On Monday, Bashar al-Assad told Syrians that if it weren’t for a few agitators and terrorists, their lives could be beautiful and democracy would flourish. Then he went and shot some more protesters.
That should finally convince even Washington’s most stubborn minds that the Syrian president must go. But the next stage of denial will center on what’s needed to actually push him out.
Yes, with time, Assad will likely be overthrown by his people, despite his backing from Iran and Hezbollah. But no, hints of measures to hasten his departure by White House and State Department officials won’t do the job.
President Obama has yet to even make a full-throated public announcement that ending the Assad family’s four-decade stranglehold on Syria is an American goal (as he did quickly in the case of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, an ally).
As former State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley recently asked in a Twitter post: Why is Obama more explicit about Anthony Weiner’s need to quit over self-exposure than about Assad’s need to quit over the murder of 1,500 Syrians and counting?
Instead, we get “soft power” threats: Obama’s aides hint that they’re weighing more international sanctions against the Assad clan. Plus, America is gathering a dossier of possible crimes committed by regime figures for use in possible future prosecutions.
Sanctions? True, Assad’s foreign minister, Walid Mualem, yesterday complained about the sanctions the European Union imposed last month. But the threat of future US sanctions isn’t going to impress a regime that’s heavily sanctioned, and whose members are fighting for political survival . . . actually, for dear life.
Prosecution? Europe and others have threatened rogue leaders with referrals to the International Criminal Court ever since the court opened its Hague doors in 1998. Having lost their appetite for fighting wars, the Europeans hope that the specter of international prosecution will scare tyrants into ending their atrocities.
But prosecutors are powerless without cops to put the perps behind bars. In March, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy. Khadafy wasn’t impressed. Nor did Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir flinch in the face of a similar warrant last July for his role in the Darfur genocide.
And the ICC’s prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, took Sudan’s and Libya’s cases only after the UN Security Council asked him to do so. The council won’t make a similar request in Assad’s case; Russia is blocking even the mention of Syria.
In any case, the regime’s rising corpse count tell us that Assad is far more worried about holding power than future international prosecution.
The concept of international prosecution was first introduced in 1945 at Nuremberg, Germany — by the victorious Allies. But those trials were set after V-E day — with the prosecutors’ targets already in custody.
Now, we indict criminal heads of state before vanquishing them. It won’t work: Ignoring Moreno Ocampo’s call on all countries to arrest Sudan’s president, China just invited Bashar, its ally, for a state visit starting Monday.
The ICC is impotent, and the world’s tyrants know it. International prosecutions merely massage the egos of Westerners who pontificate about world cooperation in defense of the oppressed.
OK, hypocrisy is a fine European tradition, but why should Washington join such folly?
Obama can’t even get the Senate to ratify the treaty that would make us an ICC member. Now we threaten Assad with a trial there? If Assad must go — and he must — we shouldn’t wave around empty threats and join European-style “solutions.” We should come up with a real strategy.
Empty threats of prosecution won’t impress Damascus. Instead, we must first announce Assad’s departure as our goal, recall our ambassador from Damascus — and then get serious. beavni@gmail.com