The Washington Post
How Obama bungled the Syrian revolution
By _Jackson Diehl_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/jackson-diehl/2011/02/24/ABccMXN_page.html) ,
October 14, 2012
Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans are doing their best to portray
the assault on the U.S. Consulate in Libya and its aftermath as a signal
foreign policy disaster for Barack Obama. But my bet is that when historians
look back on Obama’s mistakes in the last four years, they will focus on
something entirely different: his catastrophic mishandling of the revolution
in Syria.
The deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in
Benghazi were a calamity — but those losses were mainly the result of poor
security decisions by mid-level State Department officials, not policy choices
by
Obama. The president’s handling of Syria, on the other hand, exemplifies
every weakness in his foreign policy — from his excessive faith in “engaging”
troublesome foreign leaders to his insistence on multilateralism as an
end in itself to his self-defeating caution in asserting American power.
The result is not a painful but isolated setback, but an emerging strategic
disaster: a war in the heart of the Middle East that is steadily spilling
over to vital U.S. allies, such as Turkey and Jordan, and to volatile
neighbors, such as Iraq and Lebanon. _Al-Qaeda is far more active _
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-syrian-revolts-extremist-threat/20
12/10/07/94f6095e-10aa-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_story.html) in Syria than it
is in Libya — while more liberal and _secular forces are turning against
the United States _
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-syrian-resistance-needs-us-help/2012/10/05/0332ec44-0f2e-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_
story.html) because of its failure to help them. _More than 30,000 people_
(http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/26/us-syria-crisis-toll-idUSBRE88P12Y
20120926) — most of them civilians — have been killed, and the toll
mounts by the hundreds every day.
Of course, Obama is not solely responsible for this mess. But his serial
miscalculations have had the consistent if unintended effect of enabling Syria
’s Bashar al-Assad — first to avoid international isolation, then to go
on slaughtering his own population with impunity.
Obama’s Syria policy began in 2009 with the misguided idea of reaching out
to the dictator. Within a month of his inauguration, Obama reversed the
Bush administration’s approach of isolating Assad. He later reopened the U.S.
Embassy and dispatched senior envoys, such as _George Mitchell_
(http://www.majalla.com/eng/2011/01/article1778/bashar-al-assad-speaks-george-mitchell)
.
The problem with this policy was not just the distasteful courting of a
rogue regime but the willful disregard of the lessons absorbed by George W.
Bush, who also tried reaching out to Assad, only to _learn the hard way _
(http://www.haaretz.com/news/bush-my-patience-with-syria-s-assad-ran-out-a-long-
time-ago-1.235630) that he was an irredeemable thug. Yet Obama insisted on
reversing Bush’s policy of distancing the United States from strongmen
like Assad and Hosni Mubarak — a monumental miscalculation.
When the uprising against Assad began in March of last year, the
administration’s first reaction was to predict that he could be induced to
coopt it.
“Many . . . believe he’s a reformer,” said Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton. That illusion caused the administration to stand by for months while
Assad’s security forces gunned down what were then peaceful pro-democracy
marchers; not until August 2011 did _Obama say _
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/assad-must-go-obama-says/2011/08/18/gIQAelheOJ_story.html)
that
Assad should “step aside.”
By then Syria was already tipping into civil war. The State Department’s
Syria experts recognized the peril: If Assad were not overthrown quickly,
_they warned in congressional testimony_
(http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-112shrg75019/pdf/CHRG-112shrg75019.pdf) ,
the country could tip into a
devastating sectarian war that would empower jihadists and spread to
neighboring
countries. But Obama_ rejected suggestions by several senators _
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-the-us-should-intervene-in-syria/2012/03/15/g
IQAGbpSLS_story.html) that he lead an intervention. Instead he committed a
second major error, by adopting a policy of seeking to broker a Syrian
solution through the United Nations. “The best thing we can do,” _he said
last March_
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/03/14/remarks-president-obama-and-prime-minister-cameron-united-kingdom-joint-)
, “is to unify
the international community.”
As countless observers _correctly predicted_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-uns-unworkable-plan-for-syria/2012/03/22/gIQARZiPUS_story.html)
, the subsequent U.N. mission of Kofi Annan was_ doomed from the
beginning_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/time-for-us-leadership-on-syria/2012/05/29/gJQARdX0zU_story.html)
. When the White House could no longer
deny that reality, it turned to an equally fantastical gambit: Vladi­mir
Putin, it argued, could be persuaded to abandon his support of Assad and
force him to step down. The nadir of this diplomacy may have been reached on
June 30, when Clinton _cheerfully predicted _
(http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2012/06/194337.htm) that the Kremlin had
“decided to get on one horse,
and it’s the horse that would back a transition plan” removing Assad.
Needless to say, Putin did no such thing. The war went on; thousands more
died. For the past three months, Obama’s policy has become a negative: He is
simply opposed to any use of U.S. power. Fixed on his campaign slogan that
“the tide of war is receding” in the Middle East, Obama claims that
intervention would only make the conflict worse — and then watches as it
spreads
to NATO ally Turkey and draws in hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters.
No doubt it’s easier for Romney and the Republicans to talk about the death
of an ambassador in a terrorist attack than to ask war-weary Americans to
think about this. But it is Syria that is Obama’s greatest failure; it will
haunt whomever occupies the Oval Office next year.
--
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