An argument I would expect to lose
As the President contemplates the military options for Syria, advice from the commentariat is disparate. Richard Haass would like targeted and time-limited strikes. Eliot Cohen wants a much broader and sustained attack. The difference is all about goals, as Rob Satloff rightly says, and I imagine most of the discussion inside the Administration is also.
While much of the news coverage is concerned with which weapons will be used against which targets and when, the military options need to serve broader goals. Here are the obvious possibilities:
1. Punish the Asad regime for its use of chemical weapons and deter it from another chemical attack.
Punishment and deterrence are on almost everyone’s list. The problem is that we don’t know what it will take to deter the regime from even greater use of chemical weapons. Escalation is a serious possibility. It was Milosevic’s initial reaction to the NATO bombing in 1999. He accelerated ethnic cleansing of Albanians from Kosovo. Bashar al Asad might do likewise, even attacking Israel or just throwing as many chemical weapons at his opponents as possible, in an effort to use them before losing them. To achieve the goal, President Obama has to be prepared to escalate in return if that happens.
2. Restore and enhance American credibility, not only as seen from Damascus but also as seen from Tehran.
Enhancing credibility requires something more: Tehran would need to see the attacks not only as punishing but also as highly effective in hitting the right targets, even when they are well hidden or under ground. Shock and awe will not be sufficient. Accuracy and effectiveness will be needed. Otherwise the credibility of an American attack on the Iranian nuclear program will suffer, making it far less likely that a negotiated solution will be found.
3. Tilt the battlefield back toward the Syrian opposition, enabling it to hold its own against regime security forces so a negotiated end to the war has some chance of success.
Tilting the battlefield is a far broader goal requiring a willingness to attack many more targets (Syrian air force, Scuds and command, control and communications) and to continue for as long as it might take. Some argue that it can be achieved more readily by arming the “right” opposition, but that has proven cumbersome and difficult. It will be difficult to know when the goal has been achieved, as declarations by the regime of willingness to negotiate are already cheaper by the dozen. It will also be difficult to followup a successful negotiated outcome in a way that serves US interests.
4. Enable the opposition to win.
This would require an open-ended commitment, like the one NATO eventually made in Libya to destroy the Qaddafi regime. Bomb until he is gone. Few are arguing for this in Washington, even if many hope it will happen.
Everything depends on a clear directive from the President (known in this context as the National Command Authority) specifying what the United States is trying to achieve. That will shape the diplomacy, consultations with Congress, public affairs, choice of weapons, targeting, duration, and willingness to escalate, as well as the cost, collateral damage, damage to relations with Russia and China and other negative consequences.
So far as I am able to tell, the President has not yet made this vital decision, but he clearly leans in the narrower, shorter, direction. 1 and 2 are likely the most appealing to him. It wouldn’t be worth doing anything without achieving those goals. His past reluctance suggests he won’t go for 4, which would be hard to sustain and even harder to follow up if it were achieved.
The big question is 3, which the State Department will argue for but the Pentagon will likely say is a bridge too far, and a hard one to target at that. I’d lean with State, because long-term US interests in Syria require that the war end sooner rather than later, but I would anticipate losing the argument.
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3 thoughts on “An argument I would expect to lose”
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No doubt that Al Asad deserves to be severely punished for atrocities committed against innocent civilians, even aside from the alleged use of chemical weapons. At the same time, the mere fall of his regime is not necessarily going to mean the end of war and violence, given that a number of rebel factions are hostile to one another (not to mention the possibility of Syria ending up split into several statelets).
Even American boots on the ground – which Washington hopes to avoid at all costs – would not guarantee stabilization of the country (as the examples of Iraq and Afghanistan have shown), much less that the good guys from the opposition would prevail and eventually come into power.
A U.S. strategic interest in toppling the Al Asad regime is to limit Iranian influence in the region, particularly in the Levant. But there is a more than tangible risk that the post-Asad Syria could fall into the hands of Sunni extremists and thus become a venue for transnational jihadists. In the end, the whole issue comes down to the question of which of the two evils is the lesser one from the American viewpoint.
Why is no one concerned with why Assad would choose to use chemical weapons in a civil war he is winning WITHOUT using them? The drums of war are beating so I guess common sense isn’t of much value. It does seem to me that you need to believe in mass, worldwide insanity for any of these preemptive wars to make any sense though. Our government and its lapdog media keep chanting “give war a chance”. Again. And again. And yet again. It’s all like some perverse version of Groundhog Day mixed with the Twilight Zone.
Thank you David Gondek.