Needed: creative diplomats

An attack to punish Syria for its use of chemical weapons is on hold due to British parliament reservations.  The American Congress also has reasonable questions it wants answered.  The P5 (that’s the veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council, namely US, UK, France, Russia and China) met yesterday and failed to agree to a draft UK resolution authorizing all necessary means.  President Obama is hesitating, or at least hoping for better conditions.  He still has to present the case for military action to the American people, who haven’t forgotten the Bush Administration claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (and some even remember President Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin incident).  The UN chemical weapons inspectors are scheduled to leave Syria this weekend.  If military action is in the cards, the earliest it is likely to happen is next week.  The President is supposed to be at the G20 summit in Saint Petersburg September 5/6.  It might be the better part of valor to wait until after that.

So there is time for diplomacy.  The deal President Obama should be offering to Moscow is this:  agree to implement the Geneva June 2012 communique, which calls for Bashar al Asad to hand executive power to a government approved by both the opposition and the regime, and we will desist from a military attack. That would save Russia the embarrassment of another Western military intervention without UN Security Council approval.

Iran, where there is admittedly some concern about the use of chemical weapons, might still prefer a military attack, because it would give its military a good deal of intelligence on current American capabilities.  But if Russia pushes Bashar aside, Tehran will want to shift its support to ensure continuation of its alliance with Damascus.  More than likely, it will put its chips down on one of the security force commanders, hoping that he can maintain the autocracy even if Bashar is a goner.

The trick is that a credible offer of a political solution can only be made if the threat of military attack is real and imminent.  Otherwise Moscow can simply ignore the deal.  Nor can the threat of military attack be a one-off, limited strike of the sort President Obama seems to think appropriate.  To get Bashar to step aside, or to get Moscow to push him aside, will require a near certainty that failure to do so will lead to a military attack that tilts the battlefield against him and guarantees that his days are numbered.  The notion that diplomacy will work without an “existential” threat is delusional.  Diplomacy and military strategy have to be fully synchronized.

Won’t a short, focused military attack do the trick?  No, it won’t.  President Reagan tried that to retaliate against Libya for a terrorist attack on American service people in Germany.  It had no serious impact on Qaddafi, except to make him a a bit crazier.  Nor did the Clinton-era attack on an Al Qaeda facility in Afghanistan do anything to deter Osama Bin Laden.  Pin pricks can be useless at best, counter-productive at worst, if they signal weakness or precipitate escalation.  Bashar al Asad may well react to a well-targeted and narrow attack by using more chemical weapons.

The diplomats should focus then on two things:

• Making the military threat as real, broad and open-ended as possible by close consultations with whatever coalition of the willing can be hammered together over the next week;
• Getting Moscow to realize that it stands to lose more by backing Asad than by pushing him aside.

I doubt an effort along these lines will succeed, mainly because of the difficulties in mounting a credible existential threat.  But that’s where creative diplomats come in.