The moment when President Obama has to make an unpalatable decision on escalating involvement in Syria is inching closer. The pressure to intervene more actively mounts daily.
Last year the President defined the use of chemical weapons by the regime as a red line, whose crossing would provoke a strong American response. There is mounting evidence that sarin gas has been used at least once on a small scale in Syria. The President insists that the evidence is not conclusive; his critics, both here and abroad, accuse him of dithering.
There have been rumors and accusations of the use of chemical weapons in Syria at several points in the past year. Both the opposition and the Assad regime have accused the other of using poison gas. The allegations have increased in the past few weeks and focused on events in a village last March.
Almost all the primary sources of information on what is happening in Syria are second hand and filtered through sources with inherent unreliability. For example, the primary “go to” source of information on events inside Syria for media in the U.S. and Europe is the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a small London based group of anti-Assad activists that claims to have some 200 informants inside the country and tracks civilian casualties (more precisely, people killed and wounded by government forces; government soldiers or supporters killed by opposition forces are not always included.) It is highly unlikely that the CIA, British MI6, or Israeli Mossad have a network of spies on the ground; it is highly likely that they are getting at least some of their raw data from SOHR or other anti-Assad exiles. The other major source of information is interviews with refugees who have fled Syria for camps in Turkey or Jordan. (It was those interviews that led to the assertion by a UN human rights investigator that there was evidence opposition forces had used gas.) The UN mission authorized some months ago is prepared to go to Syria, if and when the government guarantees free and unfettered access. All the reports and claims of gas use agree that the incidents, if they happened, were sporadic and small scale. That makes it even more difficult to verify or refute the claims.
I think it is fair to say that the weight you give to the uncertainties in determining what happened is inversely related to how eager you are to have the U.S. get more heavily involved.
Some observers, including members of the U.S. senate like John McCain, have long advocated more robust support for the Syrian opposition. The charges that the regime used sarin gas in March are further evidence of the brutality and inhumanity of a desperate dictator whose forces have already killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians. There is a strong belief that the United States could and should provide direct military support to hasten the end of the Assad era and influence the regime that will emerge after victory. Failure to act undermines our ability to influence events in the Middle East. After the President’s statement that use of gas would be a red line the regime could not cross without grave consequences, failure to act now undermines the credibility of any U.S. pledge.
For those who are hesitant to see the United States move beyond the current policy of supplying non-lethal supplies and advice to the opposition, there is skepticism that military assistance can be narrowly targeted to the “good guys” among the opposition and/or doubts that we really can influence the outcome, either in terms of hastening the end of Assad or making sure his replacement is friendly to Western interests. Iraq and Afghanistan are stark warnings to look long and hard before you leap. Another line of argument against increased involvement focuses on the broader international context and warns about adding unnecessary complications to our already difficult relations with Russia and China or seeming to validate the Iranian fears that we’re out to get them.
The problem for President Obama and others who are reluctant to expand U.S. involvement is that there is a simple and compelling story about chemical weapons in Syria. The President said using chemical weapons would provoke a strong response from the U.S. The British, French and Israeli intelligence services all say the regime used gas and no one in the U.S. intelligence community says we are sure they didn’t. The counter story stressing the carefully hedged qualifiers and definite maybes is lame and makes the President look both weak and indifferent to the massive suffering of millions of Syrians over the past two years.
What is the menu of choices facing the United States?
The focus here is not fine tuned tactics but overall strategy. A minimalist strategy would seek to redress the military balance between factions in the anti-regime coalition. A maximalist strategy would try to position the United States to control, or at least strongly influence, the post-Assad regime. We have been supplying non-lethal equipment to some elements of the Free Syrian Army (a loose coalition of disparate armed groups who, sometimes with difficulty, cooperate in the fight against the regime.) Supplying more non-lethal materiel is not really an option; we’ve gone about as far as we can go down that path. All the options available for increasing U.S. involvement include some level of actual weapons. No one is suggesting that uniformed American soldiers be deployed anywhere near Syria.
Broad options include:
Even the balance between factions.
For most of the past two years a growing volume of weapons has been shipped into Syria from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. There are a number of very wealthy people in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf who finance a wide range of Sunni Islamists throughout the world, from conservative Whahabbi imams for mosques throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Western Europe to armed fighters. The arms suppliers and smuggling routes that supported the Sunni insurgency in Iraq ran from the Gulf through Syria; shifting the delivery point from Iraq’s Anbar province to groups within Syria was simple. The Syrian groups fighting Assad who are not inspired by political Islam, home grown or linked to expatiates in Britain, France or the United States have receiver far less support. The United States and European countries have supplied non-lethal aid, such things as medical supplies or communications equipment and some covert advice on strategy and tactics.
So the first, minimal, option would be to try to supply enough weaponry to insure that the elements who would resist the imposition of a narrow and repressive regime have the firepower to counter those who would.
Change the balance between the regime and its opponents.
The Syrian military, despite significant loss of bases, defections of officers and men, and using up large amounts of weapons and ammunition, remains a formidable fighting force. The regime is able to muster large numbers of tanks, artillery, short and medium range missiles, and other heavy weapons. It is unchallenged in the skies, freely operating helicopter gunships and jet fighter bombers. Rebel advances have been fiercely contested and rebel gains have come at a heavy cost in human life, both military and civilian. While the balance has shifted from clear regime superiority to something closer to a stalemate, Assad and his supporters seem able to hold on to Damascus for a very long time, especially since they have been resupplied by Russia several times in the past two years.
Ensure the rapid victory of the opposition.
One idea that is being floated in Washington is to neutralize the Syrian air force by declaring a no-fly zone over rebel held areas. While Israel has demonstrated that you can fly over Lebanon and launch cruise missiles and smart bombs at targets in Syria, enforcing a no-fly zone means flying regular patrols over Syrian territory and that would necessarily mean a major bombing campaign to take out the Syrian air defense system. An additional step might well be the use of CIA agents and military Special Operations personnel to provide training and close support to the opposition forces on the ground.
And the maximal strategy would be to insure enough American support, including weapons, a no-fly zone, advisers and other assistance to guarantee the United States a major role in the creation of the post-Assad regime in Syria.
Each of these broad options comes with major questions and risks.
For the minimal strategy of supporting “good” elements with enough weapons to counter the “bad”ones:
How “good” do the good guys have to be? Is being independent of influences from Islamist sources in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf enough? Do we have to look for (probably nonexistent) nascent democrats, or altruistic leaders who seek neither power nor wealth for themselves? How much corruption and brutality is tolerable? Do you draw the line all the way down at “He may be a nasty rat bastard but he’s our nasty rat bastard?” Or do you insist on a moderately high standard at the risk of not finding enough people eligible to receive weapons?
How do you insure that the weapons you supply to the “good guys” don’t end up in the hands of the people you’re trying to counter, either in the short term or the long run?
For the more robust strategy of supplying weapons and other support to defeat the Syrian military and bring a quick end to the Assad regime:
If this option means a no-fly zone, how do you insure that the campaign to neutralize
Syrian air defenses doesn’t mean weeks of intense air warfare with high risk of killing civilians on the ground and U.S. casualties in the air?
At what point does U.S. involvement become significant enough to trigger reactions by other countries? Iran is an active supporter of the Assad regime ... at what point does Iran perceive U.S. involvement in Syria as a threat to its interests? Russia has long standing military, commercial and political ties with Syria. At what point does the Putin government in Moscow perceive U.S. involvement as destroying a Russian ally?
How do you insure that the “victory” doesn’t mean the triumph of radical Islamists?
Escalating to a maximalist strategy of not only toppling the Assad regime but also playing a major role in shaping the next regime through supplying even more weapons to the opposition and major financial and political support to our favored elements in the coalition, raises the same questions as the other two options, plus:
Doesn’t this amount to a major, very long term commitment to financial and political supporter to a new regime with a significant probability that those parts of the opposition that we do not like or support will change their definition of “the enemy” from the Assad regime to what they label an American puppet regime? Do we really want to become responsible for Syria?
At no point in this discussion is “don’t get involved” listed as an option. It is not just that the United States has been involved in Syria since the violent conflict began, trying to find a peaceful solution and avoid tens of thousands of deaths. We have a important interests in the Middle East, from tangible ones like oil to intangible ones like stability and development. In an interconnected world, what happens in Syria directly or indirectly affects all its neighbors and through them, most of the rest of the world. The cars we drive, the clothes we wear, the food on our tables are all inextricably linked to the global economy and society. Given the size of our economy, the array of diplomatic and military resources we have available, and the values America embodies when we are at our best, what we do inevitably matters. Deciding to avoid involvement in a situation affects the outcome as much as deciding to become involved.
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