In his testimony on Capitol Hill Tuesday, former CIA director (ret.) General David Petraeus argued that the Obama administration can and should be doing more in Syria. Petraeus proposed “the establishment of enclaves in Syria protected by coalition air power where a moderate Sunni force could be supported and where additional forces could be trained, internally displaced persons could find refuge and the Syrian opposition could organize.”
Presumably the plan Petraeus sketched is similar to what he advocated before resigning from his CIA post in November 2012. The difference nearly three years on is that Russia has escalated its military presence in order to defend Assad, which makes any American military action—like firing cruise missiles at Assad’s air force, as Petraeus suggested—highly unlikely. Petraeus knows that if President Obama didn’t want to back the Syrian rebels previously, Russia’s incursion simply gives the White House another excuse not to move against Assad and his allies.
Given that Petraeus has first-hand knowledge of the White House’s policy and the president’s tendencies, it’s hard not to conclude that the purpose of the general’s suggestions was largely to highlight the Obama administration’s manifold failures in Syria. His testimony showed how things might have been different. And indeed Syria as well as the rest of the region, and now the growing refugee crisis might well be different had the president listened to Petraeus—or Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, or Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Thomas Donilon, and Samantha Power, who all advised the president to arm Syrian rebel units. But from Obama’s perspective, they’re all to blame for the administration’s failed Syria policy.
In the wake of last week’s embarrassing revelation that only four or five U.S.-trained rebels are currently engaged in fighting the Islamic State, the White House was scrambling to deflect blame. It wasn’t Obama’s fault, said White House press secretary Josh Earnest. The president never wanted to back the rebels in the first place. His hand was forced by administration figures and Republican lawmakers who wanted to aid the rebels. It’s time, said Earnest for “our critics to fess up in this regard as well. They were wrong.”
Of course, this isn’t just about shifting blame, it’s also about changing the subject: None of the administration’s “critics” ever argued for arming rebels to fight ISIS, the target was always Assad. It was the administration that forced rebel recruits to sign documents promising they would only fight the Islamic State and wouldn’t use their arms or skills to fight Assad and the regime’s allies. The failure then is all Obama’s, and the administration’s clumsy legerdemain provides important insight into the nature of the White House, its Middle East policy, and the character of the president.
Since the White House seems to be operating under the assumption that the historical record is equivalent to a 12-hour Twitter cycle, it’s important to go into a bit more detail regarding the argument about backing Syrian rebels. The idea, advocated both on the right and the left, was to support rebel units to fight the Syrian regime. The humanitarian rationale was to help topple a dictator who was slaughtering his own people. The strategic rationale, taken out of America’s Cold War playbook, was just as plain—arm proxies to stop imperial expansionism, this time Iran’s, in the region. As former CENTCOM commander, (ret.) Marine Gen. James Mattis, said in 2013, toppling Assad would be the “biggest strategic setback in 25 years” for his patron Iran.
There was an additional benefit for the United States as well. If the Iranians did agree to negotiate its nuclear weapons program, as they had not yet agreed to do so publicly, taking Assad off the board would strengthen the administration’s negotiating position. We don’t want war, the White House could have argued, but we have many ways of causing you pain, as we have shown you in toppling your Syrian ally, who now swings from a noose in Damascus.
Traditional American allies, especially the Gulf Arab states, told the president and his aides that the Syrian conflict was destabilizing the Middle East even as Iran was solidifying its position. As this October 22, 2013 article in the New York Times shows, White House principals also saw that Assad was the problem. No one either in the administration or outside it thought the main issue was the Islamic State—because ISIS was not yet a major factor in the Syrian conflict. The problem was Iran.
Was it possible that the only person in the world who didn’t see the strategic significance of toppling Assad was the president of the United States? After all the high-level briefings, after virtually all of his national security officials advised him to push back against Iran in the eastern Mediterranean on the border of three key American regional allies, Obama still didn’t get it?
Of course Obama understood—he just saw it the other way around. He feared that if he went after Assad he’d anger Tehran and drive it from the negotiating table. As Kassem Eid, a Syrian opposition figure, came to understand during the course of his meetings around Washington, “President Obama does not wish to upset the Iranians.” Indeed, the commander-in-chief wrote a letter to Iran’s supreme leader explaining that any U.S. operations in Syria wouldn’t touch Assad.
And now Obama has prepared the way for Assad’s rehabilitation. After Obama told Assad to step aside in August 2011, the administration and its Democratic allies argue that Assad should actually probably stay, at least for now. “Who are you going to replace [Assad] with?” asked Sen. Joe Manchin. “What are you going to do? Leave a void?" Plenty of senate Democrats see it similarly. "I don't know that it helps for us to keep banging the table about Assad," said Sen. Claire McCaskill. "I think it would be better for us to be as effective as possible in fighting [the Islamic State] and restoring some kind of security environment that shifts back the flow of refugees."
And even if Assad was still perceived to be the central problem it wouldn’t matter because the Russians are backing him and they’ve got the final say on all matters in Syria. If you want to talk about Syria, you have to go through Moscow, as the heads of state of two of Syria’s neighbors have done just this week, Benjamin Netanyahu and Recep Tayyip Erdogan Making himself a power broker in the region was precisely what Putin had in mind—that and neutering the United States. Sure, Assad still “has to go,” says John Kerry, but the “modality” and timing of his departure should be flexible. “I don’t have the answer as to some specific time frame,” said Kerry. “We’ve said for some period of time it doesn’t have to be done on day one, or month one, or whatever.” Whatever—the White House’s Syria policy in a nutshell.
Policymakers of course are typically faced with difficult decisions—choices that may well lead to the deaths of hundreds or even thousands of innocent civilians. Or more. They have to weigh that horror against the possible benefits that may come from their choices. Thus, Obama chose not to back the Syrian rebels to help topple Assad in order to get a nuclear deal with Iran.
To date, the trade-off seems unwise. What the United States got in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was a deeply flawed agreement that guarantees the clerical regime will have an industrial-scale nuclear weapons program within fifteen years. In addition, the president’s choice to help preserve Assad has fueled the immigrant crisis, for most of the millions of Sunni Arabs fleeing Syria are looking for refuge not from ISIS, but from the regime that has put the sect through a meat grinder since the rebellion began as a peaceful protest in March 2011. Moreover, Obama’s choice has let Putin establish a strong presence on the eastern Mediterranean from where it will not be easy for future administrations to dislodge him.
Perhaps most galling is Obama’s decision to blame his critics for the failures of a Syria policy that they never advocated. Obama’s failure to take responsibility for his own ideas and actions disfigures the best traditions of the office he holds.