Barack Obama wants options on Syria. "The president has asked all of the agencies to put forward options—some familiar, some new—that we are very actively reviewing," said Anthony Blinken, deputy secretary of state. But force is not an option, since according to the White House there is no military solution for Syria.
"We're trying to pursue the diplomacy," John Kerry told a group of Syrian opposition activists in a meeting whose proceedings were leaked last week. To that end, Kerry wants some credible threat of military force—not, of course, to force the Russians to bend to American power. After all, as Kerry has insisted, "We remain absolutely convinced there is no such thing as a military solution." No, all they want is to make the Russians a bit more agreeable to American pleas for mercy. In any case, Obama rejected Kerry's proposal. Force is not an option, even if it's just meant to get Moscow to the table.
Options are urgent since the suffering in Aleppo is getting worse. The assault on what was once Syria's largest city, comprising forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad, with Russian, and Iranian support, may be the worst in more than five years of fighting. The president wants options. The White House even tried to hand Syria over to Russia but that didn't work.
"With the Sept. 12 U.S.-Russia cease-fire agreement," former Obama staffer Philip Gordon wrote last week in the Washington Post
the Obama administration offered Putin a way forward that from a Russian perspective could only have been described as a clean win. If fully implemented, the agreement would have prevented regime change in Damascus — a major Putin redline — for the foreseeable future; boosted Russia's position as a major power in the Middle East; facilitated military and intelligence cooperation with the United States against terrorist groups; diminished a costly conflict; and secured Russia's Mediterranean base.
And still Russia said no. The White House pressured Democratic leadership to delay a Syria sanctions bill because it might have annoyed Moscow, but Putin refused to accept Obama's surrender. Instead, the Russians are hammering away at Aleppo. And why not? The Obama administration cannot stop them no matter how many rostrums it employs—in Europe, the United Nations, or Washington itself—to denounce Moscow's barbarism. Putin doesn't care how much suffering he's inflicting on innocents. His plan is to protect his client Assad, and thereby advance Russian interests by turning himself into the key player in Syria, to whom everyone, allies and adversaries alike, will have to speak. The Russians believe that there is a military solution to the Syrian conflict. And thus it is hardly a coincidental benefit that Putin gets to teach Barack Obama a lesson about the nature of the world a she understands it.
Over the course of several years of Syrian and then Russian aerial campaigns targeting Aleppo, hundreds of thousands of people have fled a city of what was once three million for refugee camps, or Turkey, or Europe. "The United Nations," reports the Washington Post, "estimates that 250,000 remain surrounded in eastern Aleppo, many of them the poorest of the poor, the families who couldn't afford the cost of transportation out of the city."
Witnesses to the carnage, and victims of it, detail the means by which Putin rains death from the sky: Bunker busters, says Haisham Halap, a journalist trapped in Aleppo, "cause extreme harm and turn the buildings that are hit into rubble and dust…After we see and hear the Russian jet, it takes about 20 seconds until the bomb hits the ground or a building. It then takes another 20 to 30 seconds for the bomb to explode, for instance in a cellar, and the whole house collapses." "Cluster munitions, continues the journalist, "are big bombs that carry many small bomb balls. Each of the small bombs contains metal balls that kill and hurt everyone at a distance of 200 metres." Incendiary bombs, he says, "are so hot that they can even penetrate concrete walls… Everything that is in contact with these bombs will burn."
The administration warns Russia that it may break off talks. That is an unlikely option, since it would leave the White House with no political cover for its irrelevance. As long as Kerry continues to try to engage the Russians there is at least the empty talk of diplomacy, rather than an empty white noise that is periodically filled by the sound of bombs falling on civilians. Obama is tired of critics claiming that his Syria policy is a manifestation of American weakness. "Seeking peace is not a concession," says a White House spokesman. "Seeking peace is our goal."
Obama wants peace, and options. "There hasn't been probably a week that's gone by in which I haven't reexamined some of the underlying premises around how we're dealing with the situation in Syria," Obama said last week. The war in Syria haunts him. "It haunts me constantly," he told Vanity Fair.
Of course, there are problems in the world that can't be solved. "There are going to be some bad things that happen around the world," said Obama, "and we have to be judicious." And that's why the president is asking for options. "The conventional arguments about what could have been done are wrong," Obama said. A no-fly—wrong. Buffer zone—wrong. Arming rebels to topple Assad—wrong. Strikes against Assad regime targets—wrong.
Over the last five plus years, Obama dismissed all the "conventional arguments" made by his staff, from which he is now asking for different options.
"But I do ask myself," says the president, "'Was there something that we hadn't thought of? Was there some move that is beyond what was being presented to me that maybe a Churchill could have seen, or an Eisenhower might have figured out?'"
Churchill kept together a country at wartime, its capital under constant siege from an enemy in the air. He held on long enough for the United States to enter the war, a campaign led by Eisenhower. The difficult coalition that Eisenhower managed as Supreme Allied Commander saved Western civilization from an unspeakable darkness. Churchill and Eisenhower were exemplary figures under extreme circumstances, but their extraordinary actions were premised on a basic understanding of statecraft, and therefore the darker colors of human nature: There are times when the only option is force.
Obama knows what Churchill and Eisenhower would have done since he prides himself on doing precisely the opposite. "There's a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow," he told the Atlantic in April. "It's a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses."
It was when Obama changed his mind about ordering strikes against Assad for crossing his own red line regarding the use of chemical weapons that he freed himself from the playbook. "I'm very proud of this moment," he said.
The paradox is that the playbook was composed for figures like Obama. Statesmen like Churchill and Eisenhower would understand as a matter of experience and instinct what was required to secure interests, protect allies, and maintain national prestige. In liberating himself from the wisdom and guidance handed down by history, Obama has left himself with no option—except the White House's hollow protests against the barbarism now encircling Aleppo.