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Obama’s Guns of August
President Obama will likely bomb Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria. Here is the logic—and limits—for the president’s plan of attack.
Syrian army tanks in Damascus on Saturday. Obama may be considering a strike against Assad's regime.
Photo by STR/AFP/Getty Images
Photo by STR/AFP/Getty Images
It seems likely that President Obama will bomb Syria sometime in the coming weeks.
His top civilian and military advisers are meeting in the White House
on Saturday to discuss options. American warships are heading toward
the area; those already there, at least one of which had been scheduled
for a port call, are standing by. Most telling perhaps is a story in the
New York Times,
noting that Obama’s national-security aides are studying the 1999 air
war in Kosovo as a possible blueprint for action in Syria.
In that conflict 14 years ago, ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, an
autonomous province of Serbia, were being massacred by Serbian president
Slobodan Milosevic. President Bill Clinton, after much reluctance,
decided to intervene, but couldn’t get authorization from the U.N.
Security Council, where Russia—Serbia’s main ally—was certain to veto
any resolution on the use of force. So Clinton turned to NATO, an
appropriate instrument to deal with a crisis in the middle of Europe.
The parallels with Syria are obvious. In this case too, an American
president, after much reluctance, seems to be considering the use of
force but can’t get authorization from the U.N. because of Russia’s (and
China’s) certain veto. The pressures to act have swelled in recent
days, with the growing evidence—gleaned not just from Syrian rebels but
also from independent physicians’ groups and U.S. intelligence—that Assad’s forces have used chemical weapons, killing more than 1,000 civilians.
But where can Obama turn for the legitimacy of a multinational
alliance? Nobody has yet said, but a possible answer is, once again,
NATO—this time led perhaps by Turkey, the alliance’s easternmost member,
whose leaders are very concerned by the growing death toll and
instability in Syria just across their southern border.
The weapons that NATO used—and, more important, did not use—in Kosovo
are also likely to appeal to President Obama. Clinton was insistent
that no U.S. ground troops be sent to aid the Albanians and told his
commanders to keep from losing a single American in the fight, if
possible.
And so, the Kosovo campaign was, from America’s vantage, strictly an
air war. (Just two U.S. servicemen were killed, and not in battle but in
an Apache helicopter that crashed during an exercise.) The air war went
on for what seemed, at the time, an eternity—78 days. More than 1,000
NATO planes (including the first Predator drones) flew a total of 38,000
combat sorties. The bombs—most of them dropped from altitudes of 10,000
feet and higher, to avoid air-defense batteries—seemed to have no
effect on Milosevic’s actions until the final days of the campaign, and
so NATO’s commanders kept adjusting and expanding the target list, which
ranged from military bases, factories, and electrical power plants to
individual Serbian tanks on the battlefield.
Bad intelligence led to a few horrific mistakes: the bombing of an
Albanian caravan, which was confused with a Serbian convoy, and the
Chinese embassy in Belgrade, which was thought to be a military relay
station. In all, “collateral damage” over the 78 days killed an
estimated 1,200 civilians
In the end, though, the war was won. The strategic goals were to stop
the fighting, force Milosevic to pull back his army, restore Kosovo as
an autonomous Albanian enclave, and insert NATO troops—30,000 of them—as
peacekeepers. All the goals were met.
During and after the war, many Republicans and some retired U.S.
military officers lambasted Clinton for relying so heavily on NATO. They
called it a war “by committee” and claimed that it could have been won
much more quickly had America gone it alone. But Gen. Wesley Clark, who
was NATO chief at the time, later argued in his book, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo and the Future of Combat,
that the multilateral approach was necessary for two reasons: to give
the war legitimacy (especially given the lack of a U.N. resolution) and
to counter whatever resistance the Russians might muster (in the end,
Milosevic surrendered when he realized that, despite earlier promises,
Moscow was not coming to his rescue).
Let’s say that Obama agrees that NATO could be the key force of an
air campaign in Syria—and that enough NATO members agree to go along.
(In Kosovo, every member of the alliance, except Greece, played some
kind of role.) What would be the war’s objectives?
This is the crucial question of any military intervention. It should
be asked, and answered, before a decision is made to intervene—along
with a calculation of how much effort might be needed to accomplish
those objectives and whether the cost is worth the benefit.
A few things are clear from Obama’s record as commander-in-chief: He
tends to resist the use of military force. When he sees it as
unavoidable, he tends to steer clear of grandiose objectives, and he
demands that allied nations come along, even take the lead, especially
if their interests in the conflict outweigh ours.
If Obama does use force in Syria, he will do so because of clear
evidence that Assad’s regime has killed lots of civilians with chemical
weapons. Two considerations will likely drive his decision, if it comes
to that. First, he has drawn a “red line” on this issue, publicly, at
least five times in the last year, and failure to follow
through—especially after the latest revelations—would send confusing
signals, at best, about U.S. resolve and credibility. Second, failure to
respond would erode, perhaps obliterate, the taboo that the
international community has placed on chemical weapons (especially nerve
gas) since the end of World War I. I suspect that this factor may be
more pertinent to Obama, who takes the issue of international norms very
seriously.
So the No. 1 objective of a U.S. air campaign against Syria would be
the seemingly limited one of deterring or preventing Assad’s regime from
using chemical weapons again. However, Obama’s top generals and
intelligence officers would likely tell him that they can’t do much to
fulfill this mission. They probably don’t know where the remaining
chemical stockpile is located, so they wouldn’t be able to destroy it.
And the notion of using military force to deter some future action is a
bit vague: It’s unclear whether it would have any effect on Assad. Obama
would also have to specify the additional damage he’d inflict if Assad
ignored the message, and he’d have to be reasonably sure ahead of time
that that damage would be enough to deter him from taking the dare.
A more extravagant, but possibly more feasible, target of an air
strike might be Assad’s regime itself—with the objective of destroying
it or at least severely weakening it.
In an Aug. 5 letter to Congress, made public just this past week, Gen. Martin Dempsey,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made a comment pertinent to this
point. He said that if Assad’s regime were to topple, none of the
myriad Syrian rebel factions are currently in a position to fill the
power vacuum. Nor, if any of these factions did come to power, do they
seem inclined to promote U.S. interests. For that reason, he expressed
skepticism about the good of taking the side of a particular rebel
faction or, presumably, sending its fighters more arms.
However, Dempsey also said in this letter that U.S. military
intervention could tip the balance against Assad in the Syrian civil
war—by, among other things, destroying his military assets and
infrastructure as well as reducing the flow of arms from Iran, Russia,
and others.
President Obama seemed on the same page when he said, during an interview aired this weekend on CNN,
that while the Syrian situation is “troublesome,” his job as president
is “to think through what we do from the perspective of … national
interests.” He added, “Sometimes what we’ve seen is that folks will call
for immediate action, jumping into stuff that does not turn out well,
gets us mired in very difficult situations, can result in us being drawn
into very expensive, difficult, costly interventions that actually
breed more resentment in the region.”
But Obama also said that if the evidence clearly shows that Assad has
used chemical weapons “on a large scale,” that would “start getting to
some core national interests … in terms of … making sure that weapons or
mass destruction are not proliferating as well as needing to protect
our allies, our bases in the region.”
This marked the first time that Obama has mentioned “core national
interests” in the context of Syria. It may signal rising pressures to do
something—and, again, Kosovo, where Clinton switched his views on
intervention dramatically, serves as an intriguing parallel.
In his letter, Gen. Dempsey wrote, “We can destroy the Syrian air
force” but he also warned that doing so could “escalate and potentially
further commit the United States to the conflict.”
That would be the risk, and it’s the sort of risk that Obama is
generally inclined to avoid. There have been some exceptions, most
notably in Libya, where he concluded that the important thing was to get
rid of Qaddafi and to let those on the ground—aided to some extent by
the United States but more by allies with bigger stakes in the
region—settle the aftermath.
This may be the position he takes in Syria, in consultation with
Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other interested parties, which would
play some role along with the NATO command. If he decides to use force,
it’s the only position he could reasonably take. Given the threat, the
humanitarian crisis, America’s standing in the region, and the
importance of preserving international norms against the use of weapons
of mass destruction, the best option might be to destroy huge chunks of
the Syrian military, throw Assad’s regime off balance, and let those on
the ground settle the aftermath. Maybe this would finally compel Assad
to negotiate seriously; maybe it would compel the Russians to backpedal
on their support (as NATO’s campaign in Kosovo compelled them to soften
their support for Milosevic). Or maybe it would just sire chaos and
violence. But there’s plenty of both now, and there might be less—a road
to some sort of settlement might be easier to plow—if Assad were
severely weakened or no longer around.
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