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 in
Syria than it is in Libya — while more liberal and secular forces are turning against the
United States because of its failure to help them. More than 30,000 people — 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.
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 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 that Assad should “step
aside.â€
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, 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 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, “is to unify
the international community.â€
As countless observers correctly predicted, the subsequent
U.N. mission of Kofi Annan was doomed from the beginning. 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 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.
