Aaron David Miller
Incremental steps being considered probably won’t work without a much more sustained and aggressive military intervention.
By Aaron David Miller
Speaking from a refugee camp in Turkey last year, Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami told CNN that, like Bill Clinton, who felt ashamed for not intervening to stop the Rwandan genocide, Barack Obama will look back with regret at his refusal to use US power in Syria.
By any standard, Syria is a disaster.
But it’s not Rwanda, where 800,000 Tutsis were massacred in eight months. Nor is it Obama’s disaster in the sense that he’s responsible for what has transpired there by not intervening.
Obama has avoided intervention not because he’s insensitive, incompetent, or even uninterested. He has done so because his options aren’t just bad, they’re terrible. Syria is already a disaster, but a ham-handed intervention could make matters worse, certainly for America.
None of the incremental steps that have been proposed so far have answered the following questions: Can these actions degrade Syria’s military power so that President Bashar Al Assad’s regime collapses? Or, alternatively, can they produce a stalemate that would force the regime, the Russians, and Iran to accept a negotiated transition?
Even if Assad falls, why do we believe that the battle in Syria will end? In the wake of the regime’s collapse, the war may well expand — Alawite militias will continue the fight, opposition groups will struggle among themselves for control, and foreign powers will continue to meddle in the hopes of emerging on top of the new political order.
It’s not that America can’t intervene militarily in Syria, or even that the options on the table are too risky. The problem is that the incremental steps being considered probably won’t work without a much more sustained and aggressive military intervention.
Those are all good reasons to avoid intervening in Syria — but I doubt they will carry the day. By the end of the summer, more than 100,000 Syrians are likely to have died in a calamitous civil war that shows no signs of abating. As a result, the pressure to intervene will mount on the risk-averse Obama administration.
Here’s why we are headed for a militarisation of the US role in Syria.
Time’s starting to run out
The Syrian crisis might go on, in one form or another, for years. But the Obama presidency won’t. The president’s awareness that the clock’s ticking — and that there’s no third term on the horizon — will increasingly weigh on his decision-making.
Yes, we’re only six months into Obama’s new term. But second-term presidents — not to mention their advisers — quickly start to focus on what’s important and what’s not, because they know time is now limited. How a president will be remembered becomes critically important.
Obama knows that Syria is the key story line in the so-called Arab Spring and that his own legacy will suffer unless he moves to counteract the negative appraisals currently gathering force.
No diplomatic track in sight
The arc of the Syrian civil war seems pretty well set. These kinds of conflicts end either when one side triumphs, or when a third party intercedes to impose its will.
From the beginning, the conventional wisdom has been that the regime could not survive. That logic was partly driven by the fact that no other autocrats survived the Arab Spring. But it was also driven by what seemed like simple arithmetic: The regime looked increasingly weakened (subtraction) and the opposition seemed to be gaining in strength (addition). At some point, the situation would reach a tipping point, and Assad would be overthrown.
What’s important is that its strategy, at this point, is to get the Russians to force the regime and the rebels to the negotiating table. If Washington and Moscow can accomplish that, they just may be able to convince the warring parties to negotiate a political transition that eases Assad out, while bringing a coherent group of opposition elements to power. Such an accomplishment would go a long way to stopping the killing and preempting the need for US military intervention.
The tough ladies are back
Individuals do matter in forging the US government’s response to an international crisis. And the ascension of Susan Rice as Obama’s National Security Adviser and Samantha Power as America’s envoy at the UN increases the odds of intervention in Syria.
I wouldn’t dismiss this line so quickly. Rice is smart, tough, disciplined, and reportedly risk-averse on Syria. But she has a new job, and expectations for new and bolder initiatives are mounting.
Combined with her own determination to make a difference, one of the pieces of the puzzle for intervention may have just fallen into place: She is closer to the president than any other foreign policy adviser.
The other tough lady, Samantha Power, wrote a book about the Balkans (and other mass slaughters), A Problem From Hell. That describes Syria, too. This problem isn’t going away. Indeed, it will likely get worse — before it gets even worse.
Too much blood has flowed in Syria to imagine a quick, negotiated settlement. The longer the conflict continues, the greater the odds that some new kinetic element — an Israeli-Syrian confrontation, massive use of chemical weapons, or some atrocity that surpasses previous horrors — will occur.
The steady drumbeat of death in Syria will increase the pressure on the US to do something, anything, to stop the violence — even if it’s out of good options for doing so. For better or worse, the Obama administration seems headed for military intervention in Syria, with all the risk and uncertainty that entails.
WP-BLOOMBERG
Incremental steps being considered probably won’t work without a much more sustained and aggressive military intervention.
By Aaron David Miller
Speaking from a refugee camp in Turkey last year, Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami told CNN that, like Bill Clinton, who felt ashamed for not intervening to stop the Rwandan genocide, Barack Obama will look back with regret at his refusal to use US power in Syria.
By any standard, Syria is a disaster.
But it’s not Rwanda, where 800,000 Tutsis were massacred in eight months. Nor is it Obama’s disaster in the sense that he’s responsible for what has transpired there by not intervening.
Obama has avoided intervention not because he’s insensitive, incompetent, or even uninterested. He has done so because his options aren’t just bad, they’re terrible. Syria is already a disaster, but a ham-handed intervention could make matters worse, certainly for America.
None of the incremental steps that have been proposed so far have answered the following questions: Can these actions degrade Syria’s military power so that President Bashar Al Assad’s regime collapses? Or, alternatively, can they produce a stalemate that would force the regime, the Russians, and Iran to accept a negotiated transition?
Even if Assad falls, why do we believe that the battle in Syria will end? In the wake of the regime’s collapse, the war may well expand — Alawite militias will continue the fight, opposition groups will struggle among themselves for control, and foreign powers will continue to meddle in the hopes of emerging on top of the new political order.
It’s not that America can’t intervene militarily in Syria, or even that the options on the table are too risky. The problem is that the incremental steps being considered probably won’t work without a much more sustained and aggressive military intervention.
Those are all good reasons to avoid intervening in Syria — but I doubt they will carry the day. By the end of the summer, more than 100,000 Syrians are likely to have died in a calamitous civil war that shows no signs of abating. As a result, the pressure to intervene will mount on the risk-averse Obama administration.
Here’s why we are headed for a militarisation of the US role in Syria.
Time’s starting to run out
The Syrian crisis might go on, in one form or another, for years. But the Obama presidency won’t. The president’s awareness that the clock’s ticking — and that there’s no third term on the horizon — will increasingly weigh on his decision-making.
Yes, we’re only six months into Obama’s new term. But second-term presidents — not to mention their advisers — quickly start to focus on what’s important and what’s not, because they know time is now limited. How a president will be remembered becomes critically important.
Obama knows that Syria is the key story line in the so-called Arab Spring and that his own legacy will suffer unless he moves to counteract the negative appraisals currently gathering force.
No diplomatic track in sight
The arc of the Syrian civil war seems pretty well set. These kinds of conflicts end either when one side triumphs, or when a third party intercedes to impose its will.
From the beginning, the conventional wisdom has been that the regime could not survive. That logic was partly driven by the fact that no other autocrats survived the Arab Spring. But it was also driven by what seemed like simple arithmetic: The regime looked increasingly weakened (subtraction) and the opposition seemed to be gaining in strength (addition). At some point, the situation would reach a tipping point, and Assad would be overthrown.
What’s important is that its strategy, at this point, is to get the Russians to force the regime and the rebels to the negotiating table. If Washington and Moscow can accomplish that, they just may be able to convince the warring parties to negotiate a political transition that eases Assad out, while bringing a coherent group of opposition elements to power. Such an accomplishment would go a long way to stopping the killing and preempting the need for US military intervention.
The tough ladies are back
Individuals do matter in forging the US government’s response to an international crisis. And the ascension of Susan Rice as Obama’s National Security Adviser and Samantha Power as America’s envoy at the UN increases the odds of intervention in Syria.
I wouldn’t dismiss this line so quickly. Rice is smart, tough, disciplined, and reportedly risk-averse on Syria. But she has a new job, and expectations for new and bolder initiatives are mounting.
Combined with her own determination to make a difference, one of the pieces of the puzzle for intervention may have just fallen into place: She is closer to the president than any other foreign policy adviser.
The other tough lady, Samantha Power, wrote a book about the Balkans (and other mass slaughters), A Problem From Hell. That describes Syria, too. This problem isn’t going away. Indeed, it will likely get worse — before it gets even worse.
Too much blood has flowed in Syria to imagine a quick, negotiated settlement. The longer the conflict continues, the greater the odds that some new kinetic element — an Israeli-Syrian confrontation, massive use of chemical weapons, or some atrocity that surpasses previous horrors — will occur.
The steady drumbeat of death in Syria will increase the pressure on the US to do something, anything, to stop the violence — even if it’s out of good options for doing so. For better or worse, the Obama administration seems headed for military intervention in Syria, with all the risk and uncertainty that entails.
WP-BLOOMBERG
