Sultan Knish
Someone chalked a long red line along the street outside my building.
The line is sloppy, it turns, wavers and meanders. Car tires have
already rubbed it pink in places and dogs have done to it what large
four-legged animals do naturally when taken out of the confines of
narrow apartments. The line turns a corner and dives inside a pothole
near an exposed sewer grate. And then it is gone.
Obama's
red line is more famous than my red line. It appears in the Washington
Post and the New York Times. There are reams of speculation over what
the nature of the red line is, whether the red line has been crossed,
what Obama should do about the crossing of the red line and how many
devils can dance on the edge of a red line while juggling Sarin
canisters.
Despite being much more famous, Obama's red line matters about as much
as the one in front of my building. It's there one day and gone the next
and no one really cares.
The red line, the famous one in D.C. is a meaningless. It exists because
politicians and reporters expect it to exist. It's a necessary optical
illusion that convinces them that Eisenhower or JFK are still in the
White House and that the United States of America is a rational world
power with standards that on truly important matters such as human
rights and the percentage of cow flatulence that is to be allowed to
ascend into the atmosphere.
Obama's red line never existed. It was the sort of thing that Obama
occasionally said because people expected him to say it. Chemical
weapons are bad, okay? If you use them, we'll get really upset. And the
White House press corps pawed its iPads, hardly able to type for the
thrills shooting through their nervous systems at being in the presence
of a leader they could truly respect for his compassion and wisdom.
But Obama and his teleprompter are far too elegant wordsmiths to get
bogged down in red lines. “That would change my calculus. That would
change my equation,” Obama declared at one point, channeling his inner
Stephen Hawking, but sounding more like a punchline from Big Bang
Theory. Whatever changes have happened to Obama's calculus equations
from the possible use or non-use of chemical weapons, the equation is
still up there on the blackboard and it has no solution.
The idea that Obama has a red line governed by the number of people who
are killed is slightly sillier than the plot of every big budget summer
movie rolled together. As far back as his campaign, Obama made it clear
that genocide in Sudan or the Congo was not a criteria for military
intervention. But when Gaddafi took the initiative, Obama went to war in
defense of a lovely peaceful city named Benghazi that the Nobel Peace
Prize winner declared was on the verge of being exterminated.
What set one African country apart from another? Cynics might point to
oil and race, but those are just elements of the larger calculus
equation that makes Obama do things. It's his real red line that doesn't
show up at press conferences because it doesn't sound good. The real
red line has nothing to do with how many people die in Syria. It has to
do with how those deaths slot into the larger agenda for the region.
That might be okay if the agenda were remotely coherent. It isn't. It
might be okay if he didn't have a habit of saying stupid things and then
flailing around afterward.
Obama allowed the thin red line myth to go forth and now he's stuck with
it. The old liners at the Washington Post who still think that we're
living in 1958 keep calling on Obama to show leadership. But how is he
supposed to do that? He's not a leader. And even if he were, he
certainly would not be their kind of leader. Or at least he is the kind
of leader they deserve.
The left has a long history of marrying incompetence and malice. It
excels at taking power and fails at trying to use it. It is good at
convincing people of things, so long as those people are out in the
streets shouting about jobs and food. It is quite capable of looting a
country, but incapable of building it up except through the crudest
brute force forms of industrialization that fail before too long.
Behind the big fat red line of the Soviet Union was a monstrous regime
that got its ass handed to it by its Nazi allies in a hot war and then
got its ass handed it to it again in a cold war by the United States.
The United States saved the Soviet Union twice, once from famine and
once from war and nearly saved it a third time economically. The Soviet
Union had thoroughly infiltrated Western elites and even received
nuclear weapons technology from them that it could use to destroy the
world. And it still failed miserably.
Obama's red line leadership marries incompetence and malice. The left's
big idea of dismantling American power leaves it with few ways of using
American power. Like the idiot who campaigns against hammers only to
realize he has no way of nailing up his anti-hammer posters, he is stuck
between making empty threats that no one believes in and then having to
either back down or nerve up and carry them through because the threats
alone have no credibility.
The foreign policy establishment threw itself into the idea that the
Arab Spring represented a historical movement that could not and would
not be denied. (Except in Bahrain where the protesters were Shiites
going up against the House of Saud which happens to own the White House
mortgage.) The dictators, the ones without oil, were told that standing
in the way of a historical movement of price protests hijacked by
left-wing and Islamist mobs was futile. Either they would step down or
the people would throw them down.
Gaddafi chose to test the force of history and won. And once it was
clear that he was winning, the jets that no one thought of sending out
to stop genocide anywhere in Africa were dispatched to protect that
jewel of democracy, Benghazi, the heartland of the Libyan revolution.
Now Assad is testing the farce of history. And while he isn't winning,
he hasn't lost either.
Obama's real red line has nothing to do with how many Syrian civilians
die. No one in Washington cares about dead Syrians. They care about who
is going to win in Syria. Their credibility has been staked on a rebel
victory. Their red line is a rebel defeat like the one that forced
Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron to jump into the Libyan War on the pretext
that they were protecting the civilians that they couldn't give a fig
about anywhere else in Africa.
Dead civilians are worth a stringer's photo with the contrast enhanced
to show the magnificent desolation of war. It's the sort of thing that
Bush might have naively cared about, but we all know he was a moron who
just wanted to start crusades, kill Iraqis and paint dogs. His far more
moral successor only starts smart wars in defense of grand historical
movements that globalist flat earthers like Thomas Friedman insist will
usher in a new age in the old Middle East.
If Syria actually did use chemical weapons, then all it did was
embarrass the emperor of peace by exposing the nakedness of his
pretensions. The State Department hemmed and hawed and the occasion was
seen as sufficiently drastic that the New York Times for the first time
ever told the truth and admitted that there are no secular forces
fighting in Syria. It's Assad or the Islamists.
It's nice of the Times to tell the truth on a Sunday to explain to its
readers why the grand crusade for human rights that they were expecting
hasn't begun yet. The pity of it is that by Tuesday, the Times will be
back to talking about why we should be aiding the Syrian secular forces
that it already admitted have the same level of material existence as
the Easter Bunny, the moderate Muslim and the shovel-ready job.
But Times readers should be used to it by now. Clinton shrugged his
shoulders at Rwanda and Sudan, but spent a good deal of time bombing
Yugoslavia over false claims of genocide. It did not take very long for
his ideological successor to do the very same thing in Libya. It doesn't
matter how often George Clooney goes a week without shaving, shoots his
cuffs and has his assistant chain him to the fence of the Sudanese
mission, the right to protect is never going to show up over Sudan.
None of this is about human rights. It's not even about humans. It's about big pictures and even the
devoted readers of books about the Post-American world order still have
their big pictures.composed of grand historical movements and massive
chess games in which leaders can be raised and toppled, in which power
can check power until a perfect stabilizing point is reached and the
rest of the world decides to start killing its own babies, dismantling
its own industry and dedicating all its efforts to turning out graduates
with three degrees to teach small children about transgender identity.
That obviously isn't going to happen. The plan to turn over the region
to the moderate Islamists worked out about as well as the plan to use
the Ayayollah Khomeini as a stabilizing force in Iran. Fortunately
believers in grand historical movements don't back off because they have
been proven wrong. They don't stop when the bodies begin piling up.
Instead they move forward certain that they are doing the right thing,
even if the dimmest man alive would have figured it out by now.
The red line in Syria isn't chemical weapons or blood. It's ideology.
It's the red-green alliance exacting its deadly toll while the Great
Teleprompter squats behind his curtain making shadow puppets on the wall
and telling self-deprecating jokes to the press corps that waits for
leadership and worries that the dictator, the other dictator, has called
his bluff and one of these days he is going to have no choice but to
ante up or fold.
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