crime and none of their own abuses.
In one of the videos, a Syrian soldier stood in a field with two gun-toting colleagues
on either side, dozens of others behind him. Some of them held up Syrian revolution
flags—the black, white, and green flag with three red stars that fluttered in Syria
between its independence from France in 1946 and 1963, when the Baath Party seized
power in a coup. Under a gray March sky, villagers and children looked on. The soldier
gave his name and announced his defection from the Syrian national army. On camera,
he read his new oath of allegiance as a member of the Free Syrian Army.
“I promise to defend villagers from the assault of the government forces,” he said.
“Long live Assad’s Syria.” He paused a moment, then burst out laughing, his hands
to his head, his body tilting backward in the laugh. Everybody laughed. “Long Live
Assad’s Syria” was seared on every Syrian’s brain, branded like cattle from infancy.
Every Syrian belonged to the Assad family; the country belonged to the Assads. The
motto was tagged on walls, printed in schoolbooks, repeated like a mantra for generations.
It was hard to get rid of. Just like Assad himself.
For years, Lebanon had suffered from the Machiavellian politics of the Assad family.
Several dozen prominent politicians had been assassinated over the course of three
decades. Syrian soldiers had invaded, occupied, looted, and raped in Lebanon with
the outside world often paying scant attention. In 1972, Hafez al-Assad declared that
Lebanon and Syria were one country, and he pursued that goal of unity assiduously
and ruthlessly from the first time he sent troops into Lebanon in 1975, until he completed
his control with the invasion of 1990 that had marked me so much. In the process,
across Lebanon, people were humiliated, detained, or beaten up by Syrian troops or
intelligence officers, many languished in Syrian jails for years, and some had never
resurfaced. Damascus did also have staunch allies in Lebanon who either benefited
from that alliance or espoused the same worldview—resistance to Israel and the imperial
West. Syria was now being torn apart, and while many Lebanese had often wished the
worst for their occupiers, this was heartbreaking. I looked at the images coming out
of Syria and I thought of Lebanon. There were many differences between us. Syria was
poorer and more rural than Lebanon, and its cities still bore the mark of the Soviet
influence, but in many ways we were similar, not one country, but cousins, people
of the Levant. The fact that Syria was stuck somewhere in the 1980s because of dictatorship
only reinforced the feeling that, when I looked at the conflict unfolding in Syria,
I was seeing Lebanon from the 1980s.
The idea that Bashar al-Assad was a reformer was buried in the rubble of cities like
Homs and Daraa, which had so far borne the brunt of the military assault. Assad after
all had never rebelled against his father, Hafez, never broken ranks; he was truly
his father’s son, along with his brother Maher. Just like Saif Gaddafi, who had deceived
so many with his talk about change, appearing to lead the way toward reform, or Gamal
Mubarak, who ended up being partly responsible for the downfall of his father in his
desperate desire to keep power in the hands of the family. Syrians who had hoped that
Bashar was their country’s savior were disappointed and angry. Smart, educated, Westernized
liberals started to break ranks, bitter about how they too had been used to show the
outside world that there was potential for openness and democracy in Syria. But many
Syrians still believed that Assad was their best protection against the kind of chaos
that had engulfed Iraq, next door, after the fall of Saddam. Christians and Alawites
feared retribution if the Sunnis came to power.
In Washington, in opinion pieces in newspapers around the world, people kept saying
that this was not 1982; the younger Assad would not be able to kill with impunity
the way his father had done at the time in the northern town of Hama when he put down
an Islamist rebellion. Some twenty thousand people were massacred then, their bodies
bulldozed into the ground with whole buildings that had been brought down on top of
people’s heads. Today, there was television, Twitter, Facebook—the world would act
in the face of such atrocities, just as it had in Libya to prevent the massacre that
Gaddafi had threatened to carry out in Benghazi. But Bashar al-Assad knew this was
the twenty-first century, and though he kept the international media mostly out of
his country, he also did not appear on television to threaten that he would hunt down
his people like rats in alleyways, the way Gaddafi had done. His forces were reportedly
instructed to keep the daily death toll just below outrageous.
* * *
Every day brought another call for intervention, the same kind of “loose talk” that
had infuriated Robert Gates during the Libya uprising. But Syria was not Libya, and
the cost of intervention was just too high for a president in an election year. Libya
had lasted well beyond the “few weeks” that the Obama administration had insisted
it would take to end the violent repression by Gaddafi of his people. Syrian armed
forces were better armed and trained, with air defenses and jets bought from Russia.
Syria also had the region’s largest stockpile of chemical and biological weapons.
Who knew how long an intervention would last or what it would lead to?
As the weeks went by, on trips with the secretary, over drinks in Washington, officials
would ask me, “What do you think of the situation in Syria?” I had no particular wisdom
or specific information, but in the search for a path forward in the face of such
a cunning dictator, all ideas were welcome.
I told them, from experience, about Assad’s expertise in sowing chaos, holding on
to power, and outwitting everybody. I warned about a slow descent into civil war.
Assad would burn the country before he handed it over to anyone else.
“But what good does that do anyone? That’s just sandbox logic!” exclaimed one incredulous
official. Perhaps, but it was Assad’s logic, the kind that often escaped some American
officials. They remained as result-driven as ever, often getting tangled up in their
good intentions and unable to understand other governments’ absolute indifference
to their own people’s welfare. But this administration seemed to be demonstrating
an understanding that foreign interventions meant playing in someone else’s stadium
by someone else’s rules and always remaining a stranger. Those advocating for action
said Obama had swung to the other extreme of the Bush administration—so eager not
to put a U.S. stamp on popular revolutions that he was overthinking the situation
into paralysis.
America had interests to safeguard too, and in my life away from Lebanon I was becoming
attuned to the thinking driving officials in D.C. I raised the prospect of months
of protests, a simmering war, months of fighting.
“You don’t want that, not in an election year. It’s messy,” I said. Our conversation
was on background, so I couldn’t identify the speaker by name.
“I’m not sure it has an impact on us. Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s terrible that
people are dying, and I wish we could find a way to stop it, but if it continues to
simmer like this, contained within Syria, it doesn’t have a direct impact on our national
security.”
I had lived through war, I had felt abandoned by the world, I had clamored for help,
and yet here I was sitting in Washington able to see why, from this official’s perspective,
America’s national security was not affected by events in Syria, for now, and why
intervention was still worse than nonintervention.
What had happened to me? Had I become insensitive to people’s suffering? Forgotten
my own past? Become too in tune with American political discourse? I hoped it was
just my new appreciation of the complex role of a superpower and the shortcomings
of other countries as well as my own. I also understood there were often deep connections
between separate problems that constrained America’s actions. How it handled Syria
would influence its policy toward Iran, for example, which was much more of a strategic
interest for America. This was the stuff of diplomacy for a superpower. Russia and
China had their own considerations, their own interests to protect, when they vetoed
resolutions on Syria at the UN. Comparisons are never straightforward but America
vetoed plenty of resolutions at the UN that condemned Israeli military operations
against the Palestinians or Lebanon. Everyone stood up for their buddies.
Washington, European capitals, and the Syrian opposition were perplexed by the position
taken by Brazil, India, and South Africa. They had abstained from voting on one of
the Syria resolutions. Their traditional nonaligned approach to solving the world’s
crises was not producing any results for the Syrians. Instead of supporting civilian
protestors calling for democratic change, they were de facto supporting a repressive
regime. These countries wanted a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, but their
presence at the table didn’t mean the oppressed people of this world were getting
a new voice on the council defending their rights.