Hillary's Syria Chutzpah
She hectors Russia and China for supporting Assad while the U.S. does nothing to get rid of him.
Listening to Hillary Clinton berate China and Russia for their refusal to condemn Syria's crackdown on its own people—"It's just despicable," she said last week at the anti-Assad "Friends of Syria" conference in Tunis—it's almost possible to forget that this administration was once eager to get on Bashar's good side, too.
"Only a year ago, this country's government was being vilified as a dangerous pariah," the New York Times's Robert Worth reported in March 2009. "Today, Syria seems to be coming in from the cold." Top administration envoy George Mitchell paid Assad a visit that June, seeking, he said, "to establish a relationship built on mutual respect and mutual interest."
Then, as the Syrian uprising began a year ago, Mrs. Clinton continued to paint Assad as a "reformer." It took President Obama more than six months (and 2,000 murdered Syrians) to call for Assad to step down.
Even now, the administration has no plan to get Assad to step aside, other than to call on him to do so. A U.N. resolution on Syria vetoed last month by Russia and China was the usual mush of exhortation and condemnation. Friday's Tunis meeting ended with a ringing call for, well, nothing: "They still give this man [Assad] a chance to kill us, just as he has already killed thousands of people," said an opposition fighter in Homs, sizing up what Hillary Clinton's cheap solicitude means for him and his besieged city.
Compared to this, the position of the Russians is at least intellectually defensible. Say what you will about Moscow's despotic allies, mercenary interests and autocratic principles, Vladimir Putin has been consistent in sticking up for all three. That's more than can be said for a U.S. administration that urges democracy, nonviolence and human rights for Syria—and pays nothing but lip service to each.
But let's get back to the administration's early efforts to engage Assad—itself part of a broader push to hit "reset" buttons with Russia, Iran, the Muslim world, Europe, China, Latin America and even the planet itself.
When Mr. Obama came to office, the memory of Rafik Hariri's murder and Syria's subsequent campaign of assassination in Lebanon was still fresh. So was the knowledge that Damascus had teamed up with Pyongyang to build a secret nuclear reactor, and that it maintained an apparatus of domestic repression second only in the Arab world to Moammar Gadhafi's.
In other words, the Assad regime wasn't exactly a model of rectitude when the administration decided to engage it. It did so, we were told at the time, in the hopes that Damascus could be a constructive player in an overall Arab settlement with Israel. More importantly, though, engaging Damascus was justified as a canny way of detaching it from Tehran's orbit and thus adding to the pressure on the mullahs to be a little more reasonable.
None of this ever had any chance of coming to pass, as I wrote at the time. But whatever the realpolitik merits of trying to engage Damascus, at no time did the administration ever justify its position as a way of bringing freedom and justice to the Syrian people.
If anything, the administration went out of its way to curtail U.S. efforts to promote human rights and democracy, precisely because they got in the way of pressing all those reset buttons. Democracy and freedom was so passé, so arrogant, so . . . Dubya. "People around the world have heard a great deal of late about freedom on the march," wrote candidate Obama in Foreign Affairs in 2007. "Tragically, many have come to associate this with war, torture, and forcibly imposed regime change."
Since then, the administration has come around to the idea that being on the side of democracy is good U.S. policy. But here's an irony: Just as it has become the conventional wisdom that Mr. Assad's downfall is the only way to detach Syria from Iran, the administration has adopted a purely rhetorical attitude toward regime change. I have no doubt Mrs. Clinton has come around to loathing Mr. Assad as much as some wild-eyed neocons did a few years ago. But loathing combined with inaction still amounts to the worst form of indifference: the willful kind.
Which brings me back to Mrs. Clinton's tirade on Friday. There is a good case to be made that we should apply sufficient military pressure on Assad to help tip the scales in favor of the opposition, as we did in Libya. There's also a plausible case to be made that the last thing the U.S. needs is another military entanglement on behalf of a cause we barely know for the sake of a goal we can only hazily define.
But there is no case for lecturing Russia on its own long-standing record of engaging its faithful clients in Syria, much less for invoking the suffering of a people she has no serious intention of saving. Even chutzpah has its limits, Hillary.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
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