Western efforts to find a solution in Syria are floundering thanks to misplaced deference
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Email Nick Cohen The Observer, Sunday 10 June 2012
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Death in Houla: the bodies of some of the more than 100 people massacred Photograph: HOULA MEDIA CENTER/HANDOUT/EPA
The failure of the west to utter a threat that might limit the slaughter in Syria is made flesh in the pitiful figure of Michael McFaul, the American ambassador to Moscow. Pitiful, but also ridiculous, because McFaul is a diplomatic Malvolio: so desperate to please that he never guesses that everyone is laughing at him.
His actions are of a liberal, if of the guilt-ridden variety. Their effects are anything but liberal. From the best of intentions, he is ending with the worst of outcomes. In this, he is a true representative of the Obama administration.
You will remember that in the 2008 presidential election, the Democrats argued that George Bush was a certain cowboy and probable war criminal – a "stupid white man" to use the words that Michael Moore might better have directed at himself. When Obama came to power, he would "engage" with Putin's Russia, "reach out" to the ayatollahs' Iran and "reset" American foreign policy. Liberal America (and Europe) thought that "the duty to repent forbids the western bloc, which is eternally guilty, to judge or combat other systems, other states, other religions", as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner said in The Tyranny of Guilt, his dissection of western masochism. It hoped that once the west repented and replaced a stupid white man with a smart black man it would remove the "root cause" of anti-western hostility. There would be no need to judge or combat our enemies. Indeed, our enemies would reveal themselves to be no enemies at all but an unjustly demonised "other", the victims of our paranoid fears and racist stereotypes.
The failure of western diplomacy in Syria has been a bloody destroyer of illusions. The US, Britain, France, Turkey and the Arab League have acquiesced to a Russian veto. While they have agonised over the morality and practicality of "liberal intervention", the dictatorships have been practising "illiberal intervention" in a modern echo of the Spanish Civil War.
Assad's crimes have not stopped Putin supplying his client with arms. After Ba'athist forces massacred at least 108 people near Houla, Putin's foreign minister insisted that "both sides obviously had a hand in the deaths of innocent people". After the massacre in Mazraat al-Qubair, Russia said it wanted Iran involved in any peacemaking process. This was too much even for Hillary Clinton, a stateswoman whose tolerance had appeared to be infinite. Even she knew that Iran's revolutionary guards are engaged in an illiberal intervention of their own on the side of the ayatollahs' allies in the Allawite minority. As Michael Weiss, Syria expert at the Henry Jackson Society, said: "Asking Russia and Iran to help find peace is like asking a rapist to lead a Reclaim the Night rally."
The "progressives" of the last decade did not understand that dictatorships are rarely just a rational reaction to western crimes. They have their own reasons, which do not cease to motivate them once a liberal is in the White House. Autocrats do not think that they are thieves and megalomaniacs. It goes against human nature for criminals to admit what they are. They dignify their will for power by seeing themselves as the only people who can maintain order and hold their countries together.
To their mind, therefore, opponents must be traitors not only to the ruling family or clique, but to the nation. Democracy and human rights are not competing ideologies or the legitimate demands of honourable opponents, but the subversive doctrines of the imperialist west that dictatorships must unite to oppose. One of the least noticed features of the modern world is how the common interest of dictators has collapsed differences between ideologies. Look closely and you see a trade unionism of the authoritarian; a tyrannous ecumenism. On paper, crony-capitalist Russia, communist Cuba, Ba'athist Syria and Islamist Iran have nothing in common. But they will always form a united front against liberalism.
Michael McFaul is not an idiot, or at least not obviously so. A distinguished academic, he helped organise the reset of Obama's Russian policy. He shared the administration's assumptions that once the Kremlin realised that reasonable men and women were in charge in Washington, it would cooperate.
For all his scholarship, McFaul did not understand the dictatorial mind. He arrived in Russia in January when the opposition movement against the kleptocracy was growing. Putin, like Assad, had to blame dissent on foreigners and convince his supporters they were defending the motherland from the plots of alien enemies rather than the legitimate grievances of subjugated Russians. McFaul was the nearest target to hand, so the state media hit him. Flunkey journalists accused him of being the puppet master behind the protests. When he met dissidents, state broadcasters, who clearly knew his schedule, trailed him. Putin supporters posted videos comparing him to a paedophile.
McFaul, who cared so much, who was trying so hard, wailed to Julia Ioffe of Foreign Affairs in February: "What I did not anticipate, honestly, was the degree, the volume, the relentless anti-Americanism. That is odd for us. Because we have spent three years trying to build a different relationship with this country. I mean, I'm genuinely confused by it." According to Ioffe, a "note of real hurt" rang in his normally chipper voice. Nevertheless, he overcame his pain. By last week, McFaul was as much a Uriah Heap as a Malvolio as he humbly accepted the abuse the Kremlin directed at him.
In a breach of all protocols covering the treatment of ambassadors, the Russian foreign ministry lambasted him on Twitter for propagating "blatant falsehoods" at a presentation in Moscow to academics. What made the diplomatic incident pathetic was that although McFaul had made mild and true criticisms in his speech, he filled most of it with praise. As he said in his reply to the Kremlin on Twitter, he had "highlighted over 20 positive results of 'reset'".
Even while the Russians traduced him, McFaul did not understand that the "reset" had been on the western side only. For Putin, nothing had changed. McFaul concluded by tweeting that Russia had launched a Twitter war against him. Never mind, harsh words were better than armed conflict. "That's the new world – followers instead of nukes," he said. "Better."
It is not "better" in Syria, whose largely defenceless population is suffering from more than nasty tweets. The Russian and Iranians understand that the battle for Syria is a battle they must win for their sakes as much as Assad's. The democracies are too blinded by the failures of the Bush years to see it. Until they press the reset button, there will be no end to the killing.
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