Obama, ISIS and the Batman!
Abdulrahman al-Rashed/Al Arabiya/March 19/16
In his write-up on the US President, Barack Obama, journalist Jeffrey Goldberg refers to the testimonies of Obama’s assistants who quote him as saying that ISIS is like the character of joker in the movie Batman. In one scene of the movie, a group of men living in the city, are shown angry at the joker villain who threatens to burn the city down; so they decide to fight him. Does the President mean that the belligerent people in Syria are the group of men defending the city or is it the whole world that has realized the danger posed by ISIS, be it Americans, Russians, Iranians and Gulf leaders? The approach is, however, correct as ISIS is the joker which has come to destroy and has no other intentions.
However, what Obama failed to notice, and is missing in the movie analogy, is that ISIS roots go back to Iraq during the days of the American occupation. It was led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the first leader of the organization, and most of his men came to Iraq during the occupation through Syria, controlled by Iran’s ally, the Bashar al-Assad regime. Under the name of the Iraqi “resistance” and al-Qaeda, they were involved in the killing of more than 4,000 Americans. It was during Obama’s tenure that the US withdrew its troops without making arrangements to fill the governance void.
We can argue long about the genesis of ISIS but the organization is nothing but the natural product of the chaos and proxy wars that have swamped the region. Obama made a huge mistake in the beginning when he considered that ISIS was a problem that only concerns the region. However, when Westerners were beheaded by ISIS, and its danger expanded outside the region, Obama discovered that this is indeed a problem that threatens the world.
The world cannot fight against ISIS, whether it is led by Russia, the United States or Europe, without paying attention to the need to control the chaos in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya . This is the case now and it will continue to be so even after Obama leaves White House at the end of this year. The world cannot fight against ISIS, whether it is led by Russia, the United States or Europe, without paying attention to the need to control the chaos in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya. No matter how powerful the state is, it won’t be able to achieve such a huge task alone, without the cooperation of countries in the region and the world. A state of stability in the four countries cannot be reached without acknowledging the source of trouble, which is Iran, and whose sanctions have been lifted and whose main activities so far were igniting wars in the region. The Middle East has lived and relied on the balance within regional and international arrangements, whether during the Cold War or its aftermath. When Obama told The Atlantic magazine that Saudis should learn how to share the region with Iran, he did not explain what he meant.
It is not a bad idea if participation means agreement or cooperation. Saudi Arabia and its allies, namely the other five GCC countries – with Jordan, Egypt and Morocco – don’t have a military or expansionist approach. However, Iran has always exported chaos, backing armed groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. There are 16 similar militias in Iraq that are pro-Tehran regime.
Regional participation
The country that has to stop the violence is Iran. United States can encourage Iran to engage in a healthy regional competition through trade, investment and political cooperation. This is the concept of regional participation that can be achieved. However, if they meant the division of the map of influence in the region into Iranian and Saudi camps, they would be giving the recipe for a long and serious internal strife, and Syria will just be the first chapter of this terrifying play. When speaking about Libya, the president admitted how his European allies disappointed him when Muammar Gaddafi’s regime was toppled and that they are not qualified to lead any war. Whatever his vision was to them, Libya should not be a place through which the US would want to prove the failure of the Europeans. Libya was a problem for the United States in the years of Gaddafi’s rule, as it was for Europe.
Washington made a mistake when it turned its back on Libya, because it turned out later that it is not just a port for thousands of illegal immigrants to sail to southern Italy and the rest of Europe; it has also become a hub for terrorist organizations. The properties of the Libyan crisis are similar to what is happening in Syria; however it would be easier to impose a new political regime in Libya because there is no regime like al-Assad and there is no major international conflict there yet. Finally, the state of disgust expressed by Obama regarding the Middle East is not mere politics. We can see that the Russians, who have dreamt since the Tsars time to gain access to warm water, are now swimming in it. All senior leaders in the region have been forced to go to Kremlin during the past two years because of the deliberate absence of the Americans; they built multiple relations with Moscow and this is something that was not on anyone’s mind and did not happen before.
Syria, between ashes and roses
Hisham Melhem/Al Arabiya/March 19/16
“A time between ashes and roses is coming When everything shall be extinguished When everything shall begin.”Adonis (Ali Ahmad Saeed)
When I think of Syria, I often remember Adonis’ poetry. I imagine him in a state of total bliss, reciting the poems of transformations, of the journeys between the provinces of day and night, of preaching the great disruption and anticipating the new beginnings, poems that ruptured the stagnant language and with it the stagnant world of the Arabs, and made him the greatest Arab poet and visionary of modern times. Adonis was born in Syria, but his productive decades were spent in Beirut as a poet, essayist, historian of culture and editor of Mawaqif, the journal that expressed the tremendous intellectual and artistic ferment that followed the Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. Adonis was obsessed with renewals after deconstructing stale orthodoxies. He exploded Arab poetics, and wrote pioneering criticism of classic and modern Arab culture.
He used language as if it was never used, abused or debased by millions of his ancestors; in his hands it became malleable, he gave it shape and form, the way a sculptor would chisel beauty out of a shapeless stone. He thought that Arab intellectuals and artists should do the same to their polities and societies.
Thinking of Syria on the fifth anniversary of the beginning of its descent to the great disruption, I thought of Adonis’ poem A Time Between Ashes and Roses, which he wrote decades before the rupture. Adonis was not sympathetic with the Syrian uprising, particularly its Islamist overtones. While I shared his jaundiced view of the Islamists, I was disappointed that he did not lend his voice to the secular opposition to the tyrannical regime in Damascus. The Adonis I invoke here, is the visionary poet and the critic of his culture, the prescient historian who believes that Syria is now going through that long time of migration from the ashes of desolation to the season of renewal, the flowering of roses. Looking back at the last five years, one could only conclude that the season of migration will be treacherously long.
No Russian goodbye
During the week we looked back, trying once again to understand what went horribly wrong, asking the same questions and getting the same unsatisfactorily answers, Russia announced that it will scale down its brutal Arial war against Syrian civilians living in the areas controlled by the anti-regime opposition groups, which find themselves at times fighting both the regime forces and the Jihadists of Jabhat al-Nusra or the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS), at the same time. Already, Amnesty International has accused Russia of committing war crimes in Syria. What is clear from the Russian position is that the withdrawal is partial, and a residual force, including offensive air capabilities will remain in Syria. But regardless of the real motivations behind the surprising Russian move, the air assaults in coordination with ground attacks conducted by a combination of Iranian led Hezbollah and other Shiite fighters from Iraq and regime forces succeeded in stabilizing the Assad regime, and enlarged the area under its control in the environs of Aleppo and other areas. And while some analysts are linking the partial withdrawal to the political talks in Geneva, there is no reason to believe that Russia will “deliver” Assad and/or put pressure on him to accept a transitional period that will lead eventually to his political demise.
Genocide and justice
After the US House of representatives voted 383-0 in favor of classifying the atrocities committed by ISIS against the Yazidis and Christians as an act of Genocide, the Secretary of State John Kerry read a statement in which he asserted that ISIS, or “Daesh is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control, including Yezidis, Christians and Shiite Muslims”. Kerry added “Daesh is genocidal by self-proclamation, by ideology, and by actions –in what it says, what it believes, and what it does”.
And yet for all of the ritualistic and brutal killings of fellow Syrians and Iraqis at the hands of ISIS, the Syrian regime remains the single most efficient perpetrators of mass killings in the country. Syrian and International human rights groups have documented the numerous crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by the Syrian regime including the use of nerve gas and chlorine, mass execution, indiscriminate shelling, barrel bombing, torture, siege, starvation and sexual violence.
Obama’s next ten months would look to many people in the Middle East like a long suffocating eternity. Obama’s long goodbye is upon us
The al-Nusra Front and other extremist groups engage in killing civilians, they control their own prisons, where torture is widespread. We may never know the exact number of those who were killed in the last five years, but estimates range between 250,000 to more than 400,000. There are now five million Syrian refugees in neighboring countries and in Europe. A weak and small country like Lebanon suffering from a variety of political and economic ailments where more than a million Syrian refugees have settled in the last few years could implode anytime. The number of displaced Syrians is around 7 million. This situation cries out for justice and accountability.
Syria is not a signatory to the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, so the ICC has no jurisdiction over the country, but there are precedents for using a mixture of local and international justice mechanisms, such as the Special Court for Sierra Leone which indicted and convicted former dictator Charles Taylor. The quest to achieve justice to the victims and their families in Syria should not wait until the war is over. Preparations for a Syrian version of “Truth and Reconciliation” committee should be underway by Syrians and their friends. The worse thing Syrians could do is to fall into the collective trap of denial. They should avoid Lebanon’s tragic failure to exorcise the demons of its own civil war.
Obama’s long goodbye
On the fifth anniversary of the war, President Obama reminded the Syrians once again that his doctrine of non-intervention even in a colossal human tragedy like theirs’s, was a wise choice. The president of the United States is proud that he did not deliver on his own threats and promises. One of the many subtexts in Obama’s Doctrine in the Atlantic Magazine is that he is done with the Middle East. The president got his nuclear deal with Iran, and he will spend the remaining months of his tenure keeping ISIS at bay and trying to prevent a terror attack against the homeland, to degrade ISIS and hopefully decapitate its leadership. But he no longer talks about destroying the Caliphate monstrosity in Syria and Iraq. Of course occasionally, drones and maybe Special Forces could be used in Libya, Yemen and Somalia, but these are tactical and safe moves designed to keep ISIS and al Qaeda off balance. The mission of destroying ISIS Obama will bequeath to his successor. The other urgent issues and crises of the region; the ongoing unraveling of Iraq and Libya, where Obama’s actions and inactions are still reverberating, and Iran’s destabilizing role in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, would have to wait for the new president. Obama’s next ten months would look to many people in the Middle East like a long suffocating eternity. Obama’s long goodbye is upon us. Watching Syria after five years of agony, I was moved by that incredible spirit and boundless hope and courage that animated the first optimistic peaceful demonstrations in Damascus, Deraa, Homs and other Syrian cities and towns. The Syrians are at it again I wondered. They are back in the streets shouting for the fall of the tyrant and calling for democracy and human rights the very subversive demands that terrifies the Assad regime and the Jihadists.
Recently, I came across WH Auden’s poem It’s No Use Raising A Shout in which he writes:
“I’ve come a very long way to prove No land, no water, and no love.”
Looking at the people of Syria, I would like to say (and hope) that they have come a very long way to prove that after the ashes of desolation there is land, water, love and yes Adonis, roses too.