What Next for Homs and Syria?

Watching the siege of Homs reminds me of a scene in the movie Crash, where a young girl runs out of her house just an Iranian gunshop owner is threatening to shoot her father because he wrongly blames him for negligence that allowed vandals to break in and destroy his shop.

In the theater where I saw the movie for the first time, the audience let out a collective gasp of horror and disbelief as the man pulled the trigger just as the girl jumped into her father's arms while her mother watched helplessly from the house behind her.

That same gut-wrenching feeling of watching a tragedy unfold without the power to intervene hits me every time there is a news report of a new atrocity in Homs: the shelling of civilian homes, the continued lack of food, water, and medical supplies, and most recently, the refusal to let in humanitarian supplies.

As Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch put it in an interview on the PBS NewsHour, “This is worse [than Sarajevo], worse than Grozny, the city in Russia that was leveled by Russian forces in 1998 and 2000.”

In fact, all of those who participated in the discussion with Malinowski, including Anne-Marie Slaughter, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton, and Richard Haas, Council on Foreign Relations, agreed that the options available to respond to the situation in Homs are “incredibly painful.”

Professor Slaughter called for Turkey, Saudia Arabia, Jordan, and Qatar to help the Free Syrian Army “establish civilian protection zones as close to the border as possible” and to provide the intelligence, communication systems, and weapons to make this possible.

But Richard Haas objected that since Syria is one of the most highly militarized countries in the world, this might well make Homs the beginning stage of a protected civil war.

All agreed that it must be up to Arab nations to lead any effort against Syria, both in the case of any military action and also in the enforcement of economic sanctions.

Haas focused on the Syrian National Council as the best way to offer an alternative to the Assad government that can protect minorities who now support the regime, with the hope that Assad's supporters will find it worthwhile to turn against him. But he admitted that any diplomatic or political solution will almost certainly come too late to save the people of Homs.

Another factor, of course, is the continued opposition of Russia and China to any peace plan like the one proposed by the Arab League to the United Nations Security Council. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was uncharacteristically blunt in her assessment of these actions:

It's quite distressing to see two permanent members of the Security Council using their veto while people are being murdered – women, children, brave young men – houses are being destroyed

It is just despicable and I ask whose side are they on? They are clearly not on the side of the Syrian people.

In a situation where even Hamas has turned against the Assad regime, it seems particularly shocking that Russia and China continue to support it, even though the long term prognosis for Assad looks increasingly grim. Sooner or later he is likely to face the same fate as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, but not before blood runs through the streets of Homs, and that is no metaphor.

On her return from the Friends of Syria conference in Tunis, Hillary Clinton again expressed her frustration with the situation in Homs but tacitly admitted that United States has limited influence. Then she spelled out the few realistic options that remain:

We have to continue to consult with those who truly are friends of the Syrian people...We are doing everything we can to facilitate humanitarian aid. Secondly, we continue to ratchet up the pressure. [Syria] is an increasingly isolated regime. And third, we push for a democratic transition by working with and trying to build up the opposition so they can be an alternative.

In the movie Crash, the anticipation of the young girl's death provoked an instinctive gasp of horror that turned to overwhelming relief as the audience realized that the gun was filled with blanks rather than bullets. Homs is unlikely to have this kind of Hollywood miracle. We're at that cliffhanger moment, and whatever the Friends of Syria and the Syrian opposition can accomplish in the long term, Homs may well go down in the pages of history as another Sarajevo, another Grozny.

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

This past week as I was driving I found myself listening to a recording of Dr. Martin Luther King's final speech, the one he gave in Memphis the night before he was assassinated.

Towards the end of the speech, I was struck by his use of the story of the Good Samaritan, which he presented as a parable of a man reaching across racial lines. He described the Samaritan as “a man of another race [who] came by [and who] decided not to be compassionate by proxy. [Instead] he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying that this was the good man; this was the great man because he had the capacity to project the “I” into the “thine,” to be concerned about his brother,” even if that brother was a man of a different race.

At the very end of the speech, Dr. King told a cheering crowd: “ I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”

The very fact that today in 2008 we have a white woman and a black man running serious campaigns for President suggests that we are a good deal closer to the “Promised Land” of racial and gender equality that Dr. King evoked. We may even have a chance of hearing the shattering sound of one or another glass ceiling in November if we elect the first black or the first female president of the United States.

However, the emergence of race and gender as weapons to be used directly and by proxy in both the Clinton and Obama campaigns raises disturbing questions about their effects on voters. Not just black female voters who may feel deeply torn between their allegiances to the advancement of women and to the advancement of all people of color, but all voters who are excited by the prospect of having such strong candidates to choose from, and yet dismayed by the inevitable political tendency to go negative.

When the Clinton and Obama campaigns take their jabs at one another, I can't help thinking of the Old Testament tales of sibling rivalry that so often ended in disaster – Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. It's clear that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama deeply and even desperately want to win the nomination of the Democratic party, but it may be time for the party leadership to suggest that each risks alienating voters that may be vital to Democratic success if they try to destroy each other's reputation in the primaries.

One thing is certain: whether Clinton or Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, that nominee will face a tidal wave of mud-slinging across the airwaves that is likely to make the Swift Boat attacks look like a school-yard scuffle. There is no need for either of them to give this opposition more ammunition in advance.

Since Clinton and Obama are both self-proclaimed Christians, I'd suggest that they consider another Gospel parable, that of the woman taken in adultery. Not that I'm suggesting that either of them is guilty of the sin in question, but they might want to take Christ's advice to heart when he answered the scribes and the Pharisees: “Let anyone among us who is without sin be the first to throw a stone” (John 8:7).

Dr. King responded to death threats by saying that he had been to the mountain and seen the Promised Land, and he died prophesying that all of us as a people would get there. In 2008 the Democratic party has its best chance in years to help achieve Dr. King's vision if its candidates can keep their eyes on the prize and not get bogged down in the political mud.

Hillary's Tears

Hillary's Tears

The media has practically run amok analyzing Hillary Clinton's “emotional” moment captured on video and now playing at an Internet site near you. What did it mean? Was it scripted or spontaneous? Did it really have an effect on the upset of the polling projections in last Tuesday's New Hampshire primary? What does it say about women voters?

I think that what viewers, and by extension, voters, saw in Hillary's response to the inquiry: “How do you do it?” says more about us than it does about her.

We're not mind-readers, and we'll never know for sure how much of her response was sincere and how much was performative, the self-conscious reaction of a seasoned politician who has learned that she is always “on” whenever she presents herself to the public.

As gendered human beings, we always respond to some degree, in “scripted” ways to certain situations because we learn from infancy that the world sees us as “male” and “female” and automatically sets up certain expectations that frame how we behave and also how our words, gestures, and body language are perceived by others.

So in some ways, it doesn't matter so much what Hillary's “emotional moment” meant to her as what it meant to us and what it reveals about our own individual expectations of who she “really” is.

Rush Limbaugh predictably mocked Clinton, calling it her “waa-waa” moment, thus demonstrating his own bullying instincts and the schoolyard vulgarity that characterizes his Clinton shtick and makes “right-wing” and “rudeness” nearly synonymous among talk radio ranters of his ilk.

Katha Pollitt, veteran feminist in the trenches, saw the immediate stereotype of female weakness and noted that the video raised “the oldest dumbest canard about women: they're too emotional to hold power.” For her Hillary was not so much an individual woman, as a symbol of the double standards women still must confront in public life.

Most ordinary folks, without an ax to grind, saw Hillary's tears in terms of their already established expectations about her: “If she is breaking down now, how would she act under pressure as president?” grumbled one 52-year-old male on nytimes.com. Women could be equally harsh, as a 46-year-old female accountant demonstrated when she complained of Clinton's subsequent comment that “Some of us are right, some of us are wrong.” “This is exactly what is wrong with her campaign,” she wrote. “As long as she continues the 'I am right and you are wrong' mantra, there will be no collaboration, no cohesiveness, no unit.” One can fairly assume that neither of them were Clinton supporters to begin with.

But evidently, many other women, saw themselves in that moment of vulnerability: Those of us who call ourselves “feminists” and don't see it as the “F-word." Younger women who caught in Clinton's weariness the exhaustion of all the women before them who fought so hard just so a woman could run for President and not have her campaign seen as a joke. Women who were fed up with one moment of vulnerability being blown so out of proportion.

Primary season in a national election is not all the different from courting season. We project our deepest desires, fears, and aspirations onto individuals that we can never really know on a personal level and then interpret their behavior in terms of our pre-existing ideas about who they really are: white/black, male/female, Democrat/Republican, wife/husband, mother/father etc.

Any female candidate faces a double burden of conflicting and deep-seated cultural expectations about who she should be as a leader and as a woman. We expect her to be strong, but not too strong, vulnerable, but not weak. It's an exhausting balancing act for all professional women, and we hear women's awareness of that tension in the self-conscious laughter that arose immediately when another woman asked Hillary Clinton: “How do you do it?” It's a question that many women, struggling to balance children and career or the needs of a spouse or partner with their own individual aspirations, ask themselves all the time.

Maureen Dowd wrote in her New York Times op-ed that “in a weirdly narcissistic way, [Hillary] was crying for us” and for the country's failure “to grasp how much it needs her.”

I saw it differently, and like many of the women who witnessed her response to a crucial question – how do you do it ?– I believe many women saw themselves in that moment of vulnerability.

For women, Hillary's tears, welling but not shed, were those tears many women find welling up in such moments of fatigue and vulnerability when we reflect on just how hard it is for us to manage the juggling act that our society demands of us and that it often judges so harshly when we enter public life.

So before we ask ourselves what Hillary's tears meant for the voters of the New Hampshire primary, perhaps we might also ask ourselves what those tears meant for us as well. It could be revealing.