Obama's Syria Mistake, Ten Years Later
The problem with believing in an "arc of the moral universe"
I am angry as I write this. I have been angry about this subject for ten years. I am angry at a man I admire and respect. I am angry at him for failing to do good when he had the chance. I believe he bears part of the blame for the tragedies that followed his failure.
Barack Obama is well known for invoking Martin Luther King’s famous dictum that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I can understand the value of this sentiment, even though I am skeptical that such an arc exists. But believing that things will turn out alright in the end can easily become an excuse for inaction. Optimism can lead to complacency, with disastrous consequences.
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Ten years ago, Obama stood in front of cameras, addressing the use of chemical weapons by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. On August 21, 2013, Syria’s dictator, increasingly depraved in his attempts to defeat the revolts against his brutal reign, unleashed these weapons against his own people, in the Damascus suburb of East Ghouta. U.S. intelligence estimates reported more than 1,400 civilians killed, including more than 400 children. Not members of the Free Syrian Army carrying rifles, but innocent civilians.
Like every human being with a conscience, Obama was outraged by Assad’s actions. In 2011, in the first year of the Arab spring, as autocrats were falling and freedom appeared to be on the march across the Middle East, he had publicly called for Assad to relinquish power. While not committed officially to helping to overthrow him, Obama gave reasons to think he might. He had led NATO in using military force to help Libyans overthrow Muammar Qaddafi - still the right decision - and had pressured Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak to step aside in the face of mass protests. And famously, in 2012, he declared that use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime would be a “red line” for him.
Thus, when Obama announced that he could not let Assad’s barbaric action stand without retaliation, I expected him to announce an immediate use of force. I remembered Bill Clinton leading NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, where American and allied power had stopped Slobodan Milosevic’s massacre of an ethnic minority under his control. I remembered Obama’s own use of force in Libya. Here, I thought, he would bring American power to bear once more in the name of basic human decency.
But no. Instead, Obama announced that, while he intended to launch strikes, he was seeking congressional authorization for action. I was shocked. There was no need for him to do this. He had the power to inflict pain on a barbaric regime he had stated he wanted to see ended, at little to no risk to American forces, and he was opting not to. If there is indeed an arc to the moral universe, the President of the United States had a perfect opportunity to bend it in the direction of justice. And he blew it.
There are precedents for U.S. presidents using force without seeking explicit congressional approval. While not all of them have been good ideas - the overthrow of the unfriendly but harmless government of Grenada comes to mind - others have been justified. Ronald Reagan struck at Qaddafi for supporting terrorist attacks against Americans in Europe. Bill Clinton repeatedly launched air and missile strikes in Iraq to keep Saddam Hussein in check. Why, I wondered, would Obama not take the opportunity, even for a brief period, to inflict serious damage on another violent tyrant, especially one who had crossed a bright red line? His inaction would leave the world worse off.
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When congressional support did not materialize, Obama turned to a man who seemed to offer him a way out of his predicament: Vladimir Putin. The American president accepted the Russian dictator’s offer of helping remove chemical weapons from his ally in Syria. He thus created an opening for Assad and Putin. Not only did Assad not truly give up his chemical weapons (his forces have repeatedly used them since 2013), but America gave up on the chance to help opposition groups like the Free Syrian Army endure as viable alternatives to both Assad and the jihadists in Syria. The forces of decency were deprived of an important ally, one who could have weakened their foe with missiles and bombs, as Clinton did to Milosevic.
Instead, the power vacuum was filled first by ISIS - Assad could claim he was fighting ISIS when in fact he aligned with them against the non-jihadist opposition - and then by Putin in 2015. Devastating Russian air strikes on Syrian civilians have followed since, including on hospitals. Putin also benefitted politically from the 2015 refugee crisis, in which Syrians fleeing his bombs figured prominently. That crisis, of course, also helped give us Brexit, Donald Trump’s victory, and other triumphs of the populist right.
Obama would probably have been happy to leave the Middle East completely behind. He particularly wanted to focus more attention and resources on the Indo-Pacific region. But while it is understandable to want to make Asia a higher priority - especially given that China is the the greatest long-term nation-state threat to American security interests - that does not automatically entail ignoring the Middle East. It was always a false choice.
This became clear a mere year later. ISIS - whom he had initially dismissed as the “J.V. team” of Islamist insurgents - seized control of large swaths of Iraq and Syria by August 2014. They were in the process of committing genocide against Iraq’s Yazidi population when Obama - perhaps remembering the virtue of humanitarian intervention - launched air strikes to prevent that from happening. But while he halted a mass slaughter of innocents, the damage of his decision not to strike Assad a year earlier was already underway.
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Obama seemed to be so confident in this moral arc that he thought he didn’t need to do much to bend it himself, despite being the most powerful person on the planet. Progress will happen, he seemed to think, so it’s not on me to make it happen. That may be why he aligned himself with Saudi Arabia during its dreadful war in Yemen. That may also explain his infamous statement that all he needed in the Middle East were “a few smart autocrats.” It’s okay if the people of this region get slaughtered, he seemed to be saying, so I can focus on more important business. It will work out in the end.
There were other occasions during his eight years in office where I disagreed with Obama, despite my admiration for him. I wish he had not signed off on sequestration, and had instead confronted Tea Party Republicans over the federal budget the way Clinton confronted Newt Gingrich. I wish his administration’s guidelines for tackling sexual assault on college campuses had not veered into the direction of threatening due process. And when Abdel Fatah al-Sisi overthrew Egypt’s democracy, I wish Obama had permanently ended U.S. aid to Egypt, rather than merely suspending it for two years.
In each of the above cases, though, I could see the logic of what Obama was doing, even as I wished he were doing differently. Syria stands out as the issue where I was genuinely, deeply angry at the president I admired. He allowed himself to be limited unnecessarily. We will never know for certain how his use of force would have affected the Syrian conflict - every decision by a powerful political actor involves risk - but it can scarcely have ended worse than what actually happened when he chose to stand on the sidelines. When Obama chose not to bend the arc, Assad and Putin bent it instead.