Yesterday morning, Gary Johnson earned himself immortality by saying something that will be in every political blooper reel for as long as the media survive. His cringe-inducing blank stare, offered when asked what he would “do about Aleppo,” made him the butt of abuse across the political spectrum. Yet he was also subsequently was praised for owning up to his mistake and for coming up with a coherent-sounding answer when probed later about his views on the Syrian civil war.
To some extent the instinct to show mercy to Johnson is understandable, especially since that gaffe may cost him whatever small chance he might have had to get his polling numbers up to 15 percent and join the first presidential debate. Having the grace to admit your mistakes is a good thing and the choices in this election would seem less grim to most voters if the two major-party candidates could do that. But it’s a mistake to let Johnson off the hook. It was no accident that he would demonstrate ignorance on this topic. As a rigid isolationist, neither he nor most of his Libertarian supporters care about what’s happening in Syria. After all, he is still undecided about the merits of intervening in World War Two.
Yet rather than merely guffaw at Johnson, we also ought to hold the other candidates — and the incumbent — accountable for their statements on Syria. They may know what Aleppo is, but they offer no more coherent answers than the clueless Libertarian does about how to handle the greatest humanitarian crisis of the 21st century.
Let’s remember that President Obama refused to act in the early months of the Syrian unrest, when it might have been possible to force Bashar Assad out of office in the hope of seeing a non-Islamist replacement government. He subsequently laid down a “red line” against Assad’s using chemical weapons on his own people and then again refused to act when the Syrian dictator crossed it. Since then he has punted on Syria, partly in order to appease Assad’s ally Iran, and he’s allowed Russia a free hand to ensure that the Damascus government stays in power. The result is the current disaster in Aleppo, which adds to the suffering in a country where hundreds of thousands have been killed and five million have been driven from their homes.
Donald Trump’s main contribution to the discussion about Syria was taking a reasonable position — a halt to admitting refugees from the country because they couldn’t be properly vetted — and turning it into a policy of religious intolerance: a ban on Muslim travel to the United States. But Trump’s embrace of Vladimir Putin and his stated desire for better relations with Russia gives all the bad actors involved a green light for continued atrocities in Syria.
Hillary Clinton’s position on Syria is supposed to be tougher than that of her former boss since he ignored her pleas for some sort of a stand there while she was secretary of state. But Clinton has been as silent about Syria as the other candidates have. Her pledges never to put U.S. troops on the ground again in the Middle East also undermines any notion that she would be willing to do more than pay lip service to the crisis if she won in November. She can find Aleppo on a map; she understands what’s happening; and she can tell us how sad she is about it. But she offers no coherent alternative to the positions of Obama or Trump.
Put in that context, Johnson still deserves his place in the blooper reel, but he isn’t much more culpable than the major-party candidates who are counting on the indifference of the American public to save them from having to come up with a policy that might stop the killing.
