It’s one thing for US President Barack Obama to say he made the “right decision” when he refused to launch airstrikes against President Bashar Al-Assad after the Syrian leader used sarin gas against his people. It is quite another for Obama to say, in a recent interview, that he was “proud” of the moment he pulled back after warning that the use of poison gas by the Syrian regime was a red line.
In August 2012, Obama warned the Al-Assad regime that if it used chemical weapons against its own people, the US would respond with force. One year later, the regime did exactly that, and the US was on the verge of launching retaliatory air strikes when Obama backed off. Suddenly, he decided that this plan should be sent to Congress where nothing is ever done. In the end, the US, with the help of Russia, secured an international agreement requiring Syria to give up much of its chemical weapons stockpile. The US never mounted military strikes, and the administration claimed it had used diplomacy rather than force to achieve its objective. Obama said several factors influenced his decision to go, then not go. His intelligence agencies, he says, could not guarantee that the sarin gas detected in Syria had indeed been deployed by government forces. He was also concerned that the executive authority over military action had grown too expansive. Obama also said he believed that missile strikes would not in themselves take Al-Assad or his chemical weapons out and would at the same time, put the lives of American soldiers at risk in a conflict the American people did not believe was worth dying for. The most Obama would do afterwards was authorize the CIA to train and fund Syrian rebels.
Obama raises valid points, but the about-face was a pivotal foreign policy moment which served as a key test of whether he would back up his words with military action. Because he did not, the reversal has become a prime example of the US losing its credibility.
At the outset of the Syrian uprising, in early 2011, the rebels, drawn from the ranks of ordinary citizens, needed America’s support. But Obama entered the White House on the promise of ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and pulling US troops out of both countries. He had never intended to open a new front of conflict.
In his first term, he came to believe that only a handful of threats in the Middle East conceivably warranted direct US military intervention. These included the threat posed by Al‑Qaeda and a nuclear-armed Iran. The danger to the US posed by the Al-Assad regime did not rise to the level of these challenges.
But the gas attack was to have changed the dynamics. In its attempt to put down what was then a two-year-old rebellion, the Syrian regime in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta killed more than 1,400 civilians with sarin gas. The red line had been crossed. But an attack on Syria was unsanctioned by international law or by Congress and the American people and most big powers seemed unenthusiastic about a Syria intervention. Two things then happened. Al-Assad got away with murder. And the failure to help build a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against him left a big vacuum which the likes of Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) have now filled.
Obama might not have been bluffing. However, he badly miscalculated when he drew a red line on chemical weapons but was not ready or willing to enforce it. The U-turn directly affected America’s credibility and whether autocrats would still believe the US when it said it would do something. The world watched to see if Al-Assad could get away with it. He did.
