Clueless Obama makes 'remarkably foolish' appointment

Carl
Israel Matzav
31 December '10
Posted before Shabbat

In an earlier post, I explained that the problem with President Obama's recess appointment of Robert Ford as US Ambassador to Syria is not Ford, but the very fact that any ambassador to the Assad regime is being appointed.

The Beirut Star's Michael Young agrees with me. He calls the appointment 'remarkably foolish' and the White House 'clueless' for making it. Here's why.

Against congressional opposition, the administration offered a lukewarm defense of Ford’s appointment, with officials stating that it would allow Washington to get its message to Damascus more clearly. Nonsense. There are plenty of ways to transmit messages to Syria without legitimizing the fact that in the five years since the previous ambassador was withdrawn, following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the Assad regime has not budged on issues the US considers important—whether Lebanon, inter-Palestinian affairs, Iraq, Syrian cooperation with Iran and Hezbollah, and negotiations with Israel.

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Washington is getting sidetracked again

Michael Young
Daily Star (Beirut)
20 May '10

(Somewhat speculative, but excellent analysis piece in any case.)

Political Washington has a gift for getting sidetracked into marginal disputes. The latest example is the decision of 12 Republican senators to block approval of Robert Ford, who was recently named the US ambassador in Damascus, because of reports that the Syrians have sent Scud missiles to Hizbullah.

The State Department has a different perspective. It believes an ambassador in Damascus is necessary to better relay the Obama administration’s messages to Syrian President Bashar Assad. This is partly due to the fact that Assad’s man in Washington, Imad Mustapha, is mistrusted by his American counterparts.

The senators, in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, responded that Ford’s appointment would be a concession, even a reward, “if engagement precludes prompt punitive action in response to egregious behavior, such as the transfer of long-range missiles to a terrorist group.” The Republicans want new sanctions to be imposed on Syria, or a deadline from the administration to determine whether engagement is working before new sanctions are put in place.

The points of view on both sides conceal a far more significant problem. Undue focus on whether an ambassador should be sent to Damascus or not is secondary to the fact that the Obama administration is not really clear about how to bring about a change in Syrian behavior where it has demanded such change – namely Syria’s ending its destabilization of Iraq, its support for Hamas and Hizbullah, and its efforts to reassert its hegemony over Lebanon.

Naming an ambassador should only be a means of advancing policy. But because the policy is unclear, the appointment process has taken center stage. For the State Department to defend an ambassador as necessary to get Assad’s ear is ridiculous. In itself, the transmission of messages is not, and should not be, what justifies a significant political reversal, especially when the previous ambassador was pulled because the US assumed that Syria had ordered the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister.

On the other hand, the Republicans, by making Ford the issue, have also confused matters. The sanctions they are demanding may be justified, but sanctions, like the dispatching of an ambassador, do not in themselves constitute policy; they are instruments of policy. What the Republicans (and Democrats) should be asking of the Obama administration is whether its engagement strategy with Syria has any chance of succeeding – and if not what must be done to ensure it succeeds – and whether American strategy is cohesive, so that a dialogue with Syria does not actually give it wider latitude to pursue those very aims that Washington is seeking to undermine.

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America’s “big game”

Tony Badran
NOW Lebanon
27 April '10

During last week’s stormy hearing on Syria in the US House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, the Obama administration for the first time laid out its Syria policy. Unfortunately, the policy is based on a flawed, old premise that brings Washington awfully close to accepting a line the Syrians perpetually seek to sell – the politics of grievance. Distressingly, the Americans are signaling that they're interested shoppers.

Although the basic components of US policy had been hinted at earlier, this was the first time that an official openly laid out what the administration’s end game is. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, who was the official testifying before the subcommittee, outlined the administration’s conceptual framework as follows: The US is working to mitigate Iran’s regional influence, which Syria facilitates. But Syria is not Iran, and there’s a basic policy difference between them: Unlike Iran, Syria has an interest in negotiating a peace agreement with Israel. Therefore, the peace process is, in Feltman’s words, the “big game”. The administration believes that a peace deal between Damascus and Jerusalem would cure the Syria problem.

If this sounds like a familiar tune from the 1990s, that’s because in the end it's nothing but a reprise of the view that holds the conflict with Israel as the engine driving all regional dynamics and regime behavior. It’s the politics of grievance.

This line of thinking plays right into the Syrians’ hands, affording them a pass for their actions and duplicity pending the conclusion of a peace deal that may not materialize for years, if ever.

Witness, for example, this statement by Feltman: “Syria's relationship with Hezbollah and the Palestinian terrorist groups is unlikely to change absent a Middle East peace agreement.” The logic of this statement is but one step removed from justifying the arming of Hezbollah. It’s the logic that holds Syrian policy to be reactive and grievance-based. But the Obama administration’s “big game” is nothing if not a cocktail of this grievance logic and the infamous concept of “linkage”.

This toxic viewpoint was echoed by National Security Advisor Jim Jones at a recent event at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy: “One of the ways that Iran exerts influence in the Middle East is by exploiting the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict… Advancing this peace would... help prevent Iran from cynically shifting attention away from its failures to meet its obligations.”

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Ambassador to Syria?

Michael Rubin
National Review Online
26 April '10

Increasingly, it seems the State Department is grasping at straws as it tries to explain why it needs to send ambassador to Damascus. (I took some of these on a bit earlier.) The latest is that the Syrian ambassador to Washington isn't passing accurate messages back to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, something the Washington Post hints at.

It's absolute nonsense — as other Arab diplomats based in Washington will acknowledge — that the Syrian ambassador isn't relaying messages. Ambassadors for authoritarian dictatorships relay information frequently and accurately. When the authoritarian dictators do not respect the seriousness of the administration nor do they believe that the White House will take any serious coercive action, they sometimes choose not to listen. Bashar al-Assad was convinced he could get away with murder (literally) as Congressional Democrats (and, at the time, Arlen Specter) tossed aside the multilateral isolation imposed in the wake of Rafik Hariri's murder. We increased our groveling for relations after Syria's secret nuclear plant was exposed and destroyed. We sent senior State Department and NSC officials to Damascus after it was already apparent that Syria had rearmed Hezbollah with tens of thousands of rockets.

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In the absence of a US foreign policy

Hussain Abdul-Hussain
NOW Lebanon
23 April '10

Those who know Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Jeffrey Feltman know that this skilled diplomat has a personal bias toward Lebanon’s sovereignty, independence and freedom. Being supportive of Lebanon is one thing, but defending whatever the administration decides is another.

At a hearing before the Congressional Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia yesterday, the former US ambassador to Lebanon faced some tough questioning and was for once on the back foot. Naturally, Congress focused its attack on Washington’s decision to send Robert Ford as ambassador to Damascus.

Feltman argued that since February 26, the State Department has summoned Syrian diplomats – including Ambassador Imad Mustafa – on four occasions to voice its displeasure over Syria’s alleged policy of arming Hezbollah. Mustafa denies he was ever summoned, which made Feltman conclude that Mustafa was either not listening, or did not communicate the details of the meeting to Damascus. Feltman added that in the Arab world, officials tend to keep bad news from their bosses.

As such, he argued, sending a US ambassador back to Syria was imperative. The US needs to have the ear of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who until now has been making grave errors because he has been listening, Feltman argued, to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Those who have been following the Middle East long enough might remember that during one of his trials, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein asked the judge whether he thought of him as being a beast. “No, but those around you made you one,” the judge told Saddam.

The assumption is therefore that Assad is all sweet and full of good intentions, rendering the three-decade confrontation between Damascus and Washington a mere misunderstanding in communication.

But contrary to what Feltman implied, Mustafa is not dumb.

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Shadow Play

Lee Smith
Tablet
21 April '10

Ambassador Robert Ford is a career foreign-service officer with a distinguished record who now finds himself under a strange spotlight, one that illuminates one of Washington’s most heated debates: What direction should U.S. policy on Syria take? Some argue that the United States should continue to isolate a regime that has declared itself our enemy, as we did during the Bush years; others contend that we should turn the page and engage Damascus. Ford is the man the White House has tapped as the next U.S. ambassador to Damascus, five years after the last one was withdrawn following the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Hariri’s murder touched off the Cedar Revolution that seemed, for a time, as if it might herald the rebirth of a democratic Lebanon, free from the control of the Assad regime in Syria, which saw Lebanon as part of its historical inheritance. The prospect of an independent Lebanon was even less appealing to the Syrians than was the prospect of a democratic neighbor in Iraq, where Damascus also employed terrorism as part of its strategy to roll back the United States and its partners in the Middle East. Syria’s war targeted not only American allies in Lebanon, Iraq, and Israel, but also U.S. diplomats and military personnel. Since 2003, Syria has served as the main transit route that foreign fighters use to enter Iraq, and it has provided financial, logistical, and operational support to a wide range of insurgent forces aiming to kill American soldiers.

Accordingly, Damascus has few friends in Washington. But it nonetheless occupies a unique position in U.S. policymaking circles: Syria kills Americans and our allies, but its strategic significance pales in comparison to China, Russia, and Iran, which makes it a second- or even third-tier issue. And even as Syria policy fosters loud debate, surprisingly, that debate doesn’t break over strictly partisan lines; the split is reflected throughout Washington, even in the U.S. military, and within the Obama Administration.

The foremost proponent of reaching out to Syria is the commander-in-chief, and yet more than a year after taking office, President Barack Obama has been unable to make good on his campaign promise of engaging this adversary. The first step is to return an ambassador to Damascus, a White House campaign spearheaded, oddly, by Sen. John Kerry, who has effectively become Damascus’s voice in official Washington and the most prominent U.S. official with a soft spot for a regime that much of Washington loves to hate.

This past week was a bad one for those eager to reach out to Syria. It was reported that Damascus is believed to have transferred to Hezbollah Scud missiles that would be able to reach any part of Israel. “The threat that Syria might transfer more advanced weapons to Hezbollah has existed for a long time,” says Elliott Abrams, who oversaw Middle East affairs in the George W. Bush White House and is now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “With respect to Scuds, it has been understood the Israelis would interdict such a shipment. I do not recall the Bush Administration ever expressing disagreement with that view.”

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Hope over experience with Syria

Matthew RJ Brodsky
inFocus
Volume IV: Number 1
Spring 2010

Barack Obama's victory in America's presidential election was greeted with more than a little relief in Damascus. This victory was seen as an affirmation that staying the course and remaining true to the policy of resistance – muqawama – was the correct decision. Syria's ambassador to the United States, Imad Moustapha, extolled the virtues of his nation's steadfastness in Al-Watan on February 24, 2009: "Syria's winning card is [the fact that] it has not moved from its positions despite all the pressures it has been facing… The [fundamental] principles of [its] policy towards Washington have never changed, [even] in the most difficult circumstances." Moustapha stressed that, despite the attempts of the Bush administration to bring about a change in its policy, Syria never "submitted to this blackmail."

With renewed hope for a change in American behavior, Bashar al-Asad reached out with a telegram to then President-elect Obama on November 7, 2008. In the message, the Syrian president "expressed hope for constructive dialogue so that the difficulties can be overcome which have hampered the advance of peace, stability and progress in the Middle East." And true to his campaign pledge, Barack Obama charted a new course based on diplomatic engagement in the Middle East. It was therefore not surprising when on February 16, 2010, Obama named a new ambassador to Syria. However, the timing of the decision is puzzling and the assumption that it will lead to a behavior change in Damascus is wishful thinking.

Many Carrots and Few Sticks

It did not take long for the Obama administration to ease pressure on Damascus. In early 2009, the White House and the 111th Congress increased calls for greater U.S. engagement with Syria. Several congressional delegations visited Damascus, and administration officials held talks with their Syrian counterparts. In February 2009, the U.S. Department of Commerce approved an export license of Boeing 747 spare parts to Syria's national air carrier. A month later, Jeffery D. Feltman was dispatched to meet with Syria's foreign minister. As the assistant secretary of state, Feltman was the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Damascus in over four years.

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The La-La Land Diplomacy of Obama

Farid Ghadry
Reform Party of Syria (RPS)
14 April '10

Reports have surfaced to the effect that the Obama administration insists on appointing Amb. Robert Ford as its envoy to Syria even after learning Assad has clandestinely shipped SCUD missiles to Hezbollah whose intent is to threaten all of Israel directly.

In insisting on appointing the US envoy, no one bothered to ask the question: How will Assad read this?

We can assure you as Syrians who understand Assad better than any one on the Obama Middle East team can that he will see this as proof that his policies of spreading terror are succeeding and no reason exists to change direction, especially that there is no price to pay at all. In Assad's world of real politics, his primary goal is to survive and to spread "resistance" across the Arab world. Obama's diplomacy will not help Assad make any concessions and someone must explain to Obama that Assad is not in the business of being nice or conciliatory. If one simply reads the history of this family, one will realize that their success and their strength emanate from always taking as much and never give anything back. To Assad, Obama is a dream US president because he can always dictate how much he can take and never even bother to calculate what he has to pay for it.

Further, Robert Ford, as good a diplomat as he is, will not reverse the SCUD shipments.

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When Will He Ever Learn

Marty Peretz
The New Republic
13 April '10

I don’t know whether I should have ended the headline above with a question mark or an exclamation point. The first of my options would suggest that the president might actually learn from his palpable mistakes. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. But, to tell you the truth, I felt that would be playing with my readers. My alternative would hint—more than hint, I suppose—at my utter exasperation with Obama’s foreign policy. I don’t really want to go there. Still, are you not really exasperated with him and with it? Or are you one of those who care only about domestic affairs? And where, in any case, are those idealistic young liberals who wanted American to have no truck with monstrous tyrants?

Now, to be sure, the extent of Bashar Assad’s monstrousness doesn’t exceed that of Dr. Ahmadinejad, what with his clerical tyranny that has all but demolished Iran’s civil society, his nuclear designs, and his open genocidal threats to the state of the Jewish people. Still, Assad is monstrous enough, running a minority personal polity that has nullified the diversity of Syrian society, smothering whatever chance Lebanon had to be Lebanon, and turning himself into an errand boy of the mullahs by spreading imported advanced weapons southward throughout the Levant and elsewhere as far as the Persian peacock aims to strut.

Anyway, Obama saw in Assad an ally of sorts, imagining that he would shed his alliance with Iran, an alliance which made him the lynchpin of Shi’a Tehran’s ambitions among the Sunni Arabs. Obama even had the audacity to think he could lure Assad away from Shi’a designs where his patron and sponsor, the monarch of Saudi Arabia and Custodian of the Holy Mosques, had failed utterly. It’s instructive to remember that the ophthalmologist’s clan and the minority sect to which he belongs, the Alawites, are Shi’a of sorts. This is his lifeline of legitimacy as a Muslim.

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An Unusual Alignment of Interests

Michael J. Totten
Contentions/Commentary
31 March '10

More than any other Arab head of state in the world, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has mastered the art of telling listeners what they want to hear.

Last week, he said his country is fully committed to peace in the Middle East, though he worries the Israel government isn’t. He knows this is what bien pensants in the West like to believe. He knows they find it refreshing that he can talk like a liberal while Iran’s Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threaten apocalypse.

He also knows how to talk like the right kind of hardliner. Yesterday, he condemned the double suicide-bombing in Moscow’s underground metro and urged the international community to “fight terror around the globe.”

It’s no wonder, then, that some in Washington, Paris, and even Jerusalem think he’s a man they can do business with. All they have to do is convince him that his alliance with Iran is counterproductive, that it runs contrary to his self-evident interests and public pronouncements.

Syria, though, is the most aggressive state sponsor of terrorism in the world after Iran. Assad doesn’t even try to keep up the pretense when he isn’t preening before peace processors. Last week, he said Israel only understands force — a statement perfectly in line with his behavior. And just two days ago, he and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi urged the Palestinian Authority to scrap negotiations with Israel and return to its terrorist roots.

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High-Ranking U.S. Official: Enemies? Islamists? Revolutionaries? We Don't See Anyone Like That!

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
31 March '10

What could one sentence spoken by a high-ranking U.S. official prompt a brilliant pro-Western Arab intellectual to go ballistic and say the following:

“How could America be governed and represented by such blazing idiocy? How is that possible? It's a parallel universe, I'm convinced. The biggest threat, I maintain, to global security is not terrorism. It's stupidity.”

Well, this one. At his confirmation hearing, Robert Ford, ambassador-designate to Syria said:

"I do not see how instability in the region serves Syrian interests."

So here is Syria, a radical, anti-American regime allied with Iran, a major sponsor of terrorism, and Ford says that this government has no interest in stirring up instability and cannot receive any benefit from doing so? Of course, Ford rightfully does not want to criticize Syria before arriving there as U.S. ambassador. OK, understood.

But does he have to indicate such an appalling view in advance? Doesn't this throw away all U.S. leverage over Syria in advance? I can tell you that this is precisely the way Syrian leaders are portraying American policy nowadays. Of course, Ford is saying this because it reflects the thinking of this administration and the president.

Incidentally, I recently saw a non-published communication from an international affairs' expert that criticized someone else for having the old-fashioned view that the point of foreign policy is to reward friends and punish enemies. As I have said before even the most basic principles of diplomacy have been forgotten nowadays in large sections of academia, the media, and--much more dangerous--policymaking circles.

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The Innocents Pack for Damascus

Michael J. Totten
Contentions/Commentary
24 March '10

Lebanese scholar Tony Badran quotes Robert Ford, President Barack Obama’s unconfirmed pick for ambassador to Syria, and Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, making statements last week that are breathtaking in their disconnection from reality.

Kerry said he believes Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, “understands that his country’s long-term interests … are not well served by aligning Syria with a revolutionary Shiite regime in Iran and its terrorist clients.” Ford, at the same time, said the U.S. “must persuade Syria that neither Iran nor Hezbollah shares Syria’s long-term strategic interest in … peace.”

These statements are simply off-planet. Either Kerry and Ford don’t know the first thing about how the Syrian government perceives its own interests, or they’re making stuff up for the sake of diplomacy.

It could be the latter. That happens. In Baghdad in 2008, a U.S. Army officer told me that the U.S. said things that weren’t strictly true about Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia to make it easier for him to save face, climb down out of his tree, and cut a deal. The American and Iraqi armies were still fighting his men in the streets but pretended they were only battling it out with rogue forces called “Special Groups.”

“We are giving the office of Moqtada al-Sadr a door,” the officer said. “We want them to be a political entity, not a military entity. So if you’re fighting coalition forces or the Iraqi army, we’ll say you’re a Special Groups leader or a Special Groups member.”

“So,” I said, “this is like the make-believe distinctions between military wings and political wings of Hamas and Hezbollah?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s it. That’s exactly it.”

I’d like to give Kerry and Ford the benefit of the doubt here and assume that that’s what they’re doing with Assad, that they know Syria’s alliance with Iran is three decades old and therefore well thought-out and durable, that they know his foreign policy goal is one of “resistance” rather than peace, but I have my doubts. They otherwise shouldn’t find engaging him worth the humiliation and bother.

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Will Obama Reopen the U.S. Embassy in Damascus?

Israel gets an ultimatum; Syria gets an ambassador.


John Noonan
The Weekly Standard
21 March '10

In 2005, Syria's Ba'athist dictatorship was accused of supporting the assainination of Rafik Hariri, who was then the prime minister of Lebanon. Hariri's death sparked an internal anti-Syrian uprising in Lebanon--the Cedar revolution--which was both supported vocally by the Bush administration and tangibly when the State Department yanked its ambassador from Damascus.

Now the Obama administration wants to send the State Department back, claiming that U.S. foreign policy objectives would be better served through a locally assigned embassy and ambassador. Both the White House and congressional allies are talking up the qualifications of Robert Ford, Obama's pick for a potential Syrian posting. Ford is a long time State Department veteran who served as ambassador to Algeria and more recently deputy chief of the U.S. mission in Iraq -- neither easy diplomatic postings.

But the debate isn't about Ford's qualifications. Syria's brutal Ba'athist regime is a habitual human rights offender with multiple priors -- and a fanatical enemy of the United States.

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