"Their policies were a disaster for the region, so now leading hawks are undermining Obama's rapprochement with Syria"

Nick Noe in the Guardian, here

" ....Of course, this form of thinking got many people in trouble when it came to the Iraq war: Saddam had done bad things and sometimes demonstrated an interest in bad things happening, so he must have had a role in 9/11 and must be actively producing weapons of mass destruction. We all now know how that one ended.

On Iran the formula has generally been the same. Surely Iran was actively building nuclear weapons, we were repeatedly told by Bush administration officials and cheerleaders. After all, it was ruled by evildoers and had an overwhelming interest in destabilisation.

Even though the US intelligence community released its better-informed, and methodologically sounder National Intelligence Estimate in late 2007, which strongly argued otherwise – an estimate that seems to have been largely reconfirmed if recent reports are accurate – the neocons cried foul. They knew better than the NIE.

Most disturbing is that some of these same voices apparently think they know better than the Obama administration when it comes to picking up the pieces in a Middle East that many of them helped to shatter.

Applying Rule 2, Abrams argues in the Wall Street Journal that Obama's "new policy" towards Syria is "failing" and that more force is needed in dealing with Damascus. "Bush's policy was far too soft," he adds, without going into detail as to exactly why the administration he served under found it so difficult and/or unwise to keep applying still more pain.

Hannah more or less agrees, but unlike Abrams, avoids advocating the strict "no talking to evil" approach that was de rigueur until about the last year of Bush's tenure.

When it comes to Syria, he explains, "history suggests that leverage and pressure, not reassurance and unconditional concessions, are the most reliable ways to ensure that diplomatic engagement advances US goals."

Whether he is sincere or not in now supporting engagement, Hannah assumes, as his fellow travellers do, that Obama has already given away the candy store, when, in reality, virtually no "unconditional concessions" have actually been delivered to date.

Thankfully, American policymakers generally seem to be avoiding the false choice of pressure/unconditional concession – a binary itself rooted in the often inappropriate designation of a state or a movement asirretrievably and monolithically evil – and are operating as though these polarities need to be thought of in relation to one another. After all, reassurances – like publicly rejecting violent regime change – can sometimes actually jumpstart productive negotiations. Likewise, unconditional concessions can, in the right context and especially with states that are weaker, throw an adversary off balance with the effect that logjams are broken or, conversely, domestic rifts are magnified.

For Michael Young, though, all this is apparently just an indicator of Obama's boorish naivete: "Barack Obama's devotees may imagine that because he spent a few years abroad as a boy, he is well equipped to understand our complicated world. Perhaps he is, but his approach to the greater Middle East, shorn of the soaring rhetoric, has been artless and arrogant … If ever the US has been close to achieving potentially terminal self-marginalisation in the region, it is now."

Obama, the pied piper leading America to "terminal marginalisation?" Even as his multiple envoys in the region do the kind of foundation-laying work of diplomacy that their predecessors mostly avoided or vigorously opposed while the US's influence in the region materially declined?..."