The supervillain syndrome

August 28, 2013|By John Norris

WASHINGTON — — Not content to slowly exterminate his opposition and continue the massive depopulation of his country, Syrian President Bashar Assad apparently felt compelled to launch a blatant chemical weapons attack in a Damascus suburb that killed hundreds of people. If this sort of supervillain behavior sounds familiar, you're paying attention. Assad is replicating the same strategic blunder committed by a long list of his fellow tyrants and strongmen.


The answer is simple. Assad — like former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, former Liberian President Charles Taylor and former Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi — got so used to poking the great slumbering bear — i.e. the United States and the international community — without any response that he assumed he could do whatever he pleased on the ground with impunity.

After all, the United States did not seem inclined to dramatic action even after the United Nations announced that there were a million children refugees from the conflict. President Barack Obama's initial, forceful declaration that the use of chemical weapons was a "red line" later proved to be rather squishy. Russia and China have maintained a united front in the U.N. Security Council against concerted action, and it is obvious that the United States couldn't be less eager to engage in another Middle Eastern war on the heels of costly interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

Like Milosevic, Taylor and Gadhafi, Assad can be forgiven for thinking that there simply was no outrage that would force the United States to get involved. Hadn't Milosevic successfully engineered ethnic cleansing in Bosnia? Hadn't Taylor pushed neighboring Sierra Leone into a hellish landscape where rebels cut off the hands of children for sport? Hadn't Gadhafi engineered the downing of Pan Am Flight 103, killing all 259 people aboard and 11 on the ground?

Yes, they had.






The choices in Syria remain terrible, but Assad is forcing the world's hand, and like the others before him, he won't much like the endgame.

Foreign Policy
