OpEds: From Russia Without Love

The Deus ex Machina that Saved Obama and the World

by ANDREW LEVINE
In the dramas of Greek and Roman antiquity, playwrights who found that they had backed their characters into hopeless situations would sometimes deploy a plot device called a Deus ex Machina.   From out of nowhere, a god would be lowered onto the stage in a crane-like machine; the god would then set matters right.

Neither Vladimir Putin nor Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister, look much like Greek gods (Putin’s vanity notwithstanding), but Barack Obama, having painted himself into a corner as hopeless as any of Euripides’ tragic figures, would be well advised, at this point, to offer them both a sacrifice or two – not out of gratitude (since they did make him look a fool), but because, as well as any god could, they got him out of an otherwise hopeless situation, saving the day for the world.

The Putin-Lavrov fix could still fall through, of course; we must never “misunderestimate,” as George Bush would say, the ineptitude of American diplomacy in the Clinton-Kerry era.  But maybe, just maybe, Obama now won’t throw a flame into the combustible cauldron that the Syrian civil war has become.

Maybe that serial violator of international law now won’t take it upon himself to punish the Syrian government — “the Assad regime,” as our politicians and their media flacks call it — for (probably) using chemical weapons against rebellious Syrians (and Islamists from other countries).

The use of chemical nerve-agents in combat is banned under international law, as well it should be.  The many horrific weapons that have come on line since the First World War – among others, bombers, cruise missiles, chemicals that burn human skin, depleted uranium shells and, of course, weaponized drones should be banned as well.

And then there are nuclear weapons, genuine “weapons of mass destruction” – more horrifying by far than all the others combined.

Fetishizing a prohibition enacted nearly a century ago, and then stopping moral progress at that point, is, to put it mildly, strange.  But never mind; unlike feigned moral indignation, logical and moral consistency is not our President’s forte.

There is, it seems, good, but inconclusive, evidence that the Syrian government did indeed violate the chemical warfare ban.  There is also evidence that some of the rebel groups fighting the government did too.  It bears notice that they have much to gain if the world, or at least Americans and Europeans, think that their hands are clean, and that Assad is guilty as sin.

In any case, Obama’s plan was to launch an unprovoked and unsanctioned war against Syria, a sovereign state.

According to the 1945 Nuremburg Charter, initiating a war of aggression is “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

In other words, Obama wanted to punish a possible war crime by committing a far graver one. (ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).