The Chu Room in Connecticut College’s Shain Library was particularly crowded last Friday, September 27, given the noontime hour and overcast skies. The roughly eighty students, faculty, and staff – including President Higdon – who had gathered can be explained by their common desire to hear Professors William Rose, Caroleen Sayej, Alex Roberto Hybel, and Tristan Borer of the Government and International Relations Department explain what options the world has in terms of the ongoing crisis in Syria.
Of the attendees, there were varying reasons and motivations for attending the panel. Zach Balomenos ’14 explained that because of his experience studying Arabic in Jordan this summer, he is, at this point, quite personally invested in the Middle Eastern region. His classmate Charlotte Novak ’14 expressed a much-echoed sentiment of striving to get a clearer sense of what is actually going on in Syria; she also was looking forward to learning the professors’ predictions of outcomes in Syria.
Drew Majkut ’14 agreed with Novak, saying that he was “looking forward to debating with the professors, as well as seeing what their opinions are as they come from such diverse backgrounds, the different lenses through which they view the [Syrian] conflict will be very interesting.”
The talk was all the more timely given Friday morning’s unanimous Security Council passage of its resolution requiring Syria to give up all chemical weapons.
Interim Director of the Toor Cummings Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts, Professor Marc Zimmer, moderated the session. He began by handing the floor to Professor Sayej, who firstly provided the timeline of the Syrian crisis, which began two and a half years ago in March of 2011. She clearly and concisely explained how the protests, which really began with a “handful of Syrian boys scribing on walls that the regime needed to be toppled”, escalated to today’s “flurry of diplomacy” and the United Nations discussion on how to rid Syria of its chemical weapons, which pose a serious national security threat to the United States and the international community.
Professor Sayej, who specializes in macro- and micro-level analyses of authoritarian political systems in the Middle East, then set out to contextualize the Syrian crisis by looking to other regional actors such as Iran and Israel in light of the Arab Spring. She spoke of the similar nature that all of the protests encompassed by the Arab Spring appeared to have begun with. However, she then cautioned that Syria is the only country in which “violence has gotten so out of control… so through the roof” that the common sentiment is that there is no end in sight for this Syrian civil war.
She continued by pinpointing another way in which Syria is crucially different than other countries in the region: domestically, there is an enhanced rhetoric about Israel, pan-Arabism, imperialism, and Western dominance in the Middle East. Therefore, “There is really no leverage on the part of the United States to be able to step in and tell the Syrian president to step down,” Professor Sayej explained. On a regional and international level, Syria is supported and armed by Russia and China. Despite recent US-Russian tensions regarding the conflict, Professor Sayej explained that the rise of the Shiite Crescent – composed of Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah (the Lebanon-based Shi’a group) – has really replaced lingering Cold War sentiments in the region. Because Iran could potentially use Syria and Hezbollah to dominate the region and threaten Sunnis, the national security issues this conflict has brought to the forefront are only reinforced.
Professor Sayej cautioned, “We must be very suspicious of the grand ways in which we are couching issues in the region such as the War on Terror and the Shiite Crescent, because it is not clear that every Shiite leader does [in fact] align with every [other] Shiite leader. The Syrian state is not secretarian in nature.”
Professor Borer, who specializes in human rights and transitional justice, focused on the primary reason President Obama gave in calling for action and intervention in Syria: the violation of international norms, namely, Syrian President al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people. She challenged the audience, “Why is this issue of chemical weapons as a violation of international norms so egregious that it calls for the use of force? What makes chemical weapons so much worse than conventional weapons? Why was it the matter of death that seemed to make such a difference to the administration?” Given that the 14,000 chemical deaths constituted “less than 1% of the total deaths in Syria” over the course of the past two and a half years, her questions were extremely pertinent, and received as so by the audience.
She explained the strong history the international community has in prohibiting chemical weapons, beginning with the Geneva Protocol in 1925, of which Syria is a signatory.
“However,” Professor Borer added, “the Geneva Protocol only applies to interstate conflict, not civil war.”
Professor Borer went on to speak of two other international norms that President Obama failed to recognize despite his rhetoric about the importance of those norms. The first is the question of one country taking another by force with bombs; it is not an international norm to do so yet President Obama was prepared to do so in Syria without UN Security Council approval. The other is a theory referred to as the Just War Theory, which Professor Borer explained as the notion of the “US somehow being morally obligated to do something” in cases of crisis. However, the Just War Theory is meant to be an absolute last resort, which is why “most people felt as though [Syria] did not fit the theory.”
After having communicated that because the international norm of chemical weapons seems to be the only one of importance to our President, Borer left us with a quote of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s that communicates the idea that al-Assad would be more successful in slaughtering his own people in ways other than chemical weapons.
Professor William Rose next stepped up to the podium, garnering appreciative laughs from the audience as he admitted what he was about to discuss was a bit of a “new thing” for him given that he would have to express his views in just five minutes and that he would actually be giving his audience his opinion, rather than probing students for theirs!
Among Professor Rose’s specializations are ethnic conflict, the security dilemma, and prospects for war and peace; as well as Post-Cold War and post-9/11 challenges for American foreign policy. He began by expressing his interest in the US foreign policy implications of Syria: “Should we blindly follow the president’s lead?”
He emphasized that constitutionally, Congress is the body that has the power to declare war. Professor Rose then prefaced the rest of his piece by explaining he would focus on the empirical side of Congressional involvement in US interventions. He asked, “What are the consequences to American core values based on when Congress gets consulted and involved [with these conflicts] as opposed to when they don’t?”
To answer these questions, he turned to the comparative case study of American intervention in Lebanon between 1982 and 1984. Congress was not consulted on American peacekeeping or peace enforcement there. However, in 1983, when American troops were sent to Lebanon in the name of peace enforcement, they took a side in what had then escalated to be a civil war (as opposed to peacekeeping missions, for which troops should not take sides). This mission was profoundly unsuccessful – Congress was not consulted regardless of the high risks the situation presented. “This was a big mistake,” Professor Rose reiterated. Because of the heightened loss of American troops, Congress was finally consulted; they decided it was “time to pull the plug and withhold funding.”
The lesson from this case study? “When you take a side in a civil war, it’s much harder to keep the peace,” Professor Rose said. The eventual “congressional involvement in Lebanon – once they got it – helped to cut down the number of American lives being lost.” Because of the similarities between the Lebanon case study and present-day Syria, he concluded the absolute necessity of Congressional involvement when considering American action in Syria.
Among Professor Hybel’s expertise are International Relations Theory as well as US foreign policy. The last to speak, he declared of the Syria crisis, “I’m going to speculate and try to understand why Obama did what he did.”
He began by emphasizing that “Obama does not rely on his intuition” largely because President George W. Bush was the last person who relied extensively on his intuition. He continued, “Obama is an exceedingly prudent individual who demands information and never stops asking for more information, which after receiving multiple sources thereof, he himself analyzes… He takes his time and his time. Why do I want to emphasize that?”
“The first thing every president will do will look to the domestic political arena. He knew there was going to be tremendous opposition [to the prospect of American intervention in Syria]. So WHY?”
Professor Hybel then explained that in the US posing a direct threat to Syria; Russia (which has strategic ports in Syria) and Iran (which as Professor Sayej mentioned, wants to use Syria and Hezbollah as a means to fuel their dominance in the region) automatically become quite concerned with this American threat. Iran, of which there is growing international concern regarding their development of nuclear weapons, has a significant strategic importance in the conflict (along with actors such as Israel and Saudi Arabia).
Because of Russia’s strategic interest in Syria, the US and Russia have begun negotiations. “Now,” Professor Hybel added, “Iran seems more likely to engage in some negotiations with the US. The gamble Obama has taken may not have been a bad gamble at all.”
Following Professor Hybel’s assessment of Obama’s foreign policy strategy, the session was opened up for a question and answer session, in which many audience members were eager to get their word in.
On Friday’s UN resolution, Professor Hybel addressed a question posed by Majkut by declaring, “The US accomplished what it wanted to – it brought the discussion of chemical weapons to the table.”
Professor Rose commented on the increasing American attitude towards “war as a last resort rather than a first resort” and the population’s current “isolationist tendencies”.
Following the intense hour of discussion, Gaby Dann-Allel ’14 commented, “More of these types of talks should happen in regards to foreign policy debates… As we are at the hands of all these different media outlets, [panels such as this one] really clarify the information overload we experience daily.”
