Barack Obama's Girlfriends and the Red Line in Syria

Remember this?

In August of 2013, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus was attacked with sarin gas — a nerve agent that causes lung muscle paralysis and results in death from suffocation.

The attack killed 1,400 men, women and children, and at the White House, officials asserted “with high confidence” that the government of Bashar al-Assad was responsible.

One year earlier, President Barack Obama had described Assad’s potential use of chemical weapons as “a red line” that would have “enormous consequences” and “change my calculus” on American military intervention in Syria’s civil war.

When Assad appeared to cross that line, Obama ordered the Pentagon to prepare to attack.

But of course Obama changed his mind, and instead of a massive air strike we got a deal whereby Assad handed a bunch of chemical weapons over to the Russians, and the mess in Syria ground on without much US intervention.

This event still looms large for many people: anti-government Syrians and their allies, many US military and foreign policy types, some Europeans who think it was US weakness in Syria that made Putin think we wouldn’t help Ukraine – I’ve seen this stated several times on Ukraine war Twitter – and the sort of people who think the best way to understand history is by psychoanalyzing world leaders.

Within that last category we find David Samuels. Samuels, a long-time Jewish journalist, uses an actually rather interesting interview with Obama biographer David Garrow to develop his theory that everything wrong with the Middle East is Obama’s fault. (Besides inequality, tech monopolies, and Lord knows what else.) Samuels traces Obama’s failure to stand up for Syria back to his false version of his break-up with one of his white girlfriends, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. 

Biographer Garrow tracked Jager down and got her version of their break-up, which Obama had described in Dreams from My Father. In both versions this had something to do with Obama’s turn toward blackness. But in Obama's version this was a “a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism.” But it Jager's version the fight was about Obama’s  

refusal to condemn a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. . . . It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.

Samuels claims that the invisibility of Jager and her account of the relationship was some sort of conspiracy among Obama-loving journalists, which to me sounds like a weird description of his time in office; was there anything that some conservative did not accuse him of? But this all goes much deeper:

I have never seen any evidence that Barack Obama has the slightest personal animus toward Jews as individuals. But from his denial of American exceptionalism, and his sourness toward Israel, going all the way back to Sheila Miyoshi Jager’s account of their breakup, there does seem to be an awareness of the underlying problem posed to his politics by Jews—that is, the problem posed by Jewish group survival and their continuing insistence on Jewish historical particularity.

It’s all about the Jews! 

Because, see, the Progressive narrative is all about the noble suffering of oppressed groups and the perfidiousness of their oppressors, the White Race. Jews screw this up by being both oppressed (in the general historical sense, and in the Holocaust) and oppressors (as wealthy people in the US who own buildings in black neighborhoods).

How can Jews be “privileged white people” if they are clearly among history’s victims? And if Jews aren’t white people, then perhaps lots of other white people are also victims and therefore aren’t “white,” in the theological sense in which that term gains its significance in progressive ideology. Maybe “Black people” aren’t always or primarily Black. Maybe the whole progressive race-based theology is, historically and ideologically speaking, a load of crap. Which is why the Jews are and will remain a problem.

So, I guess, in order to maintain the narrative that history is about oppressors and the oppressed, Jews have to be wished out of existence. And that, plus a generalized Progressivism, explains why Obama worked so hard to avoid war with the “antisemitic state” of Iran. Samuels thinks that Obama refused to bomb Syria because he wanted the Iran deal (the JCPOA) so badly, and he wanted the Iran deal so badly because he hated “American exceptionalism,” the Vietnam War, colonialism, and Israel, and was at best ambivalent about Jews.

The sheer amount of political capital and focus Obama put into achieving the JCPOA during his second term, to the near-exclusion of other goals, suggests that the deal was central to his politics. It also carries more than a whiff of the kind of politics in which the American Empire is seen not just as unexceptional, but also, in some ways, as actively evil. It was a politics born out of the confluence of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, which saw a racist war abroad being used to protect a racist power structure at home. That old alliance of civil rights, anti-imperialism, and identity politics made the Democratic Party that Obama positioned himself to lead—college-educated, corporate-controlled—seem cool, allowing it to use post-1960s radical ideology as a language to sell stuff.

This kind of history simply befuddles me. If only Obama had recognized antisemitism and not lied to himself about why he ditched Jager, we could have had a peaceful, democratic Syria! Besides less inequality and tech monopolies!

But it was not just Obama who did not want to intervene in Syria, it was the vast majority of Americans, including such Obama haters as Sarah Palin. One day of bombing was not going to change the war; to have any real impact we would have had to send in a massive force and remove the Assad regime. That was not going to happen, especially under a President whose whole campaign was focused on avoiding more Middle East wars.

As for war with Iran, I think that would have been a catastrophe on par with what Russia is experiencing in Ukraine.

I think the stuff Garrow dug up about Obama is interesting, and I agree that he is a strange person who has written two dishonest memoirs. But the history of the world doesn’t really depend on the psychological quirks of term-limited Presidents.