Political Theatre

I’m bemused at the way the GOP and the conservative political press are getting after President Obama for his tone and style.  His response of course is that what counts are results, not style.  A policy is good or disastrous independent of the style of the politicians, as Obama pointed out.  Columnist Ruth Marcus thinks differently in the Washington Post today.  The press’s main target is perceived style deficiencies in handling the Syria situation. They even cite Obama’s looking down as Putin walked by at the conclusion of the G20 summit as beneath the role of a U.S. President.  Personally, I think Obama was hiding a grin; I’ll explain why in a minute. Marcus  chastised him for possible unsteadiness and uncertainty in his next action in The Washington Post, claiming he appeared bumbling and luckily stumbled, along with Kerry, into possible good results; she seems never to have spent much time at a pool table  She seems woefully naïve about what’s going on from other aspects as well.  I can see a theatre full of columnists at a performance of Waiting for Godot, muttering “Who’s he?  What’s his party affiliation? How can I tell whether he’s going to arrive without knowing that?”

The columnists who stayed awake in Literature class seem to be, as usual, Fareed Zakaria and David Ignatius. I particularly cherish Ignatius’s comments because he graduated from the same school my grandsons attend, and he shows they teach things there worth remembering.  His comments about Syria were that what we were witnessing there was a Deus ex Machina, a “God from the Machine” – a literary device in which an ancient play comes to a total impasse, with apparently no way to resolve it, when suddenly a contraption is brought out over the stage from which a “god” descends and resolves the impasse to everyone’s joy.  In the Syria situation of course the “god” was Putin with his offer of a chemical warfare ban.  Ignatius points out that the playgoers usually think the Deus ex Machina is the last resort of a desperate playwright, when in fact in good theatre it’s built into the play from the beginning.  He goes on to note that the U.S. and Russia had been very quietly negotiating a route to a ban on chemical warfare for a year.  That fact was confirmed by Zakaria in his comments.  The deal had been worked out by Kerry and apparently sealed at the G20 meeting, hence my reference to Obama’s grin.  For good theatre was required.  The method involved applying pressure from Russia on Syria, though maintaining Russia’s stance as Syria’s protector, and concurrently maintaining U.S. pressure via threat of a military strike.  The deal was both to Russia's and the U.S.’s advantage, but required strong-arming Assad.  Assad and the American hawks must be convinced that America would strike and of the need for some non-violent resolution.  Hence came the bringing of the situation to impasse and the emergence of Putin from the machine.  A subsequent confirmation was that, after Assad had accepted the deal, the Russian-American “framework”, usually involving laborious negotiation which columnists immediately predicted would take over a week, was worked out in less than 24 hours – which means it had already been arrived at before the Putin announcement.  I do enjoy good theatre and had sensed that was what I was watching, and this was one of the better productions.  A lot remains to be done, but real progress is there.

The policy Obama is following is one of minimal intervention in the Middle East while maintaining the limits of international norms.  That requires, in Syria, preventing violation of a norm like the ban on chemical warfare, while not intervening in cases of the equally abhorrent atrocities of “normal” warfare.   I strongly concur with that policy, but I recognize that others may honestly differ.  But our differences should be about policy, not just style.  It helps to understand what you’re looking at.    A classics teacher of mine once commented about a translator, “He got every word exactly right; unfortunately he didn’t understand what the play was all about.” Sometimes what you’re seeing is sheer political theatre, and columnists, like translators, should recognize what the play is all about.