Syria’s civil war stains Obama’s foreign policy
Years after he left office, Bill Clinton finally admitted that one of his greatest regrets was not sending a few thousand combat troops into Rwanda to end the genocide in that African country that left 800,000 people dead.
With the recent heart-wrenching scenes of devastation in Syria and its second-largest city, Aleppo, you have to wonder if President Obama will suffer similar remorse over 470,000 dead in that country’s civil war. In the five years since the war began, Obama rejected a number of military options, all short of committing U.S. ground troops, that might have altered the conflict’s trajectory.
To review: The civil war was triggered in March 2011 when Syrian President Bashar Assad launched a brutal crackdown against Arab Spring demonstrators. Five months later, Obama called for Assad’s removal but held back on quickly arming the rebels, conscious of an American public weary of wars in Muslim countries and at least initially confident that Assad would be forced from office the way other Arab dictators had fallen.
A year later, Obama invoked his famous “red line” against Assad’s use of chemical weapons. But Assad, frustrated by a lack of battlefield successes, crossed it anyway, launching a nerve agent attack on Damascus suburbs that killed more than 1,400 people.
The Pentagon presented Obama with the option of launching Tomahawk cruise missiles against Syrian air bases, command centers and units responsible for the chemical attacks.
But Obama hesitated, abruptly choosing to seek congressional authorization. The delay gave the Russians an opening to negotiate removal of chemical weapons and allow Assad’s conventional military to remain intact.
As Syrians began fleeing the war in unprecedented numbers, Obama resisted military options to create a safe zone with air cover to serve as a sanctuary for fleeing families. This did not happen, and the refugees pushed on to Turkey and beyond to Europe.
Obama’s options narrowed sharply as Russian and Iranian forces arrived to help Assad regain the initiative in the civil war last year. Even then, Secretary of State John Kerry continued urging Obama to launch targeted missile attacks that would give the diplomat some leverage during ceasefire negotiations. Still Obama resisted, telling The At
lantic in March that “real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence.”
Rwanda and Syria, as twin milestones of horror and presidential passivity, are certainly not absolute equivalents. Rwanda was far less complicated, with a poorly armed Hutu majority that posed little threat to American firepower. Syria, by contrast, has a professional military, an air defense system and powerful allies in Russia and Iran.
Yet Syria could easily go down as the Obama administration’s greatest foreign policy failure. Beyond nearly half-a-million dead, the vacuum created by conflict helped give rise to the Islamic State terrorist group. The civil war threw the lives of 13.5 million Syrians into crisis; 4.8 million flooded into neighboring countries and destabilized Europe.
Historians will long debate whether the U.S. could or should have done more in Syria. Obama might well be haunted by those same questions.