Brooke Gibert

POLI 430

Professor Lawson

15 November 2017

American Ideological Approaches to Syrian Unrest

The nation of Syria has seen a multitude of transitional periods throughout its history, in

both its political system and the demographic makeup of its population. Today it consists

primarily of people of Arabian descent belonging to various denominations - along with a

significant number of Armenians and Iraqi refugees (Shah) - hosted under a tumultuous system

of government which has achieved international attention in recent years due to growing unrest

between the current regime and its opposition.

The initial escalation of tensions was spurred by a protest in January of 2011 against

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. When protestors began to demand that the president and his

administration step down, governmental retaliation resulted in the placement of Syrian troops in

several regions, where protestors were punished violently. The crackdown was met with

widespread criticism - Syria’s membership to the Arab league was suspended – but as the regime

in control belonged to a sect of Shia, the second-largest branch of Islam, President al-Assad

found support in the governments of Iran and Lebanon (Shah). Increased intolerance for anti-

government speech or action formed a mutually inclusive relationship with the rebellion, in that

as one grew, so did the other. In the months following the initial protest of President al-Assad,

thousands of civilians and armed combatants alike were killed, prompting a call for Western

intervention that was met with reluctance from the United States in the face of the growing

conflict. President Barack Obama’s eventual call for the Syrian president to step down and all
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Syrian government assets in the US to be frozen preempted a later warning that any use of

chemical weapons by the Syrian government would result in “enormous consequences” (the next

year would see two gas attacks enacted by the Syrian government on its people, resulting in

hundreds of deaths). In August of 2013, President Obama requested permission from Congress to

strike back against the Syrian government and was blocked by the Republican-controlled

legislature. A year later, the United Nations Security Council reported that Syria had signed on to

the Chemical Weapons Convention, which prohibited it from “producing, stockpiling or using

chemical weapons”. In August of 2015, United Nations investigative experts reported suspicions

that President al-Assad was continuing to use chemical warfare – specifically, that he had, more

than once, used chlorine gas in oppositional areas populated by civilians. In September, Russia

actively joined the fight against Assad’s opponents and shifted the tides of the war for the first

time since its onset towards the Assad regime. In April of 2017, after learning about what

appeared to be a nerve-gas attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun in rebel-held Idlib province,

President Donald Trump approved the firing of a barrage of cruise missiles at the military base

where the attack was believed to have originated from. A limited ceasefire signed by President

Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in July was broken one day later when Syrian

warplanes bombed the suburbs of Damascus (Konviser).

The ongoing war in Syria has inevitably prompted action from global superpowers;

specifically, the United States has found itself once again in a position in which the various

ideological differentiations amongst Congress and the country at large has resulted in inevitable

backlash from one side or another every step of the way. This can be seen in the blocking of

President Obama’s response to Assad in 2013 contrasted with the direct attack on a Syrian

military base by President Trump four years later, both of which can be attributed to the
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Republican majority (and control) in Congress and its subscription to conservative ideological

values (militarism and economic independence). The American approach to the unrest in Syria

has been inherently ideological in that the very nature of our government allows the power of

decision making in wartime to the party which harbors control over Congress, and considering

the recent solidifying of the ideological line between the two predominant parties, it is

impossible that an American response could be spurred by anything more so than it is by

ideology. If the concept of ideology is approached as Giovanni Sartori would have it - “ideology

is an important variable in explaining conflict, consensus and cohesion ... the decisive variable in

explaining mass mobilization and manipulation” – than both President Obama’s inability to take

action in the face of Republican opposition and President Trump’s rapid militaristic response fit

the criteria for ideological motivation in that both scenarios were possible because of a

manipulation of votes and political party affiliation to mobilize a large group of people towards a

decision.

Sartori’s definition of ideology is particularly potent when considering the impact of the

mass media on world perception. Major news outlets and social media alike offered a picture of

Syria so loaded with violence and cruelty that Americans could not help but be split down the

middle: on one side, those who were moved to such sympathy by the images presented to them

that they demanded America step up and offer refuge; on the other, those who were so appalled

by the images presented to them that they demanded we remove ourselves from the conflict

altogether and protect our own people. Both sides were manipulated into movement.

On a broader scale, American ideology can be united as easily as it can be divided, in that

the consensus over any reaction at all exists as a result of overarching disapproval of the

deterioration of wartime standards to include civilians. The very reason America is being called
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upon to intervene stems from an ideological standpoint of preventing excessive cruelty to

innocent people; in other words, it is an ideological difference in and of itself – between the

Western world and the stance of Assad’s regime – that led to America’s initial involvement. It’s

when that overarching concept of desiring peace and safety globally branches off into ideological

differentiations in chosen methods of approach that the question becomes one of ‘how do we

solve this?’ rather than ‘do we solve this?’ and inevitably leads to fractures within. From this

standpoint, the American ideological approach to the civil war in Syria is, at its core,

nationalistic, emphasized with its foundation of culturalism with regards to the nature of the

opposing sides. There is an innate difference between the accepted cultural norms of the various

nations at play here, and even within the borders of Syria – which is arguably the catalyst behind

the conflict in the first place – and these disagreements in cultural standards on a nationalistic

level have spurred the responses of American leaders over the years since the war began.

With the nature of this global issue being as morally charged as it, an approach following

the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) as presented in the American Journal of Political Science

(1) could arguably remove some of the extenuating factors which have led to the various

disagreements over methods of American approach. The MFT “posits that moral judgments are

based in ‘intuitive ethics,’ an innate preparedness to feel flashes of approval or disapproval

toward certain patterns of events involving other human beings” (Haidt and Joseph, 56). In this

regard, the reaction of the American government would, theoretically, be motivated in full by a

moral obligation to protect the lives – and way of life – of any innocent person, of any religious

or ethnic background, any where in the world, to the best of their ability. The leaders who have

orchestrated the steps up to now have likely utilized the MFT to an extent in that it would be

difficult to disregard the moral injustices which are so inherently part of the issue at hand;
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however, an approach which was exclusively built on the foundation of the MFT would erase

party lines and diminish the influence of factors outside of basic human morality (economic gain,

fear of possible backlash, unwillingness to side with politicians belonging to the other party, etc.)

In this manner, the approach is arguably less ideological than that which has been taken thus far,

assuming that human morality is consistent across all humans (or at least the ones responsible for

making decisions in manners of global unrest; outlying humans with unusually skewed moral

compasses would – one would hope – not be involved in the decision-making process).

This is an undeniable flaw in an approach built on a foundation of the MFT. Human

beings are complex enough to make a response engineered off of basic morality a near

impossibility, considering individuality to be an indelible fact of life. The ability for humans to

establish their own concepts of morality is the basic idea behind the MFT; however, if an

established standard of morality could be set – at a basic level, a moral distaste for chemical

warfare enacted on civilians – and could consistently outweigh other, non-morality based factors,

than an approach centered around the MFT would, arguably, be more successful than the

culturalism and nationalistic approaches America has taken thus far.

The civil war in Syria has brought to light several ethical issues for global superpowers

with an unspecific duty to intervene in what they conceive to be excessive cruelty; it has forced

world leaders to weigh the importance of allowing for cultural diversity against the moral

repercussions of allowing for mass murder and torture of civilians. The United States’

approaches to the unrest have been step-by-step: hesitance, warnings, threats, investigations, and,

eventually, militaristic action by the word of President Trump, all of which built from a

foundation of nationalism and the best interests of not only the people of Syria but of our own

country. This approach requires the inclusion of American citizens’ wellbeing during the
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decision-making process, but seems to push aside the Moral Foundations Theory by

disenfranchising political leaders of their ability to make decisions based off a personal moral

leaning. Both approaches are inherently ideological in nature – assuming the application of

Sartori’s definition of ‘ideology’ here – but confront differentiations in concept which have

resulted in a variety of consequences both for the wellbeing of the people of Syria and for the

perception of American citizens regarding the competency and morality of their political leaders.
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Work Cited

Haidt, Jonathan, and Craig Joseph. 2004. “Intuitive Ethics: How Innately Prepared Intuitions

Generate Culturally Variable Virtues.” Daedalus 133(4): 55–66.

Konviser, Bruce. “Syria Civil War Timeline: A Summary of Critical Events.” DW, 14 Aug.

2017, www.dw.com/en/syria-civil-war-timeline-a-summary-of-critical-events/a-

40001379.

Sartori, Giovanni. “Politics, Ideology, and Belief Systems.” The American Political Science

Review, vol. 63, no. 2, June 1969, pp. 398–411.

Shah, Anup. “Syria Unrest.” Global Issues. 05 Jun. 2012. Web. 15 Nov. 2017.

<http://www.globalissues.org/article/799/syria>.

Smith, Kevin B, et al. “Intuitive Ethics and Political Orientations: Testing Moral Foundations as

a Theory of Political Ideology.” American Journal of Political Science, vol. 00, 2016, pp.

1–14.