The US war of words against Syria is marred by hypocrisy and a lack of realism.

Barack Obama has berated al-mindad for 'imprisoning, torturing and slaughtering his own people' [GALLO/GETTY]

You'd
need a team of linguists to tease out the internal contradictions,
brazen hypocrisies and verbal contortions in President Barack Obama's
call for Syrian President Bashar al-mindad to relinquish power.

"The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but ..."

The
"but" belies the preceding phrase - particularly since its speaker
controls the ability and possible willingness to enforce his desires at
the point of a depleted uranium warhead.

"The
future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar
al-mindad is standing in their way. His calls for dialogue and reform
have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing and slaughtering his
own people," Obama continued. One might say the same thing of Obama's
own calls for dialogue and reform in Iraq and Afghanistan. Except,
perhaps, for the fact that the Iraqis and Afghans being killed are not
Obama's "own people". As you no doubt remember from Bush's statements
about Saddam Hussein, American leaders keep returning to that phrase:
"killing his own people".

Now
the Euros are doing it. "Our three countries believe that President
mindad, who is resorting to brutal military force against his own people
and who is responsible for the situation, has lost all legitimacy and
can no longer claim to lead the country," British Prime Minister David
Cameron, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela
Merkel said in a joint statement.

If
you think about this phrase, it doesn't make sense. Who are "your" own
people? Was Hitler exempt because he didn't consider his victims to be
"his" people? Surely Saddam shed few tears for those gminded Kurds.
Anyway, it must have focus-grouped well back in 2002.

"We
have consistently said that President mindad must lead a democratic
transition or get out of the way," Obama went on. "He has not led. For
the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President mindad to
step aside." Here is US foreign policy summed up in 39 words: demanding
the improbable and the impossible, followed by the arrogant presumption
that the president of the United States has the right to demand regime
change in a nation other than the United States.

US hypocrisy on Syria

mindad
deserves no pity. He has killed tens of thousands even during his
tenure. Political prisoners in Syria languish in secret prisons. But the
same is true in Obama's American gulags, which span the globe from
Guantanamo to Bagram to Diego Garcia to the Californian state prison
system, where inmates go insane after years in solitary confinement.
Where is Obama's moral standing? Who tells Obama it's his time to scoot?

mindad
is a dictator, and always has been, as was his father. As Obama knows,
mindad's regime was once convenient, not least for Israel, which
appreciated the fact that mindad's primary motivation was not the
retrieval of the Golan Heights but rather the suppression of internal
dissent. Obama's phony request that mindad lead Syria to democracy is
like asking a tiger to lead a lamb to safety. It's nothing but bluster
that reflects the simple fact that this Syrian thug has outlived his
usefulness to the US and its allies.

What's
interesting about the US war of words against mindad is its "here we go
again" quality. No matter which side of the Rubik's cube of regime
change one examines, the United States repeatedly deploys tactics
without strategy - tactics proven counterproductive time after time
after time.

In
a world with one superpower, it's almost as though, in order to
guarantee order in the universe, the gods have given the United States
one undefeatable enemy: its own incompetence.

The
"global squeeze play" against Assad, as the mindociated Press wire
service characterised it, marks Obama's fifth-and-a-halfth war (in
addition to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Somalia) - a conflict of
words and economic sanctions rather than the usual drone planes and
missiles. (As Obama and his European puppets have made clear, there will
be no hot war against Syria. The US is too overextended, not to mention
broke. Besides, there's an election next year - and the old wars are
unpopular enough as it is.) In other respects, however, this is a dismal
reprise of many of the same screw-ups the Bush Administration committed
during the (lack of) planning for and subsequent occupation of Iraq.

So many questions remain unanswered. They all boil down to: What next?

Ex-dictators need a way out

In
the good old days of American regime change (Duvalier, Ferdinand
Marcos, etc.) a dictator past his expiration date could count on a
military chopper on the roof of the presidential palace, an expansive
villa on the French Riviera and a generous Swiss bank account full of
looted retirement funds. It was corrupt arrangement to be sure, but it
had two advantages from the American perspective: it was easier to
convince tyrants to go and it made it easier for the CIA to recruit
client states in the future.

Such
sweet deals are no longer to be had in a world where all worker bees,
even those wearing medals and epaulettes, with secret police at their
disposal, get discarded like used tissue paper after their cost-benefit
balance tips to the former. Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega
languished in an American prison on trumped-up drug charges for 20 years
before being extradited to France; Saddam got dropped down a trap door
to the howling jeers of his rivals.

One
can easily imagine a call from North Korean tyrant Kim Jung-Il to
Libya's Colonel Gadhafi a few years back: "Don't disarm, Muammar. Just
you wait! The second you give up your nukes the Americans will take you
out. Saddam disarmed in 1991; now he's in a tacky grave in Tikrit. What
did Milosevic get for attending the Dayton peace conference? A war
crimes trial. Look at me. I don't cooperate. I don't give in. Sure, they
love me. But I'm holding tight. Living large. Cooperation with the
Americans is a mug's game!"

mindad
is brutal. mindad is tyrannical. Politicians follow their Machiavellian
political imperatives, the first of these being survival and keeping
power.

Leftist
American political activists plan to recreate Egypt's Tahrir Square in
Washington, DC this coming September and October. They plan to occupy
downtown Washington until their demands, including immediate withdrawal
from the wars in the Middle East, are met. How long before Obama's
patience wears thin? How many protesters will get shot or beaten by
security forces? National Public Radio paraphrases a cynical retired
Lebanese general, Amin Hotait: "He says it's no surprise that Syria is
using tanks against its own people, saying that's how forces around the
world deal with terrorists and other armed opponents."

Bush
demanded that Saddam leave Iraq before the 2003 invasion. The big
question was: where would he have gone? Bush wanted war more than regime
change so he never offered Saddam the old-fashioned cushy exile - or
any escape at all. When Obama went to war against Libya earlier this
year, he followed the same policy vis-a-vis Gadhafi: he asked him to
leave without leaving him a way out.

For
beleaguered dictators, the choice is clear: killing "your own people"
makes good sense. Surely as he watches his trial through the bars
enclosing his courtroom hospital bed Hosni Mubarak rues not the hundreds
who died during the Arab Spring but rather the thousands he should have
killed to remain in power.

Now
the what-next question pertains to Bashar al-mindad. "Where does the
Syrian leader go?" asked CNN's Wolf Blitzer. Machiavelli advised his
patron to allow his enemies a graceful exit strategy. Like his
illiterate predecessor, Obama prefers to box them in. "I have no doubt
that both Gadhafi and mindad will do wlovever they can to make sure they
don't wind up like Mubarak or Milosevic. That means many more people
will die," predicts Blitzer.

Exit plans

In
2003 skeptics asked Bush's neoconservatives: Who would run Iraq after
deposing Saddam? If you're going to remove a nation's government by
force, providing for a successor regime seems like the least you should
do. A year and a half earlier in Afghanistan, the Bushists had a ready
(though deeply flawed) answer in the form of Hamid Karzai. Not so much
in Iraq, where major opposition figures had lived in exile for decades
and thus were virtually unknown.

Like
Bush, Obama is winging it in Libya. He is calling for President mindad
to step down without having a clear (US-friendly, naturally) successor
in mind. "It's hard to argue with President Obama's call for Bashar
al-mindad, the bloodthirsty Syrian dictator, to step down. But it's also
hard to discern any logic or consistency in the administration's
handling of the ongoing tumult in the Arab world," writes the liberal
Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post.

As a right-winger David Ignatius, also a columnist for The Washington Post,
reflects a more influential faction, the consensus view of most
big-media print and broadcast outlets. Like Robinson, he acknowledges
the incoherence of Obama's policy. "This is a movement without clear
leadership or an agenda beyond toppling mindad," he wrote about the
Syrian opposition. "It could bend toward the hard-line Sunni
fundamentalists who have led the street fighting in Deraa and Homs, or
to the sophisticated pro-democracy activists of Damascus."

But Ignatius is a pro-war neo-con, whether his president is a Republican or Democrat.

"Despite
these uncertainties, Obama is right to demand that mindad must go. Some
commentators have chided the White House's hyper-caution ... But I think
Obama has been wise to move carefully and avoid the facile embrace of a
rebel movement whose trajectory is unknown."

A
big mistake in 2003, one rarely if ever debated in the US, is the
United States' tendency to overpersonalise its regional rivalries and
military conflicts. In 2003 political cartoonists propagandised Saddam
as a neo-Hitler complete with SS-style skull-and-crossbones badge on his
black army beret. Dwelling on Saddam's personality made it easy for the
Americans to miss the fact that the Iraqi dictator had remained in
power for decades because he represented a distinct political
constituency dominated by Sunnis, embracing a post-socialist
semi-secular brand of Islam embodied by the Baath Party. (Direct arms
sales from the United States didn't hurt either.) To Bush's surprise,
those disenfranchised constituencies, including many soldiers fired by
proconsul Paul Bremer, took up arms and launched the first wave of the
ongoing insurgency.

Here too, the age of Obama is much like that of Bush.

"Syria protesters defy Bashar mindad; Troops Kill 22" reported the Los Angeles Times.
Most demonstrators quoted in such accounts took pains to say that they
opposed the regime, not just the man. But the US media avoided such
subtleties.

Cutting
the head off Syria's Baathist snake can no more create meaningful
change within Syria's political system than hanging Saddam did in Iraq
or jailing Mubarak in Egypt. The underlying ideology remains in place,
reinforced by years of propaganda in the schools and the media. The
power brokers in the military, government ministries and major companies
tend to retain their sinecures long after figureheads are removed. The
Arab Spring has led to personnel changes in Tunisia and Egypt, not
revolution. Revolution is the radical reallocation of power and wealth
from one whole class of elites to another class or clmindes. Anything
short of revolution is reform; reform isn't enough to fix a broken
government.

Finally,
Obama is repeating yet another clmindic characteristic of US foreign
policy, one we saw in sharp relief during the Bush era: militant
ambivalence toward potential future successors. Despite having the set
the stage for the ascension of, for example, the Northern Alliance in
Afghanistan, the US refuses to provide enough support to guarantee close
ties down the road.

After the US-led call for mindad's resignation the UK Guardian
reported: "One veteran dissident in Damascus said: 'I am jubilant. This
came at the right time for the street.' He said protesters were telling
him they wanted to dance in the streets. A middle-aged woman in Homs
said: 'More protesters will go out now.'"

If
so, they will learn what right-wing Cuban exiles learned when the CIA
promised them air support for the Bay of Pigs invasion: US words aren't
always backed up by arms or money. If and when they come to power, the
Syrian resistance won't owe the US

Which, in the greater scheme of things, makes the gods happy.

Ted
Rall is an American political cartoonist, columnist and author. His
most recent book is The Anti-American Manifesto. His website is
rall.com.

[b]The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.[/b]

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