This piece by Jeffrey Sachs is appalling.
Isn't anybody going to provide the blistering responses that are needed to this piece?
Sachs suggests that the international community double down to support Assad — just when Brahimi, the 16th member of the UN Security Council (as I've always called him), is apologizing to the Syrian people for failed talks.
The fact is, it isn't really just Sachs here and the International Relations Realist School in action again, but Secretary of State Kerry. Ultimately, when Obama couldn't stick to his red lines in any fashion, this is what happened. (Was it ever an accident that the most popular tune during this period was "Blurred Lines"?)
There's so much that's wrong with Sachs Realpolitik piece.
The Syrian War has already taken more than 130,000 lives. It is destroying a country that lies at the very cradle of civilization. Some of the world's greatest cultural treasures, in ancient heritage cities like Aleppo, are being destroyed; irreplaceable archeological sites are being plundered. Yet this violence could be brought to a quick end with a more enlightened policy by the United States and its allies.
So, he mentions 130,000 deaths — but he has nothing to say about them. I recall all the things I've seen on social media, most recently a man running away from a bomb scene, carrying a little girl in his arms. She looks so peaceful, until the man runs closer to the camera and you see the entire back of her head is blown off. Or the stoning of the woman reportedly by Islamist rebels supposedly because she went on Facebook. I don't know if these scenes have been vetted or vouched for as real yet — that's been a constant problem in this war. But it's not like there aren't hundreds of others just like that which are vetted.
But Sachs just talks about…cultural treasures. My God.
Then it's extraordinary that Sachs thinks that it's such a terrible thing for one head of state to tell another to leave. Why not? Some states are civilized, some aren't, and it's more than fine to ask their bloody leaders to get out.
And you know, when the Nobel Prize went to Obama, or when the crowds in Germany cheered for Obama, what were they doing, if not telling the American people they didn't like their leader Bush, and they liked a different leader, Obama? It's done all the time, people. Please.
"In fact, the U.S. has no right to pick the leaders of other countries," whines Sachs.
Oh? But the Syrian people don't have the right to pick their leader, either! And in that situation, you have to start stepping in. You have to do something!
Here's where Sachs frankly crosses from mere pragmatism into sheer immorality — and I don't hesitate to call it out as such:
The U.S. sought to topple Assad in part because the U.S. and its allies deemed him to be too friendly and beholden to Iran. By toppling Assad, the U.S. thought, Iran would be weakened. Yet Assad has another important ally: Russia. And Russia was not about to step back and let their ally be toppled by a U.S.-backed insurgency. Moreover, international law prohibits one group of nations supporting the overthrow of a sovereign government unless in self-defense or mandated by the UN Security Council
Why is this okay? There is so much wrong with this sentence. First, hello, Iran is Russia's ally, too! that's the problem! Russian blatantly promised to resume certain arms sales to Teheran if Obama ordered the air strikes on Syria. Not the first time or the last that Russia has in fact not been helpful on Iran.
Why does Russia get to have this murderous ally?!
The US never gets to have murderous allies. The US is endlessly heckled and harassed throughout the world even for having a democratic ally, Israel, that some people think uses excessive force on those in the Occupied Territories. The entire Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is premised on the idea that you can make life miserable enough for this essentially liberal democratic nation, Israel, though the world's bullying via various instruments, then it will be brought to its knees and do the Palestinian and Arab world's bidding. The BDS gang believes that this sort of coercive action is necessary to stop what they see as vast human rights violations – although they are utterly myopic on this point. Sadly, they have made some headway with this awful approach.
Imagine how the BDS thugs would freak out if Israel were to successfully bid for the Olympics — Israel wouldn't likely stand a chance of ever getting anyone to come, given the frenzy. Just think of it!
Yet no one — not a single human rights organization, not a single state, not a single group of any sort (except the Circassians, whose people were ethnically cleansed from this region 150 years ago) could forthrightly call for a boycott of the Olympics over Syria.
130,000 people killed — and they couldn't call even robustly for all heads of states — and anybody higher than the post-master general to stay home. No one could call for BDS on Russia, you know? Where the situation in Syria, with Russia's backing is a thousand times worse than in the Gaza strip.
It's really extraordinary. The number of people killed in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict each year recently is utterly dwarfed by Syria. Even the wars within Russia's Caucasus are many orders of magnitude higher than Israel-Palestine's conflict, but Syria is really beyond all.
Why can't the world mount a significant act of massive pressure on Russia?
What is wrong with a group like Oxfam that actually has the temerity to tell the US to be more diplomatic and cooperate with Russia on Syria — when it should use all its considerable people power to put pressure solely on Moscow, which is holding up the whole show?!
How dare Jeffrey Sachs behave as if we must merely concede that Russia needs its ally, and that's that? Such thinking never, ever applies in so many other situations in the world, and usually involving America. Why the Russian exceptionalism?
Then Sachs says something that is as cheap, and stupid as all the human rights groups and clueless UN bureaucrats warbling on about balanced arms embargos. Oh, stop the arms flow, Arab world:
The way to end the bloodletting is to staunch the flow of weapons into Syria from outside powers. Saudi Arabia and probably other neighbors have been providing weapons to the insurgents, and the U.S. has been providing at least financial, logistical and political support to the insurrection, if not arms. On the other side, Iran and Russia are arming the Assad regime. It would not take much for all major outside parties — the U.S., Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia — to tamp down the war rapidly and dramatically. By ending the arms inflows, the violence would drop dramatically.
Gosh, a wonder no one thought of this before!
But it's insane. We've just been told by Sachs that we "have to" allow Russia to have its ally and we can't challenge that. Therefore — in the same breath — he's essentially conceded that Russia "has to" give arms aid to Assad. It's more than a $1 billion in weapons that has already gone to this butcher, and we're to stand by for more. Some 5,000 people have been killed just in the period of the "peace talks."
Yet then we're supposed to believe that while Russia is once again allowed to act as it wishes, we're supposed to try to get Saudi Arabia and others to stop aiding their people as they wish and as they've done in other situations (remember the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?) Russia, of course, is going to be cackling the entire time and making enormous amounts of noise, some true, some false about Al Qaeda and radical insurgents.
Then there's the silly ideas of humanitarian corridors and safe zones and cease-fires for humanitarian aid. Oh, perhaps someone might get these to work for 2-3 days, but here's the thing — and I finally heard it put so simply and aptly on Twitter by James Miller, who has covered Syria for years. You can only have humanitarian aid pass through when one party in a conflict totally controls an area, he points out. Very simple observations, but one that I've seen always proves so elusive to the UN and to various other peace "helpers".
What this means is that either the rebels or Assad control a territory — or not. It's not like these two warring sides, or the multiple warring factions, come to an agreement "for the sake of humanitarian aid passing through". If they could do that — come to an agreement on something like that — why, they could stop the war, period. They can't, so there isn't safety for humanitarian aid.
The notion that you can have no-fly zones or safe corridors are pretty lame in a setting like that, if not dangerously irresponsible (every UN humanitarian worker remembers Srebrenica and Goma and you will never get them to back "humanitarian corridors). The reality is that "no fly zone" means "shoot enemy airplanes to kill" zone to maintain that corridor. Again, as Miller explains it simply, t0 succeed, one party or the other simply has to control the territory, full stop. That means the Western allies would have to use blunt force to control an area or give arms to rebels that they think can control an area. That's called "war-fighting," and not "peace-keeping." That's why it does not work.
Then there's this piece of gasping awfulness from Sachs:
So why doesn't it happen? Because from the U.S. perspective it would mean that Assad would stay. There are those who would say that Iran and Russia would not abide by such an arms limitation. They are likely mistaken.
Really, Jeffrey? Russia will abid by an arms limitation and stop arming Assad? And hurrying up those chemical weapons removals that have been so abysmally slow? Really?
And finally, the bad-faith icing on the bad-faith cake:
Just as the U.S., Russia and the Syrian government were able to agree on removing the chemical weapons, it would very likely be possible to tamp down the violence decisively as long as regime change by the U.S. and its allies is off the table.
Not only were the chemical weapons not removed; they proved to be irrelevant in one sense because conventional killing continued unabated. That is, they were only some totemic simple of "weapons of mass destruction" that could become a token for Russia's notions of soft power and diplomatic supremacy. Russia! As diplomats! Bozhe moi!
And then, this rage-inducing paragraph:
Even with Assad remaining in power at this stage, political change in Syria would likely continue. Political change occurs from inside as well as from the outside. Myanmar, for example, has opened a political reform process not through an insurrection but through internal negotiations judged to be in the interest of the major actors including the military. Similarly, Poland in 1989 made its transition to democracy with a government that included leaders from the Communist old guard as well as the Solidarity-backed new leadership.
One doesn't know where to start with someone like Sachs who is this pig-headedly obdurate about Russia, which he should truly have understood a lot better given his involvement with its finances in the 1990s — let alone, Poland, that he should have grasped even better.
There was only one reason the Round Table could happen in Poland in 1989: the Communist Party finally declared Solidarity as equals and legalized it. They released political prisoners. They accepted them as an equal party in the talks; they recognized them. There were no zillions of Brahimi shuttles back and forth to Warsaw trying to get Polish generals and Communist leaders to validate the Polish opposition in Solidarity; they were forced to do it on their own not only because of the social power of Solidarity as a labour movement, but because the US and Europe — the world — backed Solidarity and insisted on their recognition.
The recognition and the release of political prisoners and the end of the crackdown came FIRST, then came the Round Table — and that's why it could succeed. If any commies got included — and Sachs is surely exaggerating their importance — it's because the validation and the good-faith gestures and the treating of equals happened first. This lesson of round tables is one that hasn't been learned in Ukraine or Syria for that matter, and that's why invoking Poland's process in this manner is simply fraudulent without insisting on the same kind of validation sequencing.
As for Myanmar, Sachs is surely misrepresenting this sequencing as well. Aung San Suu Kyi was first released from house arrest — Obama and the world community in 2009 and 2010 pressured the regime — through those same Brahimi treks — and demanded the release of political prisoners. Whatever "internal negotiations" began and not "insurrection" could occur because the world constantly brought pressure on the junta over Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners. Their release was required FIRST in the sequence before change — which is surely incremental still – could begin. To suggest that the negotations and not the action of concrete things like letting out prisoners are all that is necessary is to fly in the face of the realities of how change really happens, and not only in Poland or Burma.
So, look. In Syria, the issues are far, far bigger than political prisoners' lists or demonstrators being sprayed with water cannon or even beaten and disappeared. Instead, there are massacres of villagers. This has to stop before there could be any conceivable notion of blessing Assad again — and in fact, I can't imagine why the world should do that, because it won't.
A completely different thing has to happen — and one that I always spoke of should happen back when the Russians pulled off their stunt and rolled Kerry and Obama last year.
And that's put massive, relentless, huge, worldwide, real pressure on Russia.
A good time for that would have been the Sochi Olympics — by not going to them at all. The situation was as bad as the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 that led to the 1980 Olympics boycott.
It's still not too late to boycott the closing ceremonies and say it's about Syria. That would help.
But more to the point, the US and EU everywhere have to stiffen their spines on Russia — at the UN and everywhere else. They've been doing a little of this, but mainly they haven't, because they've been in this fol-de-rol about Russian "diplomacy" about chemical weapons which has turned out to be a massive distraction and not even working in its own terms.
I don't think the US will get it together to do something like mount the air strikes again. But what it can do is to cease to confer legitimacy on Russia. And I mean in the coldest of cold war. Stop exchanges, stop meetings, stop business, stop everything and say it's because of Syria. Get the Europeans and Latin Americans and Asians and Africans to do the same thing. Boycott, Sanction, Divest — you know? For Muslims in the Middle East being killed?
Every single school group or ballet company or trade delegation should get pickets and chanting about bloody hands at every turn. There should be masses of pickets and demonstrations outside every single Russian mission all over the world.
Why isn't there?
Why won't there be?
There are signs that Kerry is finally turning around — and I bet it's only with very reluctant consent from Obama:
'The regime stonewalled, they did nothing except continue to drop barrel bombs on their own people and continue to destroy their own country. And I regret to say they're doing so with increased support from Iran, from Hezbollah and from Russia,' Kerry told reporters in the Indonesian capital Jakarta.
'Russia needs to be a part of the solution and not be distributing so much more weapons and so much more aid that they're in fact enabling Assad to double-down. Which is creating an enormous problem.'
This has to be not a one-off – but the relentless, full-throated world-wide note sounded everywhere.
Russia is to blame.
Russia must own this.
Russia has to stop.
It's not about the West aiding rebels who turn to Al Qaeda.
It's about Russia aiding the mass murderer who is at the root of all this.
Russia, Russia. It is about Russia and THAT is where the pressure has to be relentlessly placed.
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