If Barack Obama ever had a strategy for Syria, it’s been turned on its head
Barack Obama is busy burnishing his foreign policy legacy with Iran and Cuba – but on Syria, the public relations effort seems doomed. Syria is going down as the US president’s most serious, tragic, far-reaching and long-lasting foreign policy failure. Recent American cooperation with Russia in the United Nations over chemical weapons use in Syria will do little to erase the fact that the war is grinding on, entering its fifth year with a death toll of around a quarter of a million people, more than 10 million people displaced or refugees, and far-reaching consequences for international security.
Bill Clinton wrote in his memoirs that his big regret from his time in office was not stopping the Rwandan genocide. Perhaps Obama has long calculated that historians will be lenient with him over the Syrian tragedy. After all, as he once said in a UN speech, the US cannot carry all the world’s burdens alone. But there is more than the obvious complexity of the task behind the US’s failure in Syria, and that may boil down to a form of indifference in the White House – in tune with a largely inward-looking American public opinion.
In 2013 Obama was asked in an interview with The New Republic how he wrestled, morally, with the ongoing violence in Syria. His response came in the form of a question: “How do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?” It sounded as if he was trying to describe the horror in Syria as something relative. And it was also a fair point about the limits of American interventionism.
The arguments in defence of Obama’s approach have long been spelled out: there was no easy or obvious solution in Syria; it was important not to get dragged into another Middle Eastern quagmire, and realism dictates that Syria is at best “contained”, rather than actively solved. These arguments may have been at least partly true at one point or another, but they have unravelled fast.
Faced with a crisis of such magnitude, the choice for an American president tends to be between a bad option and a worse one. But whatever Obama has chosen to do or not to do, the outcome has been far from convincing: there seems to be no end to this war. And however long and hard the president may have refrained from getting involved in Syria, the US is now dragged back into a quagmire. And Syria has not been contained. The conflict has metastasised throughout the region, it is the nexus of the Sunni-Shia clash in the Middle East and a powder keg of Islamic radicalisation whose consequences are felt far beyond the region.
If there has ever been a clear-cut American strategy on this crisis, it now seems to have turned on its head. The US has now said it will provide close air support for a small group of 60 Syrian rebels that it has trained, and that it is considering setting up a safe zone along the Turkish-Syria border where anti-Islamic State fighters will be able to base themselves. One of the most puzzling aspects of this new phase of American involvement is that it is in no way expressly intended to provide protection for civilians. Yet it is precisely because civilians are not being protected that Isis has been able to grow.
Isis has been able to cast itself as the sole protector of Sunni civilians as they continue to be massacred by the barrel bombs and air power of the Syrian regime. As Ken Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch keeps pointing out, the Assad regime is the number one cause of civilian deaths in Syria, not Isis. Why, he rightly asks, is nothing done to stop Assad’s helicopter-dropped barrel bombs, which kill huge numbers of civilians indiscriminately, and cannot in any possible way be considered an anti-Isis weapon?
Procrastination has been Obama’s worst characteristic in this crisis. In the summer of 2012 key members of the US administration, including Hillary Clinton, tried to weigh in for active military support for the anti-Assad rebels. The logic was that this could tip the balance of forces and constrain Assad into peace negotiations, as happened in Bosnia in 1995 with Slobodan Milošević. Obama refused that option, at a time when it could have most counted. The result is that Islamic radicalisation gradually took hold in Syria, bringing fertile ground for Isis. That radicalisation explains why the US has this year found only 60 rebels it could vet for a train-and-equip programme. The paradox of fighting a force (Isis) that the rest of your policy (not protecting civilians) actually helps grow stronger is at the core of Obama’s current policy failure in Syria.
To be fair, Obama has had many hard calls to make, but the other aspect of his failure in Syria has to do with moral responsibility. It is about how the United States, the world’s most powerful democracy, largely failed to uphold a convincing moral stand in the face of one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes since the second world war.
It is hard, these days, to find any strong American high-level language denouncing the slaughterhouse that Bashar al-Assad has brought down on his own people. Nor is there any talk of an international tribunal that might deal one day with these crimes. Of course Russia would veto any of this, but why not at least expose Moscow’s complicity by raising the question of mass atrocities – not just chemical weapon use – in the UN security council?
In the case of Syria, a whole body of international norms meant to counter state-sponsored massacres of civilians has been put aside, including the notion of the “responsibility to protect” which was voted in the UN 10 years ago. It is a paradox, because Obama has on his team one of the staunchest advocates of American activism in countering genocide and crimes against humanity:Samantha Power, the current American ambassador to the UN.
In her 2003 book, A Problem from Hell, Power wrote this about how in the past US administrations failed to act in a timely manner to stop mass atrocities: “The inertia of the governed cannot be disentangled from the indifference of the government.” Obama’s apparent indifference to the plight of Syrian civilians – not just the fact that he failed to work out a solution – will be part of his legacy.
THE GUARDIAN