Editor's letter: Stumbling forward in Syria

last updated 8 January 2015

“History is not happenstance,” the comic George Carlin once said. “It is conspiratorial, carefully planned, and executed by people in power.” Many people believe that, of course. Twelve years after the 9/11 attacks, conspiracy theories about their having been an inside job involving the CIA, Mossad, or both still churn through the Internet, and even get an airing in Thomas Pynchon’s new novel. In Egypt, President Obama is broadly seen as being in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood—a suspicion that also has its adherents among the 17 percent of Americans who think he’s a Muslim. The idea that there’s a secret order to the apparent chaos around us seems to offer some people an outlet for their rage, and with it a paradoxical sense of comfort.

But it takes some real creativity to conjure up a conspiratorial scheme for the weird course of events around Syria over the last 10 days. First the Obama administration went from marshaling plans for a unilateral strike to deciding to ask Congress to approve it in advance. Then, when that outcome appeared doomed, a seemingly offhand remark from Secretary of State John Kerry engendered not only an unexpected lifeline for the administration from Russia, one of its sourest foes, but also an admission from Syria that it possesses the chemical arsenal it had never before acknowledged. The outcome would make any conspiracy theorist knowingly stroke his beard in respect: Obama avoids a deadly vote, Russia gets back in the game, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad dodges a strike. Someone, no doubt, will neatly tie it all together into a grand plot. But I see everyone stumbling forward, grasping at any straw they find.