- Hardly anyone in theUS beyond the foreign policy elite and the
hardworking people who resettle refugees is talking about the country
Gulf News
Gordon Robison
One of last week’s most widely replayed political moments in the United States involved a presidential candidate being asked on national television what he proposed to do about the situation in Aleppo, to which he replied: “What is Aleppo?” The interviewer incredulously asked whether the candidate was joking. He wasn’t.
The hapless candidate was not Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton but Gary Johnson, a two-term Republican governor of New Mexico who is now seeking the White House as the nominee of the Libertarian Party (and will be on the ballot in all 50 states). It would be wrong to say that Johnson’s TV debacle ended his chances of winning the presidency because Johnson has no realistic chance of carrying even a single state, let alone winning the election.
It did, however, raise a legitimate (if uncomfortable) question. We can all agree that someone claiming to be a serious candidate for president ought to know where Aleppo is, even if he has no real chance of winning. But given the extent to which the American media now ignores Syria, should anyone really be surprised?
Turn on any international channel and the carnage in Syria is routinely somewhere near the top of every newscast. Turn on any domestic American news channel and Syria is rarely mentioned at all except as a place that produces a lot of refugees, all of whom Trump wants to bar from the country. On the three main news channels in America — CNN, Fox and MSNBC (where Johnson committed his gaffe) — one can watch hours of programming at a time without hearing about anything except the presidential campaign.
An argument can be made that this level of ignorance and inattention can be oddly useful. The sort of negotiations that led to the most recent Syrian ceasefire would be even more difficult and have even less chance of long-term success had the entire process played out in the white-hot glare of election year American media coverage.
If people in the US really were focusing on the international community’s efforts to bring peace to Syria then the second-guessing of the Obama administration and of Secretary of State John Kerry personally would be exponentially worse than it is right now, when few outside the foreign policy establishment are focused on the issue.
The problem with this way of thinking is its short-term nature. Yes, it is probably easier for any American secretary of state to reach an agreement in Geneva when few people back home are paying attention, but there are longer-term consequences to that sort of disengagement.
To pick only the most obvious example: Because Syria is so little discussed, on the rare occasions when it does come up the debate comes across as woefully ill-informed.
Specifically, there is little understanding among ordinary Americans of the extent to which the US is already involved in the multisided Syrian conflict both from the air and on the ground in the form of advisers and trainers. For good or ill, Washington is already enmeshed in Syria and the fight against Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) on almost every level. Talk about whether the US should get involved obscures the fact that it already is.
General insistence
When Syria does enter the US political conversation, it is almost exclusively in the context of either refugees or a more general insistence that the US has to “defeat” Daesh (with far less discussion about what “defeat” means in this context).
The result is that the next US president will arrive in office with an expectation that he or she ‘do something’ but no real consensus regarding what ‘something’ ought to mean.
Hillary calls for a large, US-led multilateral effort to defeat Daesh, but last week, she also promised that the US was not going to re-invade Iraq or invade Syria. How any successful multilateral efforts can be launched without ground troops or why the rest of the region should accept American ‘leadership’ of a battle it expects others to fight is a subject she avoids. Trump, as is his wont, says he has a secret plan, but he will also ask the US military generals for an alternative, perhaps after sacking the current military brass and replacing it with officers more to his liking. He guarantees “victory” without defining it. Both, when asked about “Syria” generally give answers focused on Daesh, a habit that tends to blur all the region’s conflicts together in the minds of voters.
Hardly anyone in America beyond the foreign policy elite and the hardworking people who resettle refugees is talking about Syria these days. The candidates don’t want to, while the media cares only about the candidates. It is a recipe for more recriminations and more confusion once the next president (and, no, that won’t be Gary Johnson) takes office.
