Holy Week has come to a bright and joyful end, and I am attempting to catch up on the latest controversies. 

Most notable of these was the argument that has broken out over Nancy Pelosi’s much-discussed visit to Syria.  When cornerned about the propriety of the visit, Nancy immediately backtracked by using the one get-out-of-jail free card any American politician has in taking potentially explosive steps in the Near East: she claimed she was doing it to help Israel.  Boggle as the mind may at the, er, audacity of such a claim (which the Israelis publicly repudiated), she made it, but she also made it in a typically grandiose, overreaching Pelosian way by talking about roads to Damascus and peace in Israel with much the same stupefying carelessness that the Krauthammers of the world talked about the “road to Jerusalem” going through Baghdad.  Granted, Pelosi has not come to bring the sword, but rather talking points, on her sentimental journey to the city once known for its fine sword metal, but she wields even these with such blithe indifference to their unrealistic nature that it can only trouble a realist or any critic of Bush-style foreign policy.  It cannot end up doing any good, and it will probably do harm, if perhaps only in undermining efforts to conclude the Iraq war by lending credibility to those who say that opponents of the war are lacking in sagacity and prudence when it comes to handling hostile or potentially hostile governments. 

Now I am certainly not one of the outraged breast-beaters who think that Pelosi has committed some heinous transgression, but neither am I quite so hopeful that this trip to Syria was actually evidence of anything like a coherent “alternative” foreign policy–not that there was much danger of the Democratic leadership providing one.  I do not share the faith of the presidential cultists who think that the branches of government are profoundly unequal (they believe this about foreign policy in particular), but like everything else the Democratic House has done in the last three months I find that I would be supremely disappointed in their actions if I had ever expected anything but flim-flam and empty rhetoric, which is mostly all they have managed.  The problem is not, as Unity ’08 centrists would have it, that there is too much divergence, but far too much convergence, especially in foreign policy.  The problem, as usual, is not that the Democrats are undermining Mr. Bush’s policies and sending contradictory signals to the world, but that they are expressly at great pains to not do either of these things–but have still managed to do so despite every effort not to.  So they have bungled twice over.  Most of them do not fundamentally disagree with anything Mr. Bush has done, but only disagree with the timing, the methods or other elements of the execution, which means that all they have left is posing and putting on shows of calculated defiance that achieve nothing.  As Tom Lantos said in defense of the visit:

In USA Today, he [Lantos] noted that she “publicly declared that she supports the administration’s goals regarding Syria.”  

Whatever those goals are (it is hard to tell with this crowd what the intended goals are), the Democratic leaders insist that they are supporting them.  Yet the only justification for what they are doing would be if they had strong objections to those goals and believed those goals to be directly contrary to the national interest.  Short of that, they are just mucking about like a bunch of high-powered tourists.

There is nothing especially wrong with Pelosi going to Syria, nor is there even anything wrong with the Speaker attempting to reclaim an appropriately robust role for Congress in the making of foreign policy, but as with everything else she has done so far the Speaker has achieved nothing while pretending to have radically changed everything.  Most of those who complain about Pelosi trying to run her own foreign policy are not usually moved by constitutional scruples, but find any hint of dissent from the standard line about the perfidy of Syria, for example, to be intolerable.  Actually going there and treating the Syrian government as a more or less legitimate government with which we have formal diplomatic relations are far worse things than dissent in this view, and so there is a lot of loose talk about treachery and illegality.  If Pelosi’s venture represented something concrete in terms of advancing a new Syria policy and beginning a brokering of an Israel-Syria peace, it might have real merit and deserve the strong defense Dr. Trifkovic has given it.  Certainly, detaching Syria from Iran is highly desirable if it can be done, and it probably can be done, but it seems unclear at this time how Pelosi going to Damascus has made it more likely rather than less.  Arguably, she has done more to set back the development of some understanding with Syria with her little display than anyone else has in months, because it gives the appearance that Pelosi is now taking control of U.S. foreign policy, when in fact she controls very little and knows she controls very little.  It is empty grandstanding for the folks back home–watch as I tweak George Bush’s nose over Near East policy, she might as well be saying.  Basically, she is to diplomacy what Chuck Hagel is to war: someone who likes the sound of his own voice and the cachet of being labeled a dissenter or rebel or “maverick,” while actually doing nothing to merit those labels. 

Therefore, Dr. Fleming makes a good deal of sense when he writes:

The best that one can say about Pelosi’s trip is that it is inconsequential. The worst is that it reveals a self-important woman who puts party politics above the American interest.

This latter point seems to be on target.  It fits into Pelosi’s preference for taking symbolic action rather than doing anything substantive.  At least she didn’t say that she was putting the Speaker’s gavel in the hands of Syrian children!  The Armenian genocide resolution is a good example of a symbolic move (which I happen to agree with) that does nothing except formally state what every honest, informed person already knows (the Ottoman government organised and carried out a genocide against the Armenians, and that this was very bad), but which will inevitably worsen relations with Ankara, committed as it is to official denialism.  Within its first four months, Pelosi’s speakership could be defined generally as one that meddles inconclusively in foreign affairs while also managing to create a diplomatic nightmare with Ankara for purely constituent-driven and ethnic lobby reasons.

I find myself increasingly torn over the genocide resolution, since it is undeniable that the genocide occurred and that the Ottoman government was behind the planning and execution of it (particularly the CUP triumvirs), while it is equally clear that American-Turkish relations will become terrible if this resolution is passed.  If there were ever any arguments advanced against the resolution that were also capable of acknowledging the profound evil of the genocide and the ongoing complicity of the Turkish state and the early National Movement in the denial of the Ottomans’ responsibility, they might be quite compelling.  Since every Realpolitik argument I have seen treats the genocide as a sort of historical curiosity (as if it were an episode about which everyone’s opinion is equally valid), I am inclined to regard realist arguments against the resolution to be rather sickening in their indifference to the truth.  There is also something to be said for resisting moral blackmail from people who put Hrant Dink on trial and who still pretend that the near-extermination of Anatolia’s Armenian population was some sort of unfortunate accident.  Were the victims not Christians, and were the perpetrators not Muslims, and were the denialists not “good” secular and “democratic” Muslims, it seems to me that we would have no problem roundly condemning both the past crimes of the state and the ongoing suppression of free speech needed to maintain the cloak of ignorance and deceit that the current government actively weaves to obscure these crimes from view.  If only to resist moral blackmail from genocide deniers and to fight the profound misunderstanding of Ottoman Turkey as some land of tolerance and peaceful coexistence, the House should pass the genocide resolution.  That does not mean that Pelosi’s foreign policy bungling is generally a good idea, but it can occasionally and accidentally come to the right conclusion (even if not necessarily for the right reasons).    

Update: Read the smart exchange unfolding over at Chronicles‘ website in response to the articles by Dr. Fleming and Dr. Trifkovic.  Dr. Fleming also has pointed us to the interesting blog of Chronicles’ contributor George Ajjan, who has any number of thoughtful posts on matters Near Eastern (plus an intriguing post about Easter in Senegal among the Maronites there).