The ouster of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad by homegrown insurgents warrants a reassessment of Barack Obama’s avoidance of direct military involvement in the country’s civil war.
For years the words “Obama” and “Syria” have been tightly linked to the word “failure.”
After almost launching a military strike in response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons in 2013, Obama said he would not go forward without congressional approval. Then a deal was struck with Russia to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile a deal that did not stick—and no congressional vote was taken. The Syrian civil war raged on for the rest of the Obama presidency and beyond. Obama himself told Vanity Fair in 2016 that “the situation in Syria … haunts me constantly.”
But Obama still defended his reasoning for resisting pressure to strike. In 2016, he explained to The Atlantic, “the scope of executive power in national security issues is very broad, but not limitless.” (Two years earlier, he told the traveling press corps on Air Force One that his overriding foreign policy principle was “Don’t do stupid shit.”)
While we can’t play out counter-narratives in real life, Obama’s insight looks better in hindsight.
I’ll explain, but first, here’s what’s leading the Washington Monthly website:
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Obama had obvious reasons to be skeptical of what American military power could accomplish for a deeply divided Middle Eastern country. He was elected in large part because in 2002 he foresaw George W. Bush’s hubristic invasion of Iraq as “dumb,” “rash,” and “cynical.”
The war was waged on the false pretense that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of weapons of mass destructions. Capturing Hussein didn’t take long, but the subsequent occupation was chaotic and deadly and resented by the Iraqis.
Today, a nominally democratic government exists in Iraq. But the democracy advocates at Freedom House offer a dim characterization of how it works in practice: “…democratic governance is impeded in practice by corruption, militias operating outside the bounds of the law, and the weakness of formal institutions … State officials and powerful militias routinely infringe upon the rights of citizens through legal and extrajudicial means.”
Also by 2013, the occupation of Afghanistan had become a quagmire. The theocratic Taliban government was quickly deposed in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But the successor government—propped up by American weaponry and racked with corruption—was unable to secure legitimacy from the public. Fed up with risking American lives for a hopeless project, Donald Trump developed and Joe Biden executed a military withdrawal, allowing the Taliban to return to power.
Seeing how Iraq and Afghanistan went sideways, and sizing up the unique challenges in Syria, Obama concluded a strike against the Assad government would backfire.
“We could not, through a missile strike, eliminate the chemical weapons themselves,” Obama told The Atlantic in 2016, “and what I would then face was the prospect of Assad having survived the strike and claiming he had successfully defied the United States, that the United States had acted unlawfully in the absence of a UN mandate, and that that would have potentially strengthened his hand rather than weakened it.”
(The Atlantic had previously reported that Obama also noted that a few days prior to his reconsideration, the British Parliament voted against military action, denying him a critical partner, and undermining the possibility of United Nations support.
The path Obama took to reach that decision was erratic, undermining his own credibility. In 2011, he called for Assad to resign. In 2012, asked by a a reporter what would happen if Assad used chemical weapons, Obama said, “We have been very clear to the Assad regime … that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”
Obamas exact “red line” language stopped just short of promising a military response, but that’s how most interpreted it. Not meeting those expectations once chemical weapons were reportedly used by Assad prompted accusations hurled at Obama for fecklessness. The worsening brutality and widespread death over the next several years only made Obama’s inaction look like a favor done on Assad’s behalf.
Yet the caution of Obama—who, according to The Atlantic, believed “that the Washington foreign-policy establishment … makes a fetish of ‘credibility'”—ultimately allowed Syrians to take matters in their own hands. Assad’s removal from power took an extremely long time, and what will emerge in the power vacuum is yet to be determined. But at least Syrians now have some opportunity to make their own choices about their future.
(The triumphant rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was once linked to Al Qaeda and deemed a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department, but has broken ties and suggested it would support a pluralistic Syria.)
Recognizing the long-term value of Obama’s purposeful inaction in the case of Syria is not tantamount to extolling simplistic isolationism, or Trump’s grotesque blend of selective isolationism, coziness with autocracy, and penchant to exploit geopolitics for familial enrichment.
If America had completely withdrawn from the world stage, the overthrow of Assad probably would not have happened.
Biden’s decision to support Ukraine with money and weapons forced Russia to expend huge military resources on their border, making it impossible to use them to prop up its patron, Assad. And whatever your opinion is about how Biden has supported the Israeli government—be it too much or too little—the reality is Israel had the military means to roll back Hezbollah, further weakening Assad.
And let’s not forget that Obama did not steer clear of Syria entirely. Obama sent Special Forces to eastern Syria to engage in counterterrorism and protect the Kurdish minority–hardly an example of isolationism. Now those troops are ensuring that Islamic State terrorists don’t gain a foothold. These are troops that Trump, during his first presidency, planned to withdraw—a move that would have benefited the autocratic Turkey, enemy of the Kurds—but failed to follow through.
(Last week, Trump posted on social media that America should have “nothing to do” with Syria, raising the possibility of an actual pullout next year.)
Like any president who has dealt with the Middle East, Obama was faced with a set of bad choices. He sought to make the least bad choice, by combining high internationalist principles with a realist assessment of the limitations of American power. As questionable as Obama’s decision was, it looks far wiser today.
Best,
Bill
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