Television images are so powerful that just a reminder of them can carry an audience. "I refused to wait for images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action," said President Obama and the American people were reminded of screens full of horrors in Bosnia, or Kosovo, or Rwanda, or Darfur. "Oh, thank you for saving us from more evenings like that."
Sympathy has to fill a big part of Obama's political screen. He doesn't want to hear "Why didn't you do something?" at the end of those evenings. On the other hand he doesn't want to hear, evening after evening, "Still doing something? For what?" Or, worse, "Did you have to slaughter?" He can't give the public the Clausewitz answer ("Yes, if I was going to stop slaughter.") Sympathy is the hardest force in the world to manage.
It can also be the most dangerous. Sympathy with brothers across a border has probably produced more wars than any force in history. Make a powerful tribe a minority on the territory of another tribe, introduce discrimination, oppression, maybe some killing, and bang, you've got a war. Think of all the borders badly drawn for ethnicity. Think of Europe, the Balkans. Sympathy can be lethal.
And it can provide an altruistic cover for self-interest. Want a country's gold, or wheat, or oil? Find some brothers who need protection. You're in.
So we've got tribal sympathy and cynical sympathy. That leaves just plain human sympathy. Obama, led by the American public, could (as Gwynne Dyer has argued) be "acting from very selfless and humanitarian motives." We already had the oil through Gadhafi, Dyer points out. We have absolutely no tribal connection to the rebels. We just can't stand seeing human beings treated like that.
Obama probably knows that acting on that kind of sympathy can, over time, make him responsible for more suffering than he faced at the beginning, and leave him looking very foolish. It's a gamble. And he takes that gamble, even adding to his stake, every time he uses one of those sympathy-arousing words — "slaughter," "massacre," "genocide." Whatever his deficiencies in semantic accuracy you can't say he lacks semantic courage.
"Sympathy can be lethal." Interesting. Is it sympathy or is it compassion? Or even moral revulsion. Someone I know tried to break up a fight between two women in a subway station only to have them both turn on him.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of Obama, I think it is more moral posturing with a finger in the wind.
You make a painful hit with that subway fight, Richard. If those Benghazi rebels turn out to be Al Qaeda that's just what we've got.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard for me to know my own sympathies because of "1984 syndrome." About the time of Lockerbie, I knew from reading the newspaper that Gadhafi was the worst thing going. Then he renounced nuclear ambitions and he became the best thing. Now suddenly he is the worst thing again. Plus, he keeps changing the way we spell his name.
ReplyDeleteWhile the Americans and British were busy evacuating hundreds of their fellow citizens from Libya recently, China evacuated 38,000 Chinese. So far the Chinese press hasn't commented one way or the other on the merits of the civil disorder there.
Great to have somebody able to give us the Chinese view. Not much doubt about what it would be if we plunged in (No-no, West, no more plunging into sovereign countries), but how about a creep, starting with a few CIA guys? At what point will they cry out?
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