WASHINGTON — For four years, President Obama has watched the civil war in Syria
with deep frustration. It is, he tells advisers, an intractable
situation, though he uses a grittier word. The best the United States
can do in the short term, he says, is manage it as much as possible.
But to Secretary of State John Kerry,
the mushrooming crisis cries out for American attention. No less aware
of the challenge, he seems willing to go anywhere, anytime, and meet
with anyone in pursuit of a resolution. The idea that it may be elusive,
or even impossible, is no deterrent.
The
disparate outlooks define the administration’s approach as the crisis
metastasizes from a blood bath that has cost more than 200,000 lives and
fueled a resurgence of Islamic radicalism into a new confrontation with
Russia
and a refugee crisis engulfing Europe. The Obama and Kerry views are
not incompatible, advisers say, but they shape the internal discussions
that drive the American response.
“There’s probably a psychological difference between the two,” said Frederic C. Hof, who worked on Syria
as a State Department official during Mr. Obama’s first term. “The
president is at peace determining that something is just a loser, that
if he touches it, he’s going to make it worse. Whereas Kerry has the
typical American engineering approach to things — there’s a problem,
there’s a way to fix it, somehow.”
Graphic
How Syrians Are Dying
Over four years of war has forced more than four million
to flee the country, fueling a migrant crisis in the Middle East and
Europe.
Syria,
so far, has defied every attempt to fix it, although critics argue the
administration has not tried hard enough. Mr. Obama demanded the
resignation of President Bashar al-Assad
without success. He threatened retaliation if Syria crossed a “red
line” by using chemical weapons against civilians, but aborted strikes
in favor of a negotiated removal of Mr. Assad’s arsenal.
The yearlong military campaign against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS
or ISIL, has in the meantime made little headway. Pentagon officials,
who recently acknowledged that only four to five American-trained Syrian
rebels were actually in the fight, said on Tuesday that they would keep
trying to recruit fighters but that for now “we have paused the actual
movement of new recruits from Syria.”
Mr.
Obama’s aides acknowledge the lack of progress, but argue that critics
do not have any better ideas beyond sending in more military forces.
Taking what he sees as the lesson of the Iraq war, Mr. Obama has made it
clear that American ground troops remain off the table, a position with
broad public support.
As
disturbing as the destruction in Syria has been, aides said Mr. Obama’s
main priority was to safeguard American interests, leaving him willing
to take direct action against the Islamic State but not Mr. Assad’s
government. While the president seeks to manage the crisis, aides said,
that does not mean he is hands off.
The
distinction between his approach and Mr. Kerry’s has played out in a
variety of areas, including Middle East peace talks and nuclear
negotiations with Iran. White House officials give Mr. Kerry plenty of
latitude to pursue deals they do not view as likely to come to fruition,
while keeping a distance. “That’s Kerry’s thing,” presidential aides
will say. But they will back him up if it appears he is gaining
traction, as he ultimately did with Iran.
The
new discussions with Russia are a case in point. For the last two
years, Mr. Obama has basically frozen out President Vladimir V. Putin
mainly over the Kremlin’s intervention in Ukraine, refusing any formal
meeting with him until agreeing to one on Monday in the wake of Russia’s
military deployment to Syria. By contrast, Mr. Kerry has kept up a
constant dialogue with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov.
Sometimes Mr. Kerry talks to him hours on end, multiple times in a week.
“Obama
seems to approach Syria with a professor’s detachment while Kerry —
perhaps because of his high regard for his own diplomatic acuity — sees
it as something he can solve,” said David Schenker, the director of the
Program on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy.
Obama Addresses U.N. General Assembly
President Obama said “there are no
easy answers to Syria” and called for the cooperation of all the states
in the United Nations General Assembly to end the fighting and help the
victims.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS on Publish Date September 28, 2015.
Photo by Michael Appleton for The New York Times.
Watch in Times Video »
To
some extent, this reflects the differing roles of a president and a
secretary of state. “It’s Kerry’s job to engage and explore the art of
the possible here,” said an adviser to the president who like other
officials did not want to be identified discussing internal dynamics.
“The president’s got a whole bunch of other things to worry about. He
needs to be able to delegate to Kerry to do this.”
That
does not mean Mr. Kerry is any more optimistic about the chances of
success in Syria. “I wouldn’t rule out the idea that Kerry has the same
intellectual view of it as Obama but feels his role as secretary of
state is to try anyway,” said Paul R. Pillar, a scholar at Georgetown
University and retired senior C.I.A. official.
Even
so, Mr. Kerry’s predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was rarely as
eager to jump into seemingly hopeless negotiations, and instead picked
those where she judged progress most possible. Mr. Kerry, by contrast,
does not hesitate. “He thinks by working the problem hard, with a little
creativity, a strategic approach — and the sheer force of his will — he
can create opportunities and make things happen,” a top adviser said.
At
times, Mr. Kerry in his zeal risks a backlash. When he went to Sochi,
Russia, this year to meet with Mr. Putin, the Russians spun the session
as a validation of the Kremlin’s role in the world, and Mr. Kerry was
accused of looking weak.
At
times, the White House and State Department do appear to be on
different pages. Even as Mr. Kerry delivered a blistering speech vowing
an armed response to Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons in 2013, Mr.
Obama decided to ask Congress first. And one of the biggest diplomatic
breakthroughs, the opening to Cuba, was negotiated not by the State
Department but by the White House.
But
some administration officials said privately that Mr. Obama and his
circle might be increasingly concerned about the impact of Syria on his
legacy. Asked on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC on Tuesday if history will
conclude that Mr. Obama did not do enough, Josh Earnest, the White House
press secretary, said: “It’s hard to say. That’s certainly the
possibility.”
“But,”
he added, “I also think that right now if we were having this
discussion and there were 75,000 U.S. military personnel on the ground
inside of Syria, the stakes for the United States would be a heck of a
lot higher.”
Now
that Russia is playing a more assertive role in Syria, Mr. Kerry hopes
to persuade the Kremlin to broker a political solution that ends with
Mr. Assad’s departure, although the Americans and Europeans concede that
it may not take place immediately.
Mr.
Kerry expressed hope again on Tuesday. “The agreement is that we want
to save Syria, keep it unified, keep it secular,” he said on the same
MSNBC program. “So surely in those very fundamental principles in which
we could agree, we should be able to find” common ground.
END QUOTE FROM:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/30/world/middleeast/john-kerry-rushes-in-where-obama-will-not-tread.
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