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At the start of this shutdown-struck week, I published a piece asking whether Barack Obama should “reveal his inner pissed-off president.” The point was to wonder if it were time for the president, who usually keeps his cool, to call out the tea party Republican hostage-takers as crazies hell-bent on imposing suffering on millions of Americans—by shuttering the federal government and/or forcing a US government default—due to their obsessive opposition to Obamcare. It’s unclear whether there’s anything the president could say that would change the perverse internal dynamic within the House Speaker John Boehner’s GOP clown show, but perhaps—call it an outside possibility—a more forceful and direct rhetorical shot from the White House could have some impact on the national conversation.
On Tuesday, Obama appeared in the Rose Garden and did angrily denounce the extremist Republicans for causing the shutdown and threatening to turn the coming debt ceiling tussle into another crisis. “That’s not how adults operate,” he declared, ratcheting up the tough talk. But the question remains: is Obama’s language sufficiently descriptive for the situation at hand?
On Wednesday evening, Obama met with congressional leaders at the White House. The 90-minute confab was, as expected, unproductive. Afterward, Boehner told reporters, “All we are asking here is…fairness for the American people.” Fairness? That’s been the call of the Republican crusaders in recent days. They have been unwilling to fund the government at the reduced levels they demanded (via the debt ceiling negotiations of 2011 that yielded the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration) because they are trying to ensure “fairness” on Obamacare.
As I write this in a university library, dangerous and unstable people surround me. More than a third of college studentsexhibit depression, which drives suicide and murder among this fragile population, and more than a hundred murders occurred between 2005 and 2007 on college campuses. One can only conclude this terrifying behavior is the result of academic pursuits.
Of course, most reasonable people would reject that premise. Students carry mental health issues with them into college, and clinicians would say the stressors students encounter are only part of the equation. A majority would probably caution against a simplistic narrative that would paint an unfair picture of students, most of whom are well adjusted and make it through life without murdering anyone.
But veterans are not afforded similar restraint when we talk about the intersection between mental health, violent crime and personal backgrounds. On Sept. 16, Aaron Alexis opened fired in the Washington Navy Yard, killing 12 and wounding three before a police officer shot and killed him.
The Washington Post fueled early hysteria: “Navy Yard gunman said to be troubled veteran” led a report shortly after the incident. The Colorado Gazette blared “Gunman was in Navy Reserve; arrested in 2004.” The Fresno (Calif.) Bee went further with a sub-headline that read “Former navy reservist arrested in 2004 Seattle shooting; suffered anger-fueled ‘blackout.’”
A shallow discussion on mental health and the veteran experience has led to media shorthand for violence linked to former troops. Exposure to profound trauma mixed with weapons training invokes a strong image of downtrodden veterans, and news outlets drew tenuous lines from that idea to the Navy Yard shooter.
Alexis, a Navy reservist, never saw combat and maintained electrical instruments during his service. He was honorably discharged despite the Navy’s pursuit of a general discharge following a stream of bad conduct. Yet headlines that mentioned his service carried an unsettling subtext—his military training helped in the crime, and since he was a veteran, he had been struggled with post-traumatic stress.
Veteran advocates immediately protested the media’s portrayal, calling it inaccurate, damaging and untrue. The latest (and most prominent) comes from CNN’s Peter Bergen:
It’s a deadly combination: men who have military backgrounds — together with personal grievances, political agendas or mental problems — and who also have easy access to weapons and are trained to use them.
Bergen links Alexis and Nidal Hassan, the radicalized Fort Hood shooter, by virtue of their service. One issue noted by Bergen is access to weapons and military training.
He makes an extraordinary leap here.
Alexis murdered 12 people with a legally obtained shotgun and a handgun taken from a security guard, and while he may have fired a shotgun during basic training, nothing in his job description suggests proficiency with the weapon. Of course, the design of a shotgun demands little aptitude for effective use.
In the case of Hasan, sustained training on the issue M-9 pistol is relatively rare, especially for an officer in a non-combat role. Hasan sought an advanced pistol and practiced on civilian indoor ranges, and not only failed to integrate any semblance of Army training, he actively ignored it. A part owner of the range Hasan visited recalled that he fired at the heads of range targets instead of the center of the body, where soldiers are instructed to fire. Despite Bergen’s assertion, Alexis and Hasan were granted the same access to weapons as any civilian.
The other half of Bergen’s analysis falls on mental issues of troops and veterans. Kate Hoit at the Department of Veterans Affairs exhaustively debunked any notion between military service and violence, as well as any correlation between post-traumatic stress and murder, so I will not repeat it here. But in Alexis’ case, his mental health condition appears shoddy even before his Navy service after reports surfaced detailing gun-related offenses.
Bergen’s implication is a worrying one: even with access to the same information I have, the impulse to implicate trauma and weapons training is strong enough to disregard the fact that both men hadn’t deployed to a combat zone and did not carry the stereotypical mark of post-traumatic stress—a pervasive characterization from which he draws conclusions in his piece. Bergen should know better but doesn’t, and as a result, many civilians who read his piece won’t know, either.
The debate has appropriately shifted to the rigors of background checks and security clearances along the fault lines of mental illness, which should have caught Alexis’ mental instability and Hasan’s communication with radical Islamists. Bergen pegs these themes in his piece, but an issue much closer to most of his audience is the mental state of young veterans in the workplace, where most civilians will encounter them.
A survey conducted by the Center for a New American Security last year found more than half of the 69 company respondents practiced caution in hiring of veteran applicants due to stereotypes of a population riddled with mental illness. Only harm can come to veterans when small business owners, hiring managers and college application board members read and internalize the stories that Bergen and others wrote.
And that’s a duality of experience our newest veterans face: standing ovations during the Super Bowl on one side, and on the other, a general unease as civilians confront those who went to war for them repeatedly over the last decade (though Alexis and Hasan never did). Aaron Alexis and Nidal Hasan are anomalies that Bergen and countless other journalists may have recast as the new normal. In the meantime, untold numbers of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are succeeding in all levels of public and private sectors because of their combat experience, and not in spite of it.
For some time now, the predominant narrative about Syria has been that the unrest has been fueled in order to weaken Iran. This prevalent account is common to neoconservatives and liberals alike. While The New York Times trumpeted Israeli-firsters Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham message that “rebel fighters deserved to be armed and that helping them take on the Syrian government would aid Washington’s effort to weaken Iran”, moderate and independent outlets such as Truthout, Counterpunch, and numerous others echoed this same objective – but whilst decrying the plan. Even Iran’s state-run media shares this account.
This is sheer misdirection — deliberate or otherwise. Undisputedly, Syria and Iran have been staunch allies since the Iranian Revolution in their joint cause to protect the Palestinian rights and to stand up Israel and America, and any change in Syria would adversely affect Iran (as it would Russia). But this is a secondary consideration. The generally accepted narrative takes the focus away from the primary reason for the current assault on Syria – Israel.
Since the 1948 war, Syria and Israel have been in a state of war (with brief periods of unsuccessful negotiations). The conflict has been primarily over land and water (see a previous essay The Syria Imperative). Since the 1950’s, conflict over water (and land) has been at the root of hostilities between the two. In the 1950’s, Eisenhower commissioned Eric Johnston to generate a regional water allocation agreement. The failure of the Johnston plan exacerbated the conflict. The published diaries of Israeli Foreign Minister Sharett helps understand why the Johnston negotiations were unsuccessful. Sharett maintained: “[P]olitical decisions concerning the occupation of the rest of Eretz Israel were taken as early as 1954, although implemented in 1967.[i]”
Israel Takes Wait-And-See Approach To Syria
The 1967 occupation of Syria Golan (Golan Heights) and the Upper Mount Hermon by Israel enabled Israel to seize the entire Upper Jordan River giving Israel the advantage of placing its riparian position to fully upstream. Consequently, not only was Syria denied access to Upper Jordan waters, but its territorial and national integrity were assaulted.
Some years later, Haaretz would reveal the existence of a study (Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel-Aviv university) under General Aaron Yariv, former intelligence services chief, which outlined a “zone of hydraulic security”, which called for placing water resources in Syria and Lebanon under full Israeli control[ii]. Disputes continued unabated and the status quo maintained until 1982 when the military prowess of both sides were tested.
A 1987 book by Col. Emmanuel Wald of the Israeli General Staff entitled “The Ruse of the Broken Vessels: The Twilight of Israeli Military Might (1967-1982) reveals the aims of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the month of pre-planning that had gone into it. Wald writes that Ariel Sharon’s master plan codenamed “Oranim” was to defeat the Syrian troops deployed in the Bekaa Valley all the way to the district of Baalbek in North of Lebanon. According to Wald, “during the fist days, it was quietly approved by the U.S.”.
With this aim, on June 6, 1982, Israeli advanced into Lebanon. However, the Syrian army halted the Israeli army advance in the battle of Sultan Yakub and the battle of Ain Zahalta. Sharon’s plan to conquer all of Lebanon and destroy Syria as a military power was thwarted. In reviewing the book and the battles, the famous scholar and activist, Israel Shahak, opined that “the principal purpose of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon was destruction of the Syrian Army”[iii].
Shahak posits that Israel needs to win its wars quickly or not at all. In spite of technological and nuclear superiority, another assault on Syria would not predictably bring an easy win to Israel and defenses could ‘drag out a war endlessly’. He further argues that during the entire history of Israel, Israeli Jews have shown themselves to be highly sensitive to their losses, and high losses make Israelis “susceptible to political arguments against modes of domination and oppression which they otherwise would accept”.
Shahak’s analysis shed a light on events which pursued the failure of “Oranim” as outlined in The Syria Imperative. Israel continues to pursue its grand strategy, using a different tactic given its awareness of, and its familiarity with the strengths of the Syrian army – an army which must be disrupted from within given Israel’s 1982 failure to do so. And this is the primary reason for arming terrorists posing as “opposition”.
It is not without irony that Netanyahu has recently admitted that he does not rule out arming Syrian rebels, given Israel’s age-old tactic of arming minorities or rebels and cultivating dissent and chaos (such as the Anya Nya in Sudan , later the Sudanese People Liberation Army (SPLA), and the leader of the Sudanese rebels, John Garang armed by Israel from neighboring countries). This is a scenario being repeated in Syria.
Paradoxically, the [Persian] Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) who are today on a mission to secure Israel’s vision (with a nod from Washington) by arming rebels and undermining Syria, were all in favor of securing Syria in 2003 when they told Washington: “We think the threat to Syria should stop. We don’t think Syria wants a war or to escalate any situation. We reject any infringement of Syria’s security.”[iv] There is no end to their duplicity.
Amos Yadlin, the outgoing military intelligence chief warned the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in November 2010 that Israel’s next war would take longer and be fought on more fronts. Yaldin warned that Syria in particular, posed a greater military obstacle to Israel than at any time in the past three decades. It would appear that the Syria unrest has allayed his concerns. The Syrian forces which put up such a resistance in 1982, are now engaged fighting terrorists, while the world is being told that they are the violators. Perhaps Netanyahu’s plan will succeed where Sharon’s Oranim failed.
Regardless, it is important to change the accepted narrative about Syrian uprisings. Given the decades lone demonization of Iran, it may be more palatable to associate the fueling of unrest in Syria point to a ‘weaker’ Iran, but let there be no mistake – Syria today is in turmoil in order to promote Israel’s grand strategy – even as the perpetrator – Israel, plays the victim and warns of chemical weapons use by Assad’s regime, demanding intervention. “Evil requires the sanction of the victim.” Ayn Rand.
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich has a Master’s in Public Diplomacy from USC Annenberg for Communication.
She is an independent researcher and writer with a focus on U.S. foreign policy and the role of the lobby.
[i] Livia Rokach, “Israeli State Terrorism: An Analysis of the Sharett Diaries,” Journal of Palestine Studies 9, no. 3 (Spring, 1980), 3-28.
[ii] Zeev Shiff, “The Censored Report Revealed,” Ha’aretz, 8 October 1993
[iii] Sahak, Israel. IsraelConsiders War With Syria as It Ponders 1982 Invasion of Lebanon,The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (September 30, 1992).
[iv]Janardhan, N, Iraq: Gulf Council Urges U.S. to Stop Threats to Syria, Global Information Network [New York] 17 Apr 2003
[Syria"s Permanent Representative to the UN, Bashar Ja"afari, speaks candidly about the chemical weapons accusations, currently being leveled against the Syrian government by the United States
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