My love/hate relationship with Barack Obama

I campaigned for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. I will never forget the tears that streamed down my face when, after a long day of "Get Out The Vote" door-knocking in Chicagoland’s American Muslim neighborhoods, I watched him walk out on stage in Grant Park on the television screen in my family’s living room: a person with a name like mine was elected President of the United States.

Barack Obama activated young people everywhere to become civically engaged, and I was no different. I knew from then on that I wanted to ditch the traditional career routes among Syrian Americans — medicine, engineering, and so on — to work in the realm of public policy and foreign affairs.

President Obama was to usher in a new chapter for U.S. engagement with the Muslim world. That is exactly what I told my grandparents in my family’s hometown of Homs, Syria. That was in 2010, the last year that I was able to visit Homs, before Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad destroyed most of it in a brutal siege.

To this very day, five years into the conflict, my grandparents, who remain in Homs, remind me with a half-sweet, half-bitter tone that I voted and supported the president that allowed for the worst humanitarian and international security crisis in a generation to occur.

Over half a million Syrians have been killed, millions are refugees; at least half of Syria’s pre-war population of 22 million is in need of humanitarian aid.

Mainstream opposition groups, largely abandoned by the international community, splintered, and out of the political vacuum emerged the Islamic State, a transnational terrorist group unlike any other.

The Islamic State, which does nothing but fight anti-Assad rebels and murder Syrian civilians, validated Assad’s earth-razing strategy. The “terrorists” Assad tells us he’s fighting, include the 100,000 children in besieged East Aleppo, whom he and Russia bomb with impunity.

My college years were spent trying to imagine a world where President Obama, my president, had the spine to act. Instead, he has made every excuse for inaction.

My grandparents once believed that my country has the ability to do great good in the world. In their living room was an Arabic-translated edition of Bill Clinton’s "My Life." They were quite fond of President Clinton for what he did in Bosnia and Kosovo — using American military might and diplomacy to bring an end to mass atrocities.

I told this to President Clinton himself when I was a student delegate at the Clinton Global Initiative University program in 2012. Shoving my way in front of him for a handshake, I told him about my grandparents and his autobiography in their living room, and I asked him why President Obama wouldn’t do the same for Syria what Clinton did in Bosnia.

President Clinton fell silent for a few moments, deep in thought, and replied that Kofi Annan — the former UN Secretary-General and the UN Syria envoy at the time — and anyone engaging in diplomacy with the Assad regime would be kidding themselves if they thought Assad can be negotiated with. President Clinton tried as much with Assad in the 1990s. 

Brilliant, I thought. Perhaps Obama would listen to common sense.

Shortly afterward, I spent my summer doing Syria advocacy in Washington, witnessing firsthand the tone-deafness of his administration. Still, I believed that my president would have to be literally insane, in the Einsteinian sense of the word — to keep trying the same thing again and again, hoping for better results. As the death toll in Syria mounted into the hundreds of thousands, so too would President Obama’s sense of urgency.

It’s the spring of 2013 — I was interning at the Brookings Institution, doing my semester in Washington. I’m standing in the National Mall, witnessing President Obama’s second inauguration. I had just campaigned for President Obama again in 2012.

I even wrote a blog post as to why Syrian Americans ought not to be single-issue voters, and that a second-term Barack Obama would have more political space and will to take the necessary, life-saving risks in Syria.

My president would change.

The stark, well-documented reality in Syria would force anyone with a pulse to evaluate their policy options. Yet as I think back, I remember how stale the discourse in Washington was on what was to be the worst humanitarian and foreign policy disaster of a generation.

I was in the heart of where discourse happens, too, at Brookings. If only I could see the naivety coming out of my mouth the same way I watched my breath on that cold January day, listening to my president and enjoying the buzz of the spiritual high he still gives me when he speaks.

It’s the fall semester of 2013, and I’m in my apartment with my roommates. It was August 22nd, a day after Bashar al-Assad’s forces used chemical weapons in Ghouta, in the Damascus outskirts. 1,300 men, women, and children were killed.

In April of that same year, President Obama warned us all that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a ‘red line’. America would act in the face of weapons of mass destruction. Watching CNN with bated breath, we listened to our president walk his red line back.

After getting wet feet, Obama decided to couch his accountability on the matter with a Congressional vote which was doomed to fail and which he knew and which we all knew he knew would fail. Instead, he looked to Russia, Assad’s strongest backer, and de facto representative at the UN Security Council, to bail him out. The Russia-brokered diplomatic deal stripped Assad of his illegal chemical weapons stockpile. It also stripped President Obama’s moral legitimacy forever.

In 2015 alone, there were 69 documented chemical attacks made possible with weaponized industrial chlorine.

My president has turned the other cheek at each instance.

It is painful thinking about my president as his era comes to an end. He has brought our economy out of a deep recession. He has provided healthcare to millions of Americans. He brought unemployment down and created a generation of public servants from backgrounds such as my own. He also created a job for me and countless others to address the crisis he abandoned in Syria.

It’s the summer of 2016. I moved to Gaziantep, in the Syrian borderlands of southern Turkey, to work for the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS). I do humanitarian advocacy to build global awareness and promote smarter policies in Syria.

I try to take the stories, statistics, and pictures coming out of besieged Aleppo and turn them into reports, articles, hashtags, and talking points. On the back of my business card, under the SAMS logo, is the motto, "To Save Syrian Lives."

An entire industry has been created because President Obama did not do his job.

The humanitarian community does what it can, but Band-Aids cannot stop a gushing wound, as it were. The international community was a vehicle designed for an American president as the driver. In the absence of that driver, the system is lifeless.

Those of us doing Syria advocacy have stopped focusing on the Obama administration, now entering its lame-duck phase. I am forced begrudgingly to look forward, with little optimism, and with a sore heart at the wasted opportunities that led to hundreds of thousands killed.

Syria is the catalyst for the global refugee crisis, for the Islamic State’s emergence, and for the unraveling of the Middle East.

President Obama has balked and chafed at every policy suggestion from any foreign policy or Middle East experts or advisors that did not tell him exactly what he wanted to hear. During the White House Iftar during Ramadan in 2014, my father, Dr. Zaher Sahloul, a physician and then-president of SAMS, who has been to Aleppo 5 times for medical missions, told our president that his legacy depends on Syria.

President Obama was visibly annoyed. ‘There are other things’, he said.

For my grandparents, for me, for the people I speak to daily in Aleppo, there is nothing else.

It was clear that the blinders were on since Assad started torturing the children of Deraa and firing at democratic protesters across the country in 2011. Buried in a mass grave in Syria somewhere is President Obama’s legacy, along with my vote.

Adham Sahloul is an advocacy officer at the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), based in Gaziantep, Turkey. He has written about Syria and the Middle East for Lawfare, Middle East Eye, and The New Arab. Follow him on Twitter at @AdhamSahloul. This post was first published on Medium.