Dear President Obama: Before You Go, Stop the Syrian Genocide Forever
Yes, you (still) can
Syria is not just a country in civil war — it’s a police state gone mad. One man, one family, is responsible for the most terrible war crimes of this century: killings, bombings, mass executions, torture chambers, poison gas, deliberate starvation. Here is what people may not know. Here is what still can be done.
Dear Barack Obama,
You have four months left in office. You still have an opportunity to lessen what may otherwise be your greatest personal regret after you leave office. Some of your predecessors have said that their failure to act against genocide — in Darfur, in Rwanda — haunts them still. And legacy considerations aside, there is the simple matter of the right thing to do: a present-day genocide has been underway and only you can prevent it from continuing.
Syria. Once a nation of graceful boulevards and lively marketplaces, peerless classical and medieval ruins. A capital, Damascus, the world’s oldest inhabited city. A repressive police state yet relatively enlightened on universal education, religious tolerance, and treatment of women…
…. now become the human slaughterhouse of the Middle East.
Mr. President, as of this writing, yet another ceasefire in Syria’s unending catastrophe has crumbled. Air strikes by Assad’s regime are again hitting Aleppo, the encircled, shattered northern city still partly in the hands of rebels, many of whom are starving.
The ceasefire was supposed to be the first step in U.S.-Russian cooperation against our enemy in common — Al Qaeda in Syria and ISIS. As his part of the deal, Assad “agreed” to at last allow food into besieged Aleppo, and, more significantly, to ground his heavy guns and planes, pausing his five-year genocide against his own civilians.
Instead, Assad instantly broke the ceasefire with selected airstrikes, and a U.N. humanitarian convoy, assuming it was at least temporarily safe, approached with food and medical supplied, but was held for several days at the border by Assad officials for not having proper permits.
Two days later, the convoy of 31 trucks was attacked from the air. Eighteen trucks were destroyed and 2o volunteer aid workers were killed, including a Red Crescent officials. U.S. officials and other sources said the attacks were Russian airstrikes. The Syrian regime declared the ceasefire over and resumed bombing civilians in Aleppo with more ferocity than ever before,
In short, all hell has again broken loose in hell.
Yet here is my counter-intuitive appeal, Mr. President.
Do something that should have happened years ago. Go for the greater good.
Please Mr. President, for the sake of humanity, use our Air Force — deliberately this time — to cripple Assad’s heavy war machinery while you can. Target runways and standing military hardware, not troops, though deaths will be inevitable.
It could save hundreds of thousands of lives.
There’s not much time left. You do not know who your successor will be, or how much worse the consequences might be if a more reckless or callous solution were attempted.
There will be some outrage directed at you, though greater only by degree than what is already out there. You, Mr. Obama, are the sole individual on earth who not only can order this action, but, uniquely, withstand the blowback. You are the one political figure who has not been a trigger-happy Rambo in this tragic war. In fact, you’ve been criticized for your restraint, for your refusal to get more involved, to sacrifice more lives. Not incidentally, you are also the only major player certain to soon leave office. Uniquely, you can take the heat, Mr. President.
Why do so, especially as you leave amid the confetti of high ratings and the glow of a much-admired administration? Because, to lean on Dickens, this is a far better thing than you may ever do, and a far better rest than we may ever know. Let the others have their brief propaganda victories for our mistake. You, sir, can stop a genocide that has claimed 400,000 lives already and is poised to kill uncountable thousands more.
The U.S., of course, was already in this conflict with our sporadic aid to rebel groups and our air strikes against the bad guys of ISIS. But thus far we left Assad’s military untouched because, aside from slaughtering its own people, the regime has been fighting ISIS and other extremist groups, and the idea is always that some government is better than none.
But, sir, the worst of the lot is not ISIS or the jihadists. It is Assad, an even badder guy who’s responsible for more death and destruction, and has unleashed, by far, more world terror then all of the rest combined.
In degrading Assad’s weaponry, you may at least prevent the renewed systematic extermination of countless men, women and children. And, too, you may partly address what some of your advisers and supporters reproach you for: that you did not intervene in the earliest days of the Syrian uprising, when things still might have turned out well; that you stepped away from your own “red line” when Assad used chemical weapons against his people — and in fact is still doing so, despite his claims to have relinquished them.
(Your rationale, President Obama, for holding back on the red line was that the 2013 Russian-brokered “deal” at least eliminated chemical weapons from the region. Didn’t happen. A week ago, people were still falling in clouds of lethal chlorine gas. That is what happens to deals with Assad.)
Yet whatever comes of the failing ceasefire, the stonewalling by the regime, the reprisal from the rebels and jihadists, and the fallout from America’s ill-timed intelligence failure, the question remains: what happens next?
What the general public may not know is that Assad and his Russian allies used the last few weeks of negotiations behind the scenes to intensify airstrikes and position forces to maximum advantage. Meanwhile, the U.S. was urging the rebels we supported to hold back. We didn’t want to upset the forthcoming deal with any advances on their part, we said, presumably in good faith.
So now Assad and the Russians have maneuvered into their most promising military position in years, aided by a huge unforced error by the U.S. They are dealing from strength, and will have every reason to stall, to pretend to negotiate, to plan for eventual military victory.
Assad has no incentive now to truly negotiate his own departure. He and his family and regime are members of a minority Alawite sect, and they think that any loosening of power, any departure, will lead to massive revenge massacres on the entire sect for the regime’s years of genocidal killings. Why leave, especially if their forces are in a stronger position now? Many of your own advisers are certain that full-out hostilities are therefore inevitable, if not underway, this time with a real chance for Assad to retake Aleppo, once Syria’s biggest city and trade capital.
Mr. President, you regularly order surprise drone strikes upon jihadists on the grounds of the greater good, that these strikes slow down ISIS’s ability to spread, saving more lives in the long run. To justify specific strikes, you use evidence of the jihadis’ documented history and their stated aims. But you have far more compelling, and far more terrible, evidence of Assad’s widespread, indiscriminate killing, and his stated incentives to continue the war until he wins it. Yet we’re doing little more than hope.
Whatever you decide in the time you have left, let my appeal at least serve as a layman’s history of the true dimensions of Assad’s rule. I’d like to refresh the public’s memory (and perhaps offer a citizen’s aide-memoire for the International Court in The Hague) before Bashar al-Assad is someday allowed to retire to a luxury dacha on the Black Sea.
For a plunge into Assad’s dark world, start with his unrelenting war on his own doctors and hospitals. From the war’s earliest days, his regime has taken particularly savage aim at the medical community. Doctors, nurses, hospitals, ambulances have been kill targets for Assad’s troops. Traditionally, and by the Geneva convention, medical facilities are meant to be off limits even in the most brutal conflicts. Not Assad. His military stationed sentries in hospitals to kill the wounded and those who helped them. When a blood drive was announced at one hospital, Government snipers on the roof picked off volunteer blood donors as they approached. When Assad broke the next-to-last of many phony truces recently, the first thing he did was send bombers to destroy nearby hospitals.
It is a grotesquery of history that Assad was himself a doctor.
Targeting doctors and hospitals is just one of the crimes against humanity his regime continues to commit while the world stands by. In Assad, we have a uniquely destructive figure who has gone beyond all norms of the conduct of war. The specialty of the Assad military is to attack a neighborhood by strafing, artillery shells, or bombs. They wait for rescuers to respond, many of whom wear white helmets to signal their rescuer status. Then the military orders artillery strikes targeting the rescuers. Then they wait several hours for the neighborhood to gather in funeral processions to bury their dead before sunset, as is the custom, and they shell them.
By the cold numbers alone, Assad is the worst mass murderer of the 21st century. In proportion to Syria’s population, he ranks among the deadliest dictators in history. Because of the actions of one man and his family, almost half a million Syrian citizens have been murdered, most by their own government. Countless others have been tortured and killed in prison death cells. Over twelve million people have had to flee from their homes. Neighboring countries are aflame in violence, overwhelmed with the greatest flood of refugees since World War II. Humanitarian food shipments have been stopped in a deliberate strategy of starvation.
In Syria, family homes and neighborhoods, and the students and shopkeepers forced to defend them, have been subjected to unceasing daily barrages of artillery fire, tanks, aerial strafing, barrel bombs, napalm, and in some cases, poison gas. The world saw the photo of Omran Daqneesh, the dazed, ash-coated toddler pulled from the rubble in Aleppo, though not that of Ali, his nine-year-old brother who was killed in the same attack. Just one casualty among countless innocents. Schools, parks, clinics, playgrounds — places of no conceivable military threat — are blown up, pulverized. It is more akin to mass execution than combat. The neighborhood defenders have no aircraft, and only limited artillery.
And as we know, Russia’s Putin has piled on. Russian fighter planes make regular strafing and bombing sweeps over insurgent troops, residential neighborhoods, and marketplaces, roaming the skies at will. They’ve not been going after the terrorists who joined the fight — the extremist groups Putin claimed were his main target — but rather the civilians, their infrastructure, and the citizen soldiers our side supports. Search through war damage photos online, and you see atrocities committed by regime troops, by jihadists, even by the guys we say we support. But there are entire photo albums showing the civilian bomb victims of Russian air attacks, the shattered ambulances and hospitals. We should keep this in mind as we collaborate collegially with the Russians to find an end game to this genocide.
Yes, genocide is the right word. If genocide is the physical eradication of a people, can Assad’s systematic bombing and killing of his own people in their homes for five long years, including the use of chemical weapons of mass destruction, be any less?
To put this in perspective for Western readers:
In absolute numbers, Syria’s 400,000 deaths — so far — are about the same as the total of all U.S. war deaths during World War II.
In proportionate numbers, if what has happened in Syria, with a population of 23 million, were happening in the United Sates, with a population of over 300 million, the number of deaths by bullets, bombs, tanks, or napalm delivered into American towns and cities would be — so far — well over 6 million. The number of American men, women and children forced to flee to Canada or Mexico, leaving everything behind, would be over 90 million — a quarter of our citizens. Over half of us would have been driven from our homes. No other nation, even in World War II, has undergone proportionately the same mortal devastation. Making comparisons to the Nazis is a devalued currency today, but not even Hitler turned his troops on his own citizens instructing them to shoot, bomb, starve, or gas their own countrymen, women and children included. Of course, that is in fact what he did with Jews and other undesirables.
(While we consider perspective, out of seven million Syrian refugees, several neighbors like Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon have accepted about four million, at great cost and disruption. The U.S. has accepted 10,000. Canada, at a tenth our population, has accepted three times as many. In this election year, demagogues and state governors have spread dread and loathing about the dangers these refugees pose, yet these pitifully few were investigated more thoroughly than any, I suspect, in our history. Even if the son of a certain presidential candidate, in an appalling comparison, doesn’t think so)
Ah, but it’s the Middle East, we Westerners say. What’s new about civil wars in the Middle East? So many factions, so many religious sects at each other’s throats! Don’t civil wars predictably end up with terrible casualties?
But this is no sectarian war. It is a police state gone mad.
This is all because of one man, and his family, who decided to kill peaceful protesters rather than respond to them. He made the decision that his personal grip on power trumped everything — any compromise, any negotiation, any gesture of mercy or humanity. He sent trained and heavily armed troops against his unarmed populace, choosing to turn his country into rubble rather than step aside. He turned loose his country’s worst violent extremist fanatics from their prisons, and gave them free rein to poison the popular uprising.
This “war” began when a teenager, along with some friends, was arrested for scrawling graffiti on a wall. Government soldiers scooped him up in a dark van, jailed him, tortured him, killed him, and dumped his body on the street. Neighborhood folks protested, entirely peacefully. It was the Arab Spring, a time of hopeful optimism, and young people marched, no differently than our young people do, shouting for justice, waving signs.
As you know, President Obama, Assad reacted as his family always has: not by disciplining the torturers, not by offering to discuss things with the marchers, not even with police hoses to disperse crowds. He proceeded immediately to massacre, sending soldiers out to fire into the crowds, gunning down hundreds of (mostly) kids in the streets. That’s his family way. His father did something similar 35 years ago, when there were protests in the lovely river city of Hama: his troops massacred as many as 25,000 of his own citizens, using poison gas in some cases.
So yes, we refer to it today as a civil war, but there were no insurgent movements in Syria, no suicide bombers, only sporadic violence. Instead, a Mafia-like family kept power for fifty years with its secret police, its big-brother posters of Assad beaming down on every block, jailing thousands of political prisoners for the slightest infractions, and a gulag of secret prisons where torture is routine.
The odd thing is that Syria was, in many respects, despite its police-state underpinning, a cosmopolitan, largely secular society, far less gripped by Islamist extremism, far less “other” to Western eyes than neighboring countries. That is, as long as one avoided politics. A chic cafe life coexisted with its ancient souks, and just as many city women appeared in modish skirts and heels as in hijabs.
Syria’s First Lady, partly British, dabbled in garden parties, and was written up in fashion magazines. They both shopped online. Assad himself once lived in Britain, a practicing ophthalmologist who unexpectedly inherited the “presidency” when his dictator father died and his older brother, heir apparent, was killed in an accident. The long-necked, gawky younger son didn’t fit the mold of a strongman, and in fact made a few noises about reform just after taking power. But with a hardline cousin in charge of the military, and a battle-ax matriarch on the order of Livia Soprano or Ma Barker advising pitiless repression of the slightest dissent, Assad reverted to family type.
This is what makes it difficult to pin the genocide label on Assad. He doesn’t look the part. He doesn’t rant and rave, like Hitler and Mussolini, he doesn’t eat his enemies, like Idi Amin, he doesn’t execute people in garish palaces, like Qaddafi or Saddam Hussein. He definitely doesn’t terrify with snuff videos like ISIS — his killing is mostly off-camera. Assad is a geek. His dark suit and tie are always just so. In interviews, he never raises his voice.
When asked about reforms, he appears amenable, but soft-pedals past all questions by promising changes two and three years out, providing, of course, that this, that, and the other precondition be met. He “negotiates” through delay, delay, delay — and nothing changes. Ever. He refers to all opponents as terrorists, including those who merely marched for democracy, and has never uttered a word of regret or remorse. In an eerie way, he seems calm, detached, unaffected by the unfathomable devastation he and his family alone have let loose on the world.
The world knows, Mr. President, why you chose, and continue to choose, to refrain from direct intervention. There is no good alternative. The devil we know, and all that. The danger of a wider war with the Russians. Syria is so riven by competing tribes, gangs, and militias that no victory seems possible — for anyone. It could go from very, very bad to worse, the argument runs, and if the nominal order of the regime is destroyed, ISIS or Al Qaeda might gain ground, using the territory as a staging area to export still more terror.
But, stepping back, what is worse than continuing the daily, grinding, five-year systematic killing of thousands in their own homes and neighborhoods? Bin Laden was responsible for 3,000 deaths in New York City, and for other deaths by suicide bombers elsewhere. ISIS beheads prisoners on video, and sets off bombs that kill hundreds at a time. Where the so-called caliphate is declared, thousands of killings, rapes, and destruction of monuments occur. Horrifying, yes, and the world is properly terrified of what they’ll do next.
But only Assad kills in the hundreds of thousands. Only Assad practices countrywide genocide.
It is true that there is no easy solution in sight. How to pick a winner where foreign jihadists are hopelessly enmeshed with insurgents, where atrocities are committed by all sides?
But then there is this: only one side has been conducting wholesale industrial-strength killing of an unarmed population; only one side has the fighter planes, the bombs, the vast preponderance of heavy artillery, the napalm, the chlorine gas: Assad’s military and its weapon-testing Russian allies.
Recall the comments of Nazi Holocaust survivors who later told us they used to pray their concentration camps would be bombed from the air by the British and Americans, casualties be damned. At least, they said, it would have destroyed the gas chambers and slowed down the killing machinery. Is it not a worthwhile goal at least to degrade this regime’s killing machinery?
In the days leading up to the “ceasefire,” as diplomats talked, 13 more hospitals and eight ambulances were bombed by the Syrian regime — no surprise. Assad and the Russians pounded civilian neighborhoods and bombed weekend shoppers in Aleppo. As the U.S. “leaned hard” on rebel groups to hold back, Assad, for his part, intensified his airstrikes in areas near Damascus with incendiary weapons, barrel bombs, and suspected chlorine gas, forcing surrenders of survivors who are, as of this writing, being transported hundreds of miles away in what some call ethnic cleansing. As The New York Times reported:
The way things are going, say diplomats and humanitarian workers, by the time Mr. Obama is gone, the non-Islamic State opposition groups [i.e., “our” rebels] could be reduced to besieged or isolated pockets. That would leave them little hope.…to force the power-sharing that is nominally the American goal. It would set up a situation closer to the endgame that Mr. Assad wants.
And so it beats on: Assad’s first step after the “ceasefire” began was to delay agreed-upon food and humanitarian aid for starving Aleppo civilians and buy them me for Russian airstrikes, which destroyed the convoy. because, Assad said, U.N. workers didn’t have the proper permits. Meanwhile, Assad called up his “grounded” artillery, ordering a shattering strike on the building occupied by White Helmet rescuers. Again, no surprise. This, in the week after the ceasefire supposedly began. Reuters reported on Assad’s first comment since the “pause”:
Assad appears as uncompromising as ever. He vowed again this week to take back the entire country.
In other words, the status quo is more likely to keep Assad in power. Although the “ceasefire” is supposedly still in force, it is being ignored by all sides, and the regime has resumed bombing of civilians. Assad’s stated intention is to continue his relentless killing, no matter what comes of the so-called pause, until he has taken back the country. He has every reason to delay, to play for time, as he always has. Then, as the last man standing, he can restore his bloody police state with unimaginable consequences for those who opposed him.
So, Mr. President, if there is no unexpected, near-miraculous, highly enforceable pact, which no one can presently imagine, please consider this regime’s legacy — and your own. Before you go, at least cut down the odds of further genocide.
You regularly order our drones and Air Force to take out jihadists to prevent further terror. By the same logic, order our air force to take put military runways and cripple Assad’s fighter planes and bombers. Take out the heavy tanks and artillery that have rained down death on Syrian cities. Stay out of the way of the Russians if possible, but Putin has at least as much to lose by confronting us. And isn’t it time to throw at least one pitch at Putin to brush him back?
In the end, a weakened Assad will be more motivated to promptly negotiate his own departure with a minimum of preconditions. And be restrained from continuing his genocide, and perhaps achieving military victory.
President Obama, in the time you have left, don’t try to pick a winner. No one can.
Just level the playing field.
Level the killing fields.
