The Syrian civil war could have been ended years ago had the former president not failed to act on his ‘red line’
The regime of Bashar al-Assad has collapsed. He has fled Damascus for Moscow, leaving Syria’s rebels – diverse in tribe, race, and religion – in control. Torture chambers like those at Mezzeh and Sednaya are being opened, and the remaining archives will expose the machinery of Syria’s system of mass murder. The swiftness of this victory reveals that Assad’s regime, always hollow, could have been defeated a decade ago had the West acted decisively.
Over 600,000 people have died in the war, millions have been displaced, and thousands perished trying to escape. The war also resulted in the birth of Isis, in a severe blow to global security. While responsibility for these tragedies lie squarely at the feet of Assad’s regime, they also reflect the failure of Western powers – chiefly former president Barack Obama – to act when it mattered most.
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In 2013, Assad’s forces used sarin gas in Ghouta, killing more than 1,000 civilians. Obama had declared that use of chemical weapons constituted a “red line”, promising severe consequences if crossed. Yet when the moment came, the response was a hollow diplomatic deal brokered by Russia. This agreement led to unreliable inspections of Assad’s chemical stockpiles, allowing the regime to continue its campaign of terror. The inaction shattered US credibility, emboldened Assad, and invited intervention by Russia and Iran.
Relentless air strikes
Russia’s military entered the Syrian civil war in 2015, targeting civilian areas – especially hospitals – with relentless air strikes, while Iran mobilised militias, including Hezbollah, to massacre opposition forces on the ground. These interventions, fuelled by the West’s perceived weakness, prolonged Assad’s survival. But as 2024 comes to an end, Russia is bogged down in Ukraine, and Iran’s militias have been degraded by Israeli actions. The Assad regime’s rapid collapse underscores what was always evident: it was fundamentally weak and could have been toppled a decade earlier.
At that time, the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) – a multi-ethnic opposition umbrella group – was ready to govern. Comprising defectors from the Syrian Arab Army and civil society leaders, it envisioned a pluralistic Syria. Assad’s forces were flailing, facing tough opposition in Aleppo, the Damascus suburbs, and Kurdish-majority areas. Isis had not yet risen, and Russia’s intervention was still years away. The SNC, bolstered by the Free Syrian Army (FSA), stood as a viable alternative to Assad’s rule.
Targeted strikes on Assad’s chemical and aerial capabilities in 2013 could have changed the war’s trajectory. These actions, along with enforcing a no-fly zone, arming vetted FSA groups, and transferring Syria’s United Nations seat to the SNC, were achievable and could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But Obama’s hesitance allowed Assad to regroup, destroy opposition strongholds with chemical weapons, and set a precedent for atrocities that would define the war.
The failure to act in 2013 also delayed US involvement until the full emergence of Isis in 2014, by which point the situation had deteriorated beyond recognition. Programmes like the American Train and Equip initiative came too late to counter Assad directly, focusing instead on combating Isis. Meanwhile, Assad and his allies entrenched their control through sieges, gas attacks, and forced evacuations – a strategy documented extensively by organisations like the Global Public Policy Institute.
Assad’s desperation in 2013 was evident in his resort to chemical weapons, an act of both cruelty and weakness. Yet Obama’s failure to respond decisively emboldened the regime, providing space for Russia and Iran to assert dominance. By the time strikes on Assad’s chemical arsenal occurred in 2017 and 2018, they were too late to prevent the immense human and geopolitical toll of the war.
Now, as Syria’s rebels take control, the regime’s hollow foundation is laid bare. Russia and Iran, once its lifelines, are preoccupied elsewhere. But this outcome could have been achieved years earlier, sparing countless lives and preserving much more of the fabric of Syrian society.
The collapse of Assad’s regime is a stark reminder of the consequences of inaction. The Obama administration’s failure to enforce its red line in 2013 not only prolonged the war but also undermined US credibility. Syria’s tragedy is a testament to what happens when moral courage and strategic foresight are absent from international leadership.
Barack Obama targets Donald Trump in ‘politicizing’ military comment: ‘A line has been crossed’
Former President Barack Obama warned against threats to democracy in a speech at the Obama Foundation’s Democracy Forum on Thursday. “A line has been crossed,” he declared if any group seeks to secure “a permanent grip on power” through such means.
Obama expressed concern about actions that undermine democratic principles, including voter suppression, the politicization of institutions like the military, and the weaponization of the judiciary to target political opponents.
Obama’s comments come amid ongoing controversy surrounding the legal and political challenges faced by President-elect Donald Trump. Since leaving office, Trump has been the subject of multiple indictments, garnering massive support among Americans who view these cases as politically motivated. While Trump was acquitted during two separate impeachment trials during his presidency, his legal troubles have continued to fuel debate about the fairness of the judicial process.
“You see, it’s easy to give democracy lip service when it delivers the outcomes we want. It’s when we don’t get what we want that our commitment to democracy is tested,” Obama noted.
“It means that in a democracy we all have to find a way to live alongside individuals and groups who are different than us,” he said.
Biden called Trump supporters garbage days before election
Earlier, President Joe Biden called Trump a “genuine danger to American security.” Just weeks before the d-day, Biden faced criticism for comments perceived as labelling Trump supporters “garbage,” though he later clarified that his remarks referred specifically to “hateful rhetoric” directed at Puerto Rico during a Trump rally.
“Because the alternative is what we’ve seen here in the United States and in many democracies around the globe: Not just more gridlock, not just public cynicism, but an increasing willingness among politicians and their followers to violate democratic norms,” Obama warned, citing examples like targeting critics and rivals or resorting to violence for political gain.
“Pluralism is not about holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya.’ It is not about abandoning your convictions and folding when things get tough. It is about recognizing that in a democracy, power comes from forging alliances and building coalitions,” he concluded.
Obama’s democracy forum speech proved his era in politics his over
Obama still doesn’t get why Trump won. That’s the problem.
The 44th president’s message at his democracy forum was just his same old brand of centrism, which is unsuited to the current populist era.
Former President Barack Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2024 Obama Democracy Forum on Thursday night in Chicago. This year’s theme was “pluralism.”
In classic Obama style, he illustrated the concept with homey examples like a church and a mosque agreeing to share a parking lot. The kind of “pluralism” that seemed to most interest him, though, was that of divergent political factions that can “form coalitions, compete for support and elect representatives who will then go and negotiate and compromise and hopefully advance our interests.”
He studiously avoided saying the name of the president-elect, but the presence of Donald Trump hung over the whole event like a particularly grotesque balloon at a Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. Obama’s remarks celebrating the way flourishing liberal democracies are supposed to work, in the context of the return to power of the man who tried to steal the last election, are a vivid reminder that in the United States of America today, the machinery isn’t exactly humming along in perfect order.
Obama’s characteristic rhetorical virtues were on full display. He was a constitutional law professor before he was a politician, and he still sounds like one. At the same time, he was a once-in-a-generation talent as a political communicator. He knows how to convey a complex set of ideas in a digestible and appealing way.
But there was a massive gaping hole at the center of his speech. He still doesn’t understand why his eight years in power culminated in the rise of Trump. Despite his considerable talents, his brand of centrist liberalism is fundamentally inadequate to the historical moment in which he now finds himself. And his speech in Chicago offered nothing but more of the same.
In Obama’s telling of the story of America’s experiment in political pluralism, the system worked pretty smoothly in the 20th century, but all wasn’t well beneath the surface.
“Democracy,” he said, “was built on top of a deeply entrenched caste system — formal and informal, based on race and gender and class and sexual orientation.” One at a time, various marginalized and underrepresented groups got a “seat at the table.” When this happened, pluralism became far more difficult, because the political conflicts exposed by this enriching of our democracy went deeper than the old “fights about roads and taxes.” But if pluralism is now more challenging, he suggested, it’s therefore become that much more urgent.
The word “inequality” appeared exactly twice in the nearly 5,000 words of Obama’s speech. One reference was too vague for it to be clear who exactly was “unequal” to whom. The other specified that he was thinking of the inequalities between “urban” and “rural” populations and “knowledge workers” and those who work with their hands.
These are certainly real forms of economic imbalance. But the income gap between an office worker in a city and a rural manual laborer is a rounding error on the scale of the inequality between any of these people and, say, Capital One CEO Richard Fairbank, whose annual salary is in the tens of millions, and whose net worth seems to hover over a billion. To put that number in perspective, if we imagine an immortal vampire crossing the ocean with Christopher Columbus in 1492 and somehow earning the exact equivalent of one thousand dollars every day since then, the vampire would have only about $194 million today. (As one of the Obama Democracy Forum’s sponsors, the Capital One logo regularly appeared on the livestream’s lower-third graphics.)
It should go without saying that the small number of Americans with that kind of wealth have a tremendously concentrated amount of power in the economic domain, where they can gain or forfeit power over the lives of vast numbers of employees by buying and selling companies, as well as far more political influence than ordinary citizens.
This kind of inequality, though, seems to be entirely outside of Obama’s sphere of concern. Even the use of the word “class” in the phrase “race and gender and class and sexual orientation” is highly telling. The kind of centrist liberalism represented by Obama sees social justice in terms of making sure that the best and brightest members of each demographic group have an equal shot at rising to the top of society, where they can become CEOs themselves, or become politicians and participate in the process he rhapsodized about earlier, whereby bright and competent technocrats “negotiate and compromise and hopefully advance our interests.”
When “class” is simply one more item on this list of identity characteristics, it’s clear that he’s talking about making sure that particularly bright and deserving individuals from working-class backgrounds can rise to the top. He’s not interested in giving the working class as a whole more structural power in our economy or our society.
In other words, this is the same old centrism.
Obama’s version of “pluralism” has always been integral to his message. He first came to national prominence with his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where he charismatically spoke about how we should resist the efforts of pundits to “slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States” rather than seeing us simply as the United States. His message has always been anti-polarization.
As president, Obama did get an incremental form of health care reform through Congress — the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare” — but it was one that preserved the fundamental injustices of the system.
Many Americans stay in jobs they hate for fear of losing their employer health insurance. Others don’t have insurance at all, which sometimes leads to grisly outcomes like diabetics dying when they try to ration out their insulin. And even those lucky enough to be insured often are often faced with a bureaucratic nightmare when they have medical emergencies.
For-profit insurance companies have every incentive to “Delay, Deny and Defend” when clients make claims. This phrase is the title of a 2010 book on the industry by Rutgers law professor Jay Feinman. And the words “delay,” “deny,” and “depose” were reportedly written on the casings of the bullets found at scene where UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was killed in New York the day before Obama’s speech. If you want an indication of whether the reforms in Obamacare were sufficient to allay ordinary Americans’ anger about our health care system, look no further than the online reactions to that shocking act of violence.
During Obama’s eight years in power, America’s wars in the Middle East ground slowly onward. This was a crucial factor in the rise of Trump, who was able to (deceptively) market himself as “anti-war.” And on the economic front, Obama continued George W. Bush’s policy of bailing out “too big to fail” banks while leaving homeowners who lost their houses in the 2008 crash underwater. He oversaw eight years of mounting economic inequality.
Those eight years saw flashes of left-wing populist outrage like Occupy Wall Street and the first Bernie Sanders campaign. These were handily defeated by the powers-that-be, though, from the NYPD clearing the protesters from Zuccotti Park to the Democratic Party quelling the Sanders insurgency. And at the end of the day there was nowhere for all that populist energy to go but Trump.
Obama’s liberalism is far more concerned with shattering glass ceilings for deserving strivers than raising the floor of material security for everyone. And that’s exactly the kind of liberalism that failed the first time — so spectacularly that a grotesque pseudo-populist demagogue was Obama’s immediate successor.
Now Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, is running out the clock on his presidency, and Trump is returning to power, this time with far more working-class support. Meanwhile, more than a few Americans have despaired so thoroughly of fixing our society through politics that they’re willing to cheer for an assassin murdering a health care CEO in broad daylight on the streets of Manhattan.
We urgently need a far better response to the current crisis than anything the dominant faction of the Democratic Party is offering. And the first step is to stop listening to Barack Obama.
