A Whiff of Democracy?

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

18 September 13

n New York City, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio won the Democratic primary to replace billionaire Michael Bloomberg as mayor. De Blasio ran against Wall Street and the 1%, calling for a tax on those making over $500,000 a year to pay for universal childcare. He still has a nasty struggle ahead against Republican candidate Joe Lhota, who enjoys solid business backing and has already started attacking De Blasio as a dangerous radical. No doubt, de Blasio will now tack toward the center, but those of us in the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party or further to the Left can all enjoy an Occupy moment.

Hoping to chair the Federal Reserve, Larry Summers - a former Treasury Secretary and top economic adviser to both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama - was forced to withdraw his candidacy after Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee refused to back him. With or without Summers, the Fed will remain one of America's least democratic institutions. But, as I tried to convey in "Stop Larry Summers Before He Kills Again, " he could not live down the leading role he played in the Clinton-era deregulation of Wall Street. Score another Occupy moment.

In public opinion polls and public statements of judges and intelligence officials, whistleblower Edward Snowden is receiving unexpected credit for his service to democracy in leaking so much information about the universal snooping of the National Security Agency. I can almost see a Democratic presidential candidate in 2016 - not Hillary Clinton - hinting at an official pardon. Well, almost.

But, for most of us, the most enticing - and exasperating - whiff of democracy surrounds the derailing of President Obama's proposed military strike against Syria as a response to Bashar al-Assad's reported use of chemical weapons. In London on August 29, the mother of all parliaments voted against British support for the attack. In Washington on August 30, some 186 Democratic and Republican lawmakers signed letters asking Obama to seek congressional authorization. And later that same day, against the advice of almost all of his advisers, President Obama decided to let the lawmakers have their say. Letting Congress vote on a not-so-limited military intervention certainly seems the decent, democratic, and constitutional thing to do.

Or was it? I have to wonder. The United States would not be acting in self-defense against an imminent Syrian attack, and the United Nations Security Council had not authorized military action. So, in effect, Obama was asking Congress to conspire with him in committing a war crime, which could at least curtail overseas junkets to any country willing to hand the Congressional culprits over to the International Criminal Court in the Hague. On the other hand, Obama was showing respect for the American public's overwhelming opposition to yet another war of choice.

Over the next few days, democracy showed its downside, at least as the administration and assorted war hawks saw it. In Russia for the G20 summit, Obama failed to find sufficient international support for the attack, while in Washington his aides told him that the House and possibly even the Senate looked likely to listen to their voters. Rarely in living memory has popular democracy played such a vibrant role in American foreign policy. Members of Congress were standing up against their financial contributors in military industries, the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and pro-war cheerleaders in the corporate media. What better time to turn off the vote, which Obama did by choosing a diplomatic path, all the while insisting that, as commander in chief, he retained the right to attack whenever he wanted.

By now, everyone knows the story of Kerry's ad lib in London. In response to a reporter's question, he joked that Syria could avert a U.S. attack by giving up its chemical weapons. Only minutes later, according to the Wall Street Journal, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called him. "I'd like to talk to you about your initiative, " he said.

This opened the door to serious diplomacy, which appeared prompted by the threat of force, or so we are told ad nauseum. But, as Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote in The Nation, "there have been good reasons all along to think Putin would be receptive to this kind of diplomatic approach to the Syrian crisis. " Cohen is an emeritus professor of Russian studies at NYU and Princeton, and he and vanden Heuvel, his wife, know Russia well, having lived there and written about it extensively. No fans of Putin, they remind us that he has consistently argued "that aggressive American policies have been fostering dangerous instability and jihadism in the Middle East, not democracy. "

In their view, the speed with which Russia accepted "the Kerry proposal " leaves little doubt that Putin would have been receptive much earlier had Obama shown himself more serious about finding a diplomatic solution, and without any need for a military threat. They also argue - and I fully agree - that Obama would now do better working with the Russians at the United Nations "without calling for immediate military measures. " As Sergey Lavrov keeps saying, there will be plenty of time for that if the Syrians fail to meet their obligations.

The bigger question is whether Obama will meet his obligations. This includes removing his support of the Sunni rebels and their Saudi sponsors, whom he has been covertly helping at least since early 2012, but nowhere near enough to let them win. Horrific as it sounds, he still appears be following the kind of strategy spelled out in late August by Edward Luttwak, "In Syria, America Loses if Either Side Wins. " An old source from my days at the BBC, Luttwak also advises the Israelis and takes great joy in talking more than he might. As he wrote, "By tying down Mr. Assad's army and its Iranian and Hezbollah allies in a war against Al Qaeda-aligned extremist fighters, four of Washington's enemies will be engaged in war among themselves and prevented from attacking Americans or America's allies. "

This is a murderous policy that Obama can never publicly defend in open democratic debate. Worse, it leaves too much room for John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and the neocons to push for their ultimate objective, bombing Iran and putting an end to our current whiff of democracy.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How To Break Their Hold."

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