2. The vanishing red line
When it comes to evaluating Barack Obama’s presidency, the word Syria is usually judged negatively. Could he, and should he, have done more? The answer is almost certainly yes.
What is less clear and less analysed is the wider question of whether there were any good options at his disposal.
Now, just as then, the effectiveness of military action was doubtful: Iraq had shown the limits of force. Mr Obama, after spending his first term pulling troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, did not want to be dragged into a Middle East quagmire.
And neither he nor the American public wanted yet more soldiers coming home in coffins draped in the Stars and Stripes. Such a prospect was very real and weighed heavily on the president’s decision-making on Syria.
Ultimately, however, it was Mr Obama’s own words that boxed him in. Having urged Bashar Al Assad to quit as early as 2011, his room for political manoeuvring was limited from the earliest days of the uprising.
By the autumn of 2012, when the conflict had spiralled into a full-blown civil war, Mr Obama was under pressure to act militarily. The factor pushing him towards intervention was growing evidence that the Syrian regime was mobilising a chemical and biological weapons arsenal that could be used against civilians.
“A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilised. That would change my calculus,” Mr Obama said.
That statement, more than any other, is likely to haunt him. With the war now entering its eighth year it seems extraordinary that it was not until 12 months later that the president would be held accountable for the remarks.
The Assad regime’s purported use of the nerve agent sarin in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in the early hours of August 21, 2013, in which hundreds – maybe as many as 1,200 people – were reportedly killed, could not be ignored.
A military option was on the table but Britain was part of the plan. Politicians in London, suffering from an Iraq hangover, voted against taking action against Al Assad.
Mr Obama, plagued by doubt and mindful of how his predecessor George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq was undermined because of a lack of international support, stalled. He asked Congress for its approval of military action.
That delay added to the perception that the president was dithering, such was his belief – or rather more likely the lack of it – that Al Assad could be toppled, or forced to stand down in the face of a US military onslaught. The red line on chemical weapons had been crossed.
But Mr Obama’s calculus did not change. A hasty deal was instead put together by Russia and the US under which the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons would be taken out of the country. A succession of attacks have followed, many using chlorine gas, which was not included in the list of substances to be removed.
Less than six years after the red line was drawn, and with a death toll of more than 500,000, it is unarguable that Mr Obama did not follow through on his threat of force in Syria.
It is a palpable example of the adage that saying you will do something is not the same as doing it, even when you are president of the US.
Today, it seems questionable if Al Assad’s removal is even desirable. There has never been an American or international plan for a new Syrian administration that had a chance of being delivered, given the Middle East’s shifting alliances. Mr Obama, a wordsmith of the highest order, erred.
It would also be wrong to compare his mistakes – chiefly, his inaction – with those of Mr Bush, whose errors were actions borne from a lack of restraint and evaluation. But the costs are no less real.
Mr Bush has never expressed regret for Iraq but Bill Clinton, after leaving office, administered a personal reckoning by saying he failed to stop a genocide in Rwanda.
When Mr Obama’s memoirs – he signed a deal this month – are published we may see if his judgment on Syria is something he stands by.