In some ways, the Obama
administration’s attempt to engineer an attack on Syria fits an established political and rhetorical pattern. Last weekend, Secretary of State
John Kerry brought out the M-word – Munich – and by doing so, implicitly used
the H-word. A fourth-rate power that can barely hold itself together became a
great menace to the world, requiring preemptive military action by another old
fraud, the Free World. In America, nobody laughed – nobody in Washington or in
the respectable media, at any rate. This is, after all, a known script that we
dust off and read to each other every few years. Gaddafi was Hitler, Saddam was
Hitler, bin Laden was Hitler, now it’s Assad’s turn. And where there’s a Hitler,
there might be a Chamberlain. The ritual has a certain solemnity to it, like
handling a flag, and in this corniest of political cultures, playing along is the
key to respectability. Bill Keller of the New York Times – a most
respectable courtier – dutifully wrote an editorial announcing that Americans reluctant
to attack Syria were being ‘isolationist.’ (Never mind the hundreds of foreign
bases, Afghanistan, and the ongoing drone wars in at least three countries.
This is 1938, so we must be isolationist.)
Playing along with rituals,
however absurd, is the stuff of historical continuity. And what continuity! One
of the most astonishing revelations of the Snowden files is that classified NSA
documents were meant to be read only by American, British, Canadian, Australian
and New Zealand spies. Not even the French or the Germans had access, never mind
their willingness to cooperate with the NSA. Ah, the intimacy of the 'special relationship.' The French might be eager to bomb
Syria – it’s excellent advertising for Dassault, and a new Syrian regime might
buy Rafales to replace their destroyed inventory – but when it comes to that iconic
creature, ‘the Allies,’ there is no wavering from a stubbornly, romantically,
Anglophone fantasy. Empire evidently never graduated from the class of ’45,
and everybody knows that the French, Russians and Chinese never really belonged
in that class. But who knew that New Zealand has spies? (Who do they spy on? Fiji?) Or
that Canada is so important, eh? Or Britain, for that matter? Not even Putin knew, to the embarassment of David Cameron, who began sputtering unconvincingly about a great past.
What is this ‘special relationship,’ anyway? Could something as matter-of-fact
as intelligence-sharing and strategic cooperation really boil down to the
sentimentality of a shared language? Then again, no language, not even French, is
as enmeshed in the culture of empire as English. But why should New Zealand be ‘in’
and Jamaica be ‘out’? They speak English too, don’t they? Oh wait…
Then there is Israel. Another special relationship, but differently special, in which the dog has accepted the power of the tail in a way that would confound Gramsci. One of the
less reported aspects of this Syrian crisis is the frantic lobbying for war
being done by AIPAC. It would be impolite to report such things, and Abe Foxman
might make unpleasant insinuations. But why would Israel want the US to attack
Syria? Well, it would weaken Hezbollah and isolate Iran. But the Israeli
government has indicated in the past that it is not keen to see the Assad
regime – which is barely a nuisance – replaced by something unknown, unpredictable
and chaotic, especially since the anti-Assad rebels are unlikely to be friendly
to Israel. The neo-con calculation that applied in Iraq is
discernible in Syria but not very strong. But the rhetoric of gas and Munich is
irresistible all the same, in exactly the same way that the rhetoric of saving-the-world
is irresistible in American politics. It sustains a national consensus on
why-we-exist, why-we-do-the-things-we-do, and why-our-priorities-are-so-incredibly-fucked-up.
It soothes and reassures even as it frightens people into letting the
government into their pants and email accounts.
There is, nevertheless, a pattern
of diminishing returns. And this time around, it has become apparent, even
Americans are not buying it. Congress may yet buy it, but it looks shockingly
uncertain. The British clearly did not buy it. (When was the last time you
wanted to stand on your chair tipsily and sing God Save the Old Bag? Well done,
Parliament.) The Germans are being rather hostile, which is not surprising if
people are going to bring up Munich. And so we have the utterly pathetic
spectacle of the American president going around literally begging people to
please, please, let him drop just a few bombs, just for a few days. He cannot
really explain why. He cannot say that it is about saving face, although he
comes close. He insists that ‘the world’ drew the ‘red lines’ behind which he
is trapped, but doesn’t dare go before the UN General Assembly. He insists that
chemical weapons are heinous, but won’t talk about what a Hellfire missile or white phosphorus does
to a child. He cannot say why a massacre in Syria is intolerable and one in
Egypt acceptable. The press is doing its best to help by refraining from asking
rude questions, but in the end, it may be the Russians who save his face by
conjuring up a diplomatic solution. That would make Putin the winner in this
sorry affair.
Meanwhile, I find myself marveling
at the farce that Barack Obama has become. It cannot be called a tragedy; there
is no nobility here. But at one time, this man knew people like Rashid Khalidi
and Bill Ayers: thoughtful, honorable men, men with ideals to which they were
committed. It is reasonable to think that they really were friends; Barry probably
inhaled. It is difficult now to imagine them in the same room together. Could
Obama look them in the eye? The people who would still want to have a beer with
him are AIPAC lobbyists, Wall Street cronies and thugs like Keith Alexander. It
may very well be depressing for Obama to realize that being president has
brought about this startling inversion of his social and moral circle. It
certainly raises the question whether he understood, in 2008, that this was
going to happen, and if he would still have run for
president had he understood. Perhaps it makes no difference to him. The more
depressing thing is that we – who voted
for him, made phone calls for him, donated to his campaign and cheered his
election – now realize that no matter who Obama was in 2008, it was always
going to end in farce.
September 9, 2013
