The convention on chemical weapons is a most-agreeable relic of the past (specifically, their insane overuse and tactical ineffectiveness in WWI). It is also an assertion of a human right that can no longer be enforced. Syria is not a party to the convention, but neither was Iraq. Iraq was made an example of, but Syria, if anything, will make an example of the diminishing global influence of the US. Russia, that great adherent of all-things-Realpolitik, is the decisive barometer to watch in all this. They have not, and will not, withhold their veto power on the security council. This is all taken to be self-evident and will not be defended here. Instead, I will take up the consequence of our inability to admit this new reality to ourselves, and suggest some historical and theoretical explanations for this ignorance.
"A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
-Walter Benjamin, 9th Thesis On the Philosophy of History
"More than anything else, Obama reminds me here of George Orwell in his famous essay "Shooting an Elephant." Orwell recounts how, while serving as a colonial officer in Burma, he was forced to shoot a rogue elephant simply because the local residents expected an official of the British Empire to act this way, even when the animal appeared to pose no further danger. If he didn't go ahead and dispatch the poor beast, he feared that his prestige and credibility might be diminished. Like Orwell, Obama seems to be sliding toward "doing something" because he feels he simply can't afford not to.
Sad, but also revealing."
-Stephen Walt, We're Going to War Because We Just Can't Stop Ourselves
"Slip sliding away, slip sliding away, you know the nearer your destination the more you're slip sliding away"
-Paul Simon
Walter Benjamin was a very pessimistic man at the time of the above quote. I imagine he would be even more so today. The paradise of which Benjamin speaks is not religious but agnostic in nature. And the obvious solution is to redefine progress in a way much more in line with the metaphorical Angel. That would be as a way of undoing the past, unlocking the vault of history, learning its secrets, repairing its defects, reversing its defect-plagued progression, and setting it on a less-stormy path. Like myself, Benjamin was a believer in the path dependent nature of historical development. And like him, I shall try to do just this; like him, I shall fail miserably; and perhaps, from the rubble of my attempt, others may construct a subsequent totality of history, as I shall attempt to do from his; a totality of history that, in its own shortcomings, can be picked up by others, and so on, until we have weathered the storm. We the people are the Angel of history Benjamin saw in the Angelus Novelus. Meanwhile, Washington proceeds to heap more wreckage to the sky as we speak, most obviously in the case of Syria.
For a brief review, Syria is in a civil war that began with the Arab-Spring inspired democratic revolution of March 15, 2011 against the minority Syria-led Ba'ath party, which took power in a coup in 1966, splitting the Pan-Arab Ba'ath party in two (the other half being the Iraqi-led Ba'ath party that was toppled in the second Iraq war). The party was originally a hybrid of Pan-Arabism and Marxist-Leninism in ideological makeup, but became less so in the coup of 66 and less still when Assad's father took power and subsumed it by the state in the 70's. Therefore, don't get bogged down in ideology right now. What matters is that Assad is simple strong man and the uprising was democratic, as was the original uprising in Egypt, and that means little more than a demand for the universal human rights of elections, freedom of representation, freedom of the press, and a rule of law independent of political institutions to enforce these rights. That could all be true in an Al Qaeda ruled society, and conversely, statistics have shown that there is nothing inherently undemocratic about Islamic societies, with over 400 million muslims today living in consolidated democracies. There is, however, a history of such revolutions turning abortive, as we are seeing repeat itself in the case of Egypt. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Syria will be able to outperform Egypt in this regard, but US intervention, as President Obama had rightly ascertained in the Egyptian Arab Spring case, will invariably and absolutely guarantee a less-democratic outcome. And yet now we are moving to do just that in response to a brutal chemical attack and in defense of an outdated norm against such weapons, however aesthetically pleasing. Finally, true democracies are highly correlated with higher equality, prosperity in terms of GDP/capita, and happiness. Unfortunately, according to Transparency International, the most reliable think tank that ranks countries according to their relative level of democracy/lack of corruption, the US is slipping ever-lower on the global list, falling from 14th in 2000 to 21st in a post-Bush Doctrinaire world in 2012. If one thing is proving surprisingly true in this conflict it is how little ideology ends up mattering in the forging of middle east alliances. This chart demonstrates that perfectly. What is less obvious, but no less true, is that this diminishing importance, or increasing danger of ideology, whatever its sources in the region, is contributed to and possibly even caused by 2 US trends: its increasing commitment to enforcing its national ideology in the Middle East, and its DECREASING commitment to enforcing it on its own soil. As mentioned earlier, equality has traditionally tracked very closely with voter enfranchisement. Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz have as good an explanation as any as to why, for those interested, but notice their assertion that the US is off the charts both in terms of disenfranchisement and, resultantly, inequality. We are nothing close to Syria, and while Assad may or may not have been directly behind a sarin nerve gas attack that killed roughly 1000 innocents, it is looking increasingly that way. But this is not a pissing contest for Democracy. When democracy becomes an ideological cause for a crusading foreign policy, the most basic requirement is crusader purity. These are the historical facts and postulates that I will rest my case on.
The laws of History are operating in reverse?
The titular question I want to answer is the one Stephen Walt suggests above, and Walter Benjamin begs the grandfather of with his notion of the Angel. The answer might just rest on historical laws. The war in Syria is at very least looking increasingly likely to prove that the inverse of a famous line by Karl Marx is also true:
"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire."
-Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napolean, 1848-51
Hence we might add to the list, 'George W. Bush for Barack Obama,' in precisely that temporally-reversed sequence. For while the tragicness only increases in this latest buildup to ideological war by orders of magnitude over that of the Bush Doctrine (and, to be clear 'why tragic?', why did Obama beat Hillary if not for his record of consistent opposition to the Bush Doctrine), the actual devastation of the Bush Doctrine [farce] is likely to be unmatched by this turn of events, either in terms of material devastation or farcical performance doing violence to the ideological superstructure. So what do we make of this sad turn of events?
Why History has Seemed to Have Flipped Cause for Effect, Tragedy for Farce
More to the point, what do Syria, the US, the global economy, Walter Benjamin and the Angel of History, the crisis of higher education, the double-bind of modernity, and the increasingly urgent demand for green energy all have to do with each other? And what does this relation have to say about our path forward? The important thing to keep in mind in all of the above examples from Marx is that humanity was undergoing a democratic enlightenment. Only now has it begun to see its democratic horizons darkening, and as with anything at night, its challenges grow ever-increasingly complex. As Hegel also said, the "Owl of Minerva [wisdom] only takes flight at dusk." But by then it is usually too late, the situation grown far-too-complex, to put wisdom into action. Hence what could have been a romantic narrative turns to a tragic myth.
I would suggest, however, that Bush and his doctrine be for the moment taken out of the equation of history. The US middle east policy has been on a collision course with its own democratic ideals since the discovery of oil there. There is little to suggest that the doctrine has done anything except hasten its tragic end. See it instead as the final foe, Hamlet's Laertes, who is defeated in the elections of 2008 but not before piercing America with its poison blade. So we can see that in fact, the true farce has yet to befall us, but stay tuned for 2016 for that act, should ANY of the current Republican hopefuls use this turn of events to win back the White House.
Groping Toward An Analysis
With that same complexity in mind, imagine the difficulty of sorting out and assigning culpability in the recent chemical attacks. For the sake of argument, let us assume that whatever faction was most at fault, the US will continue to place blame on the Assad regime's shoulder's who currently control 90% of Damascus and something like half of Syria geographically and more demographically, and that a high level of chaos will be defined, for our present purposes, as the heroic democratic opposition.
I think that this picture is both accurate, as far as it goes, and that it goes far enough for me to continue in my inquiry. Henceforth, I will necessarily speak not from the perspective of US nor of Syrian but of world history; there is no nation-state, today or in the days since the founding of such forms of political organization (1789, roughly) whose interests are identical to those of the world or humanity as a whole. And that is because there is no nation-state that has a significant degree of control over the transnational economy. According to Eric Hobsbawm, the late 70's- early 80's will be remembered as the era when nation states lost control of the transnational economy. They accelerated this lack of control by a series of miscorrections to Keynesian economics in the west, free market and even less controlling in a moment when much more control was necessary. These neo-classical miscorrections, made popular by the famous "Road to Serfdom of Hayek, are what is now known as neoliberalism.
With that lack of control in mind, Syria is only another in a long line of tragedies in the making, the latest by-product of a long-ideologically-bankrupt, but newly militarily/strategically impotent (as opposed to the high point of US strategy-military potency in the region in the first Gulf War) policy of US interventionism and/or crusading norm-enforcement in the middle east, capped by the ill-fated second Iraq war, lest we forget the intwined origins of the state of Israel and the International Criminal Court upon which the modern human rights movement largely rests its ideological laurels, prosecuting criminals picked at random or based on the most arbitrary political convenience, often electoral in nature.
And this matters, because Human Rights will be the grounds by which the international community justifies US aggression in Syria and all its future wars, unless another 9/11 is somehow able to slip through the skynet, in which case another Afghanistan might be conceivable, if not entirely unlikely. The US influence in the region relative to Russia, Iran, even Israel, is declining as a function of both its material power base and its ideological influence vis-a-vis "democratization" within the ideological international superstructure, in a decidedly gramscian sense that I find best articulated by Ted Hopf, for any IR theoretical readers. The only coherent strategy right now would be as minimal as US national interests would permit; any crusading policy is likely to compound contradictory positions and factions, decompose regional allied and enemy state power alike, and involve Washington in a quest for El Dorado in the form of a democracy that will never materialize in its own presence, a sort of Frankenstein in a gentle world of weak, historically bound humanity, however in danger of drowning. As per the quote from Paul Simon. The great Walter Benjamin was the first to call the type of legal exercise that we now think of as normal, but is technically known as 'positive' (as opposed to 'natural') law, "spectral", as opposed to truly rational, becoming so as a function of the inevitable law-making activities of the purportedly law-preseving organs of the democratic state, i.e. the military and the police. The military has gone full-blown-Ancient-Curse on this country in the past several decades by that analysis, but in the middle east, the metastasis has been aggressively accelerating only just recently, and is set to deliver irreversible damage to the American and International body-politique.
Importantly, it can not/will not make things much worse in the middle east. That is not my argument.
Political scientist Robert Jervis has written a fascinating book about the Bush doctrine. What is important to Jervis is to assess it in terms of success or failure, success being the degree to which it was adopted and carried out and able to alter the political landscape both domestically and globally. And in Jervis' judgement, it was a very successful policy by those metrics. Not that Jervis himself thought much of the content of the doctrineat the beginning of the war or today.
Meanwhile, Russia seeks to assert more influence in the region. Russia is an oil state. The higher the price of Oil, the better off Russia is. The whole history of US policy toward the middle east since the 1973 OPEC embargo could be seen as an attempt to lower the price of a barrel of oil on the global market.
I do not think this is such a case. I think this is at cross-purposes with that crusade, as was, it turned out, the Bush Doctrine. But I digress.
The US has to get off its dependency on Oil. As of right now, the best hope for that, given its other ideological pet project, the opening of free markets, remains the preferences of US consumers reaching a higher degree of enlightenment on fuel efficient automobiles, wind-powered homes and utility companies, etc. That might have happened were there not a crisis in the higher education system preventing the serious study of such problems. And to bring it all back to the Angel, the more we throw resources known as people into school, the education bubble becomes the likely next source of global calamity on the 2008 scale.
The answer, my friends, is to renounce neo-liberal doctrines publicly and often. This information must be understood. There is no substitute for the Owl of Minerva, and no denying that we are living in a historical twilight of sorts.
The tragedy of Syria will either come about or it won't. Already that country and region are prey to their own tragedy that is related to the contradictions of democratization in a period of unprecedented nation-state powerlessness to a recently-transnational economy. But the US intervention would be a tragedy of global proportions. The diminishing of ideology as a force for good in the region and the world increases as a function of increasing US involvement in the middle east, as well as increasing indifference to its own democracy and welfare problems at home. But for all the reasons I have just listed, we are increasingly incapable of auto criticism, the signature symptom of modernity's double bind, and we are thus unable to help ourselves. Are we?