Though liberalism’s track record in the greater Middle East has been shoddy, to say the least, the past few weeks for Arab liberals must have been frustrating if not depressing. The optimism of the Arab Spring; that the better future the people sought was finally at hand has been met with utter disappointment. Almost twelve years later, the last remnants of the Arab Spring are almost gone.
After boldly ousting Hosni Mubarak in favour of democracy, the people of Egypt elected Islamist Mohamed Morsi. Morsi soon gave himself extensive powers and his supporters passed a new illiberal constitution. Though Egypt’s quasi-secular nature may have been saved by the resulting coup against Morsi, el-Sisi’s takeover was anything but democratic. Just over nine years ago, hundreds of Morsi supporters in Cairo were massacred by the Egyptian military. The new authoritarian ruling order in Egypt faced zero international repercussions despite this act of mass murder. The Egypt of el-Sisi is, sadly, eerily similar to the Egypt of Mubarak.
Though Gaddafi and Saleh of Libya and Yemen respectively were both ousted, the situation in the two countries degraded into devastating civil wars. Yemen’s civil war has taken a particularly sectarian nature, worsened by the bloody intervention of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Iran into the conflict. Tunisia, the home of the revolution which seemed to be the only lasting democracy after the Arab Spring appears on the brink of returning to autocracy under reactionary president Kais Saied. And the word has forgotten how Bahraini protestors were crushed by a Saudi invasion.
However, the single greatest disappointment of the Arab Spring was Syria. The heartbreak is twofold; how close Syrians were to destroying the Assad dynasty, and just how brutal the crackdown was. The national socialist regime in Syria, which Bashar al-Assad inherited from his homicidal father Hafez, was so close to being toppled. Of course, as Egypt, Libya, and Yemen have so tragically illustrated, though Assad’s decapitation would not have singularly guaranteed a free Syria, Assad’s removal from power was – is – necessary for Syrian democracy. Now, thanks to the intervention of Iran and Russia, Assad’s rule is secure, over half a million Syrians are dead, millions have been forced from their homes, Turkey de facto annexed much of the north and has engaged in ethnic cleansing against the Kurds, and Islamists dominate the remaining Syrian rebels. Now, Syria is on the cusp of returning to the Arab League and Turkey and Assad are finding common ground over their disdain for Kurds and other minorities.
A decade ago, many world leaders both in the west and in the Islamic world decried Assad, saying he lost legitimacy. Of the over 200,000 civilian deaths in the Syrian War, over 90 per cent have been caused by Assad and his Iranian and Russian allies. Over half a million people in total have died in the Syrian War, and millions more were forced from their homes. Yet much of the world has turned a blind eye to Syria’s suffering or outright retracted their opposition to Assad. Now that Assad will likely remain in power and the opposition will fail in overthrowing him, world leaders have decided to be conciliatory with the regime despite his carnage. For this, blame lies principally with Barack Obama.
Admittedly, with Joe Biden currently seated in the Oval Office and Donald Trump facing down the barrel of a criminal investigation, it may be jarring to read an essay on a man who hasn’t wielded power for a half decade. However, when Barack Obama’s presidency ended, he left the office popular both domestically and internationally. The American public still views him positively, years after he became a private citizen. Unlike Obama’s predecessor and successor, Obama is evaluated well by presidential historians, being ranked as the 10th and 11th best presidents from the most recent C-SPAN and Siena College surveys.
Of course, there’s nuance to Obama’s legacy – this is not an unmeasured, rabidly partisan attack on him. Frankly, Obama is quite likeable. He’s a talented orator, and as Christopher Hitchens pointed out in 2009, he’s a good writer too. His able campaigning skills are why he won states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, and Iowa against John McCain and Mitt Romney with relative ease when those states are now either extremely competitive or outright electorally “safe” for Republicans now. As far as more concrete achievements, it was the Obama administration that avenged 9/11 and had bin Laden assassinated. The Obama administration facilitated a precipitous recovery of the American economy out of the Great Recession, along with the Affordable Care Act, which improved healthcare coverage and accessibility for Americans. Obama also repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in 2011, and despite his opposition in 2008, Obama was the first president to support the legalization of same-sex marriage, which was legalized across the entire U.S. in 2015.
The sum of these aforementioned traits of the Obama presidency helps explain why he’s still popular to this day, and his popularity is not altogether undeserved, especially in direct comparison to his successor in the White House. However, aside from the assassination of bin Laden, which itself was more about getting justice for the murdered in 2001 than a meta foreign policy, nothing above deals with his foreign policy.
Ten years ago, Obama spoke to the White House press. It was the middle of the 2012 presidential campaign against Mitt Romney, and thus most of the questions during this press conference were used to ask Obama about his electoral challenger, illustrating the American press’ concern with electoral theatrics rather than policy. The last question of the press conference, asked by Chuck Todd, dealt with America’s approach to Syria and the potential usage of chemical weapons. This was months after the Houla massacre, months after peaceful protestors against Assad were forced into armed rebellion when the regime met the people with bloodshed, but before Islamists hijacked Arab opposition to Assad.
Obama’s answer, even then, was filled with weakness. Though he got the basic sentiments of affirming that Assad had lost legitimacy as Syria’s ruler and needed to step down right, he referred to the political situation in Syria as being “a very tough issue.” Of course, Bashar al-Assad was not chosen by the Syrian people; he was never democratically legitimate. He inherited Syria’s dictatorship after Hafez died, and Hafez took power in a coup within the Ba’ath Party. The presidential elections held in Syria after Bashar became president have been farcical. Obama then spoke of how America had been sending humanitarian assistance to Syrians and how they had given consultation to the Syrian opposition for a transition from the Assad regime to something else. While the humanitarian aid figure is concrete, these consultations that Obama said were happening with the opposition was a nebulous joke of an excuse for helping Syrians.
But the one out Obama gave himself, vis-à-vis using hard power in Syria, was with chemical weapons. Obama stated that if “a whole bunch of chemical weapons” were being either moved around or utilized, it would “change [Obama’s] calculus” and “We have communicated in no uncertain terms with every player in the region that that’s a red line for us and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons.” Obama’s algebraic language here was intentionally ambiguous, perhaps avoiding a hard promise of a new war amid the backdrop of running for president again, but he definitely implied that the usage of chemical weapons would force intervention against Assad, and that this message had been forwardly communicated to Assad and others in the Middle East.
On August 21st, 2013 – almost a year to the day later – the Assad regime murdered, per the US’ own numbers, over a 1000 people with sarin gas in Ghouta. The massacre of so many people in a blatant war crime should have forced Obama’s hand, yet it didn’t. Though the Ghouta attack was the deadliest usage of chemical weapons in Syria, it was not the first. Rather than punish Assad for his chilling disregard for human life, the US worked with Russia to destroy the Syrian chemical weapon stockpile. Assad remained in power and as it turns out, despite John Kerry’s hubristic proclamations to the press in 2014, Syria retained chemical weapons. The chief initiative of the Obama administration in Syria was an unambiguous failure.
After the election of Donald Trump in Nov. 2016, Assad used sarin gas in heavily publicized massacres in Khan Sheikhoun in 2017 and Douma in 2018, finally prompting an actual military response. Still, these strikes were limited in scope, targeting an air base and facilities related to chemical weapons respectively, causing minimal casualties. As incoherent as the Trump administration’s foreign policy was – just days before the reprisal for the Khan Sheikhoun massacre, Rex Tillerson was avidly conciliatory towards Assad – the US attacks on Assad were a reminder that the US is still capable if not always willing to utilize hard power.
On an aside, it was in the immediate aftermath of the 2018 American strike that John Kerry admitted the Obama administration was aware Assad still had chemical weapons squirrelled away. Perhaps Obama was simply naïve about how dissuaded Assad really was from using chemical weapons again, but it certainly seems he and John Kerry lied about Assad’s remaining chemical weapons to bring a foreign policy “victory” back home.
Either way, how America handled Syria under the Obama administration was disastrous. It is, bar none, the single greatest failure of his presidency. Had Obama been followed through on his red line promise after Ghouta, a line blatantly crossed by the Assad regime, a considerable amount of suffering could have been avoided – the majority of those killed in Syria died after August 2013. It was the months after Ghouta where ISIS consolidated its strength and reached its apex, utilizing its base in eastern Syria to invade Iraq and commit genocide against the Yazidi people in summer 2014. Likewise, an intervention would have kept other Islamist groups from growing as powerful within the Syrian opposition. An American invasion and occupation of Syria would have dissuaded Turkey from invading Rojava and engaging in ethnic cleansing against Syria’s Kurds, perhaps opening the door for Kurdish self-determination rather than the SDF being forced to sacrifice autonomy to Damascus in exchange for support against Turkey.
Obama’s failure to follow through on punishing Assad for crossing the red line also helped weaken America’s status in the world. Though America’s track record on following through on its agreements and commitments has never been perfect, Obama’s refusal to intervene in Syria and to honour the Budapest Memorandum was compacted by the Trump administration questioning America’s NATO commitments the American betrayal of Syria’s Kurds to Turkish mercy, and the agreement with the Taliban that set the stage for their return to power, a disaster for Afghans realized under the auspices of the supposedly internationalist Biden administration. If America is going to be a global superpower, it must honour its commitments, both positive commitments like NATO spending and negative commitments like those to intervene if a stated red line is crossed. Obama failed in honouring his own red line. Despite his promise to the press in August 2012, his “calculations” in Syria never changed.
Though the Trump administration was unique in that it was seemingly intentionally poisoning global trust in America, as if to prepare the public for a return to reactionary isolationism, either hesitancy or a fundamental misunderstanding of what global actors respect led to a downturn in America’s standing in the world under Obama. He missed that for soft power to mean anything, it must be backed by hard power; a threat to Assad that he would be removed by force if he used chemical weapons had to be backed by his actual removal, not inaction. This inaction has helped destroy American credibility.
Of course, had America intervened in Syria, it would not have guaranteed that Syria would become and stay a democracy, much like what has happened to Iraq and Afghanistan after America’s withdrawal. Those two countries are dominated by parties of god, torn apart by zealotry and bitter sectarianism. But had America had the will to do so and dedicated the necessary resources and time to building democracy in those two countries, intervention could have succeeded. Same with a hypothetical intervention in Syria.
If liberalism is to succeed, it must be proactive, muscular, and unyielding. Diplomacy exists in a world where war, no matter how undesirable, is an option. Otherwise, declarations like Obama saying ten years ago that Assad was an illegitimate ruler are completely irrelevant.