As I write this, President
Obama dithers on about what sort of “message” he wishes to convey
to the Syrian government. He says he strongly disapproves of Assad's
recent use of chemical weapons on his people in an attack that killed
hundreds and injured thousands, and he seems, at a minimum, intent in
shooting a Cruise missile at something. Bill Clinton, in a similar
one-off kind of military adventure, once blew up a couple of
goat-herder shacks in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in
Africa, and maybe that sort of manly gesture would suffice. Maybe
not. With Obama, it can be hard to tell what he really cares about
or thinks is important.
A guy like Bashar al-Assad
is a problem. He's a truly bad guy, he's a thug, and he thinks
nothing of committing any sort of atrocity to maintain his control
over Syria. But he doesn't respond to conventional sorts of
diplomatic pressure or economic sanctions, and even military action
is probably going to have more of an effect on his already-suffering
people than it will on him. So what should Obama do?
It's not the first time
America has faced a problem like this. Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein
posed similar dilemmas. Saddam was more than similar---like Assad,
he used poison gas not only in the Iran-Iraq War but also against
thousands of Iraqi Kurds in the town of Halabia.
The answer is obvious, but
rarely gets said---you've got to kill the bastard. It makes no sense
to destroy military assets or the poor soldiers who are forced to
carry out the sick agenda of monsters like this. If Obama wants to
send an unambiguous message that using chemical weapons is wrong, all
he has to do is kill Assad. No explanation would even be necessary.
And if the world's only superpower made it a policy to kill any
person responsible for using chemical weapons, the guy who replaces
Assad is going to be extremely reluctant to follow in his murderous
footsteps.
Consider Exodus. Now, I
don't wish to second guess God's decision in these matters, but
instead of the frogs and locusts and boils and stuff, let's just
suppose Moses and God had showed up at the Pharaoh's house one day
and said, “Yo Pharaoh, let these Jews go---and I mean NOW!” And
let's further suppose the Pharaoh said no, God vaporized him on the
spot, and then trained his divine gaze on the Pharaoh’s son (who
would now be the new Pharaoh).
“Congratulations,” God
says to the kid. “Now...what about those Jews?”
There is a myth that our
law forbids a president from killing a foreign leader. This is not
true. There are several Executive Orders which any president can
withdraw or ignore at his pleasure. Then there is the War Crimes Act
of 1996, which does not explicitly ban the killing of a guy like
Assad. And let's face a more important practical point: Obama
doesn't care what “the law” says. He rarely does. If he wants
to kill Assad, the last thing he would ever worry about is the law.
But while the solution may
be obvious, there are several reasons American presidents do not
consider the option of killing a head of state. First, there is the
modern idea of sovereignty. It used to be considered perfectly
kosher to kill the other guy's king or hold him for ransom. (In
1192, Richard the Lion-hearted was captured by the Duke of Austria
and held for ransom for more than a year.) The Congress of Vienna in
1815, however, in addition to sorting out the Papal States and the
Swiss cantons and the detritus of the Napoleonic Wars, established a
new tradition whereby heads of state agreed not to kill each other.
There were still going to be wars, of course---no one had any
delusions on that score---but decapitation of the state (or the duchy
or the principality or the city-state or whatever) was forbidden.
The result, to this day,
is a tacit reciprocal live-and-let-live understanding among world
leaders. It makes no sense in terms of any identifiable moral
principle, of course. In terms of legitimacy as rulers, Angela
Merkel and Barack Obama have exactly nothing in common with Kim
Jong-Un and Bashar al-Assad, and the recognition of the latter thugs
as “government leaders” at all is difficult to justify. It is as
if, in the 1950's, we had felt compelled to treat the Gambino family
as a respected voice of the Italian-American community in New York
City.
Yet this is how the world
treats the various mass killers and torturers around the planet who
manage to kill enough people and torture enough people so their local
opposition dissolves in fear. They get welcomed to the UN and they
get a spot at international conferences and they get really good
seats to the Olympics. We call them bad names, of course, but the
names are not that bad, and other world leaders pretend to
respect them. Nobody ignores them or mocks them or sends them away
and says, “No. Sorry. Go home and tell your stupid country to
send us a real president.” And why not? What was gained (for
example) by treating Muammar Gaddafi like a sort-of Dwight Eisenhower
in drag for all those years? In geopolitical terms, why not
laugh at them and refuse to take them seriously?
Another reason legitimate
world leaders take a guy like Assad seriously, or pretend to,
is...well, this is a guess, but maybe even the real ones like Merkel
and Obama feel like their own hands are not as clean as they would
like them to be. They know what deals they have had to make, of
course, and some of those deals may look a little dirty in the cold
light of day, and they wonder how much better they truly are than the
psycho-killers of planet earth. They're wrong about this, of course.
Barack Obama is not, morally, in the same universe as Kim Jong-Un.
But we can understand how that thought could cross his mind.
But while we may
understand the refusal to target Assad (or Gaddafi or Hussein)
personally, American presidents make a fundamental political error by
failing to do so. Several, in fact. First, they refuse to take
advantage of the primary advantage democratically-elected rulers have
over despots---legitimacy. While the popularity of a particular
American president may rise or fall, they all achieve their position
because, at one time, they were chosen by the American people. They
got more votes than anybody else. This process is respected, which
means that the individual and his office is respected even by many
who dislike everything about him. An American president is, in a
sense, an avatar of America itself. Many people who loath Barack
Obama would view any attempt to physically harm him as an attack on
the American system. I would view it as an attack on me. This is
why any attack on a president (or even a former president) would be
met by great vengeance and furious anger. A direct assault on an
American president would be a grave strategic error for any foreign
power.
Killing Assad, on the
other hand, would have no such effect. A guy like him is never
mourned by many and never for very long. Most Syrians would be happy
to see him go, and any desire for payback would be limited to a very
small number of his partisans and courtiers. Most importantly,
killing Assad would not be viewed as an attack on Syria itself, but
rather as the elimination of one particularly abhorrent individual.
Democracies have many
disadvantages in military engagements with dictators. In a
democracy, for example, it can be very difficult to forge the kind of
political consensus that is needed to wage war, while all a dictator
has to do is mobilize the army and start shooting. The asymmetry in
the legitimacy of a dictator and a popularly-elected leader, however,
is a tremendous advantage for the Obamas of the world, and it is
foolish to throw it away. Assad can be killed, and apart from a few
tut-tuts in certain editorial pages, no one will object.
So why not do it?
Copyright2013MichaelKubacki
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