Obama’s hesitation in Syria: The red line that never was

Decision time

At the daily press briefings at the White House and State Department journalists persistently asked if and when the president would use military force to stop al-Assad.

The initial response from the White House was that the al-Assad government should give access to Ghouta to a UN investigating team in Syria. Not surprisingly, there were delays in Damascus about allowing the UN team to enter the sites.

Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the administration mulled over whether the president should order strikes to deter the al-Assad government from using chemical weapons again.

Intelligence reports indicated al-Assad's circle was nervous. I urged Secretary of State John Kerry to support strikes for three reasons. First, without strikes, al-Assad would continue to use chemical weapons.

Second, a powerful strike that damaged al-Assad's military would encourage elements in the Syrian government to accept the UN-sponsored peace talks in Geneva that Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov had agreed to pursue.

Finally, I warned Kerry: if the US did not conduct air strikes opposition extremists like the Nusra Front would exploit our ignoring Ghouta to increase their recruiting at the expense of the moderates like Selim Idriss.

Kerry immediately agreed.

In the week after the 21 August attack on Ghouta, there were more meetings at the White House discussing how to deter al-Assad from using chemical weapons.

In response to accusations from Moscow and Damascus that the opposition had attacked its own civilians, Ben Rhodes prepared a statement on 30 August explaining the US intelligence that confirmed the Syrian army was responsible. 

The statement was remarkable because it acknowledged that we had intercepted communications within the Syrian command. It is exceptionally rare that Washington ever acknowledges this kind of capability because it doesn't want the intelligence targets to know we can listen to them. 

At the same time, the White House also was reviewing target lists from the Pentagon. We knew the final meeting with the president, the cabinet secretaries and top military commanders would be on Friday, 30 August. And we knew that the secretaries and top generals supported the proposed strikes against al-Assad's government.

That weekend was a holiday in America. Usually, employees leave Washington to go to the beach or the mountains, but we received instructions to cancel our plans and come to the State Department Saturday morning.

A disappointing surprise

I expected we would prepare messages for our embassies to deliver around the world to explain the US strikes. But that Saturday morning my computer inbox had no reports of military actions.

We learned that the president would speak at one o'clock and we gathered in the office of my boss, Assistant Secretary Elizabeth Jones, in the expectation that Obama would announce the beginning of the strikes.

We watched as Obama, the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, said he was willing to strike Syria even without a United Nations Security Council resolution since Russia would use its veto. He claimed he had the authority to order the strikes without congressional approval, but the issue was so serious that Congress should vote to approve the strikes first.

It was my second shock in the "red line" affair.

I wasn't the only one shocked. My French colleague told me that his president, Francois Hollande, was ready to attack Syria with Obama, and the American decision was a total, disappointing surprise.

I joined Kerry and Secretary of Defense Hagel in meetings with Congress the following week, but our mission was impossible. On the one hand, we told the senators and representatives that the strikes would hurt the Syrian government and deter it from using chemical weapons again.

On the other hand, with public nervousness after the Iraq war, we also assured Congress that the strikes would be short and limited. Not surprisingly, many in Congress didn't understand how small, limited strikes could deter al-Assad.

Others, like Congressman Mike McCaul worried the strikes might bring down al-Assad and deliver control of Syria to jihadists. He claimed that it would be better for al-Assad to remain in power and in control of the chemical weapons than let jihadists capture them.

To this day I strongly doubt McCaul's assertion that jihadists would surely have controlled Syria if the Syrian government had collapsed like Saddam Hussein's government in 2003.

Other Republicans, like Joe Wilson of South Carolina who rejected any Obama initiative, also opposed authorising the strikes.

The White House legislative affairs office concluded by the second week of September that no more than one-fourth of the House of Representatives 432 members would vote to support a strike.

On the Senate side, the Foreign Relations Committee barely approved the strikes, but after that success momentum in the full Senate died. Neither the full House nor the Senate ever voted.

We had reached a dead end less than a month after the Ghouta attacks.

Moscow 'promise' helps save Obama face

Afterwards, Moscow claimed it would guarantee Syria would relinquish all its chemical weapons, thus saving Obama's face. I joined Kerry in the delegation to negotiate the deal with the Russians in Geneva in late September.

Assistant Secretary for Non-Proliferation Thomas Countryman led our technical team in the delegation. Thomas, an old friend, told me during the talks that the Americans had more technical information about Syria's chemical weapons than the Russian delegation which was essentially political.

I didn't trust the Russians and asked Kerry how we could be sure the Russians would accept action against al-Assad if he violated the agreement. Kerry said the Russians would agree to explicit mention of Security Council action in the agreement text under Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter.

In October 2013 in the final passage of United Nations Security Council resolution 2118 which set the terms for the elimination of the Syrian programme, you can find in paragraph 21 this reference to punishing Syria if it violated the agreement.

Obama's three justifications

Obama later said his decision not to launch strikes was one of his greatest successes as president, laying out three justifications: First, he asked us how we could be sure that al-Assad in his desperate situation would not continue using chemical weapons and therefore compel us to escalate against him again and again.

We could not define for the president how far we would have to escalate to establish deterrence. There was a serious possibility that the required American military action would be more than short and limited. And a sure lesson from military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya was that there are always unexpected problems.

Of course, American politics also played a huge role in Obama's thinking. The Republican party's attacks against Obama's domestic and foreign policies were vicious.

Obama wanted the Republicans to accept some of the responsibility for the strikes; he hoped calling for a vote would trap the Republicans so that they could not complain if the military action became difficult. The political reality, however, was that the Republicans would criticise Obama no matter what choice he made. 

Some Republicans, such as Congressman Joseph Wilson from Texas, warned that if Obama used military force without permission from Congress, they would impeach him.

As the Republicans had the majority in the House of Representatives, and the impeachment process starts in the House of Representatives according to the US Constitution, Obama could not ignore this threat.

And as a lawyer, Obama himself was not entirely comfortable with ignoring Congress and starting wars. He had criticised President George W. Bush for going too far and starting the war in Iraq without a serious Congressional debate.

Obama remembered the same problem in the escalation in Vietnam in 1965-1966. Especially if the military action in Syria extended with the Syrian government using of more chemical weapons, Obama thought Congress should play its role in our political system.

Obama thus felt vindicated and proud when the United Nations and the Organization to Prohibit Chemical Warfare, an international organisation of experts, claimed at the end of 2014 that they had completed the destruction of the Syrian chemical weapons programme in accordance with Security Council Resolution 2118.

However, in 2016 the OPCW said that the Syrian government had not revealed all its chemical weapons and facilities. Worse, OPCW expert teams later blamed the Syrian government for sarin and chlorine gas in attacks against Khan Shaykun and Latmenah in 2017, and against Saraqeb and Douma in 2018. These attacks killed at least 120 civilians.

Despite their promise to Kerry in Geneva in September 2013 about Article 21 in United Nations resolution 2118, Russia vetoed every Western effort to punish al-Assad for these violations.

Nonetheless, Obama and his political allies say that al-Assad's chemical attacks would have been worse without the destruction in 2014 of most of al-Assad's chemical weapons capabilities.

As I consider this history, I disagree.

Al-Assad reduced using chemical weapons only because he didn't need them as much as in 2013 because the Russian air force intervention had turned the military balance in his favour.

We also know that the Nusra Front and the Islamic State recruitment did grow after Obama's decision not to strike in defence of his red line. While their success is not only due to Obama's decision, their propaganda after the Ghouta attack highlighted that they were better defenders of Syrians than the West.

And by the time we arrived at the Geneva 2 peace negotiations in January 2014, al-Assad knew that the Americans would not intervene directly in the war, and the government violated the terms of the Geneva 2 talks, causing them to collapse quickly, again with Russian support.

Obama was right, however, about the difficulty of using strikes to deter al-Assad from using chemical weapons. It is worth noting that the strike on Shayrat airbase in 2017 ordered by President Donald Trump didn't stop al-Assad from using chemical weapons in 2018 in Douma.

And the retaliation with France and Britain after the Douma chemical weapons attack was bigger than the 2017 American strike.

Nonetheless, Trump's Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, asserted that American intelligence found that the Syrian government had again used chlorine again in the Lattakia province in May 2019 during fighting around Idlib province.

Lessons learned

There are two big lessons to be drawn from the red-line experience.

First, it is extremely important that a government's rhetoric matches what it can and will do if necessary. Obama lost much credibility in the Middle East as a result of his hesitation in 2013.

Second and more specific to Syria: Obama himself said on 31 August that the American military could not resolve Syria's civil war. He was right: only Syrians can find a political solution.

As I look at the current effort in Congress, led by congressmen McCaul and Wilson, to limit normalisation with the al-Assad government and impose more sanctions on Syria, I remember their unhelpful roles in September 2013.

They were not interested then, and are not interested now, in the welfare of ordinary Syrians. They instead seek to exploit politically the weaknesses of President Biden's policy in Syria. It's about American domestic political competition, not Syria.

Remember, Biden's Syria policy is not very different from Trump's policy. There is no American solution to Syria's crisis — not in 2013 and not now.