Obama on the path to success in Syria
By Fareed Zakaria, WashPost, Published: September 11
Whatever the twisted path, whether by design or accident, the Obama administration has ended up in a better place on Syria than looked possible even days ago. The president was wise to take up and begin to test the Russian offer to remove and possibly destroy Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons. In fact, the offer has forced some clarity from a sometimes muddled U.S. foreign policy. For the president to turn this situation into a foreign policy success, he will have to maintain that clarity.
There are three distinct arguments for intervention in Syria, which are sometimes mixed together in calls for action. The first is regime change, which would require policies to help the rebels topple Bashar al-Assad’s government. The second is humanitarian, to do something to stop the enormous sufferingthere. The third is simply to underscore and enforce an international norm against the use of chemical weapons.
President Obama has now firmly committed himself to the third — and only the third — objective. In his speech Tuesday, he rejected the first, explaining that the United States “cannot resolve someone else’s civil war through force, particularly after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.” His proposed military action would be even smaller in scale than the Libyan strikes, he noted, and, thus, would be unlikely to shift the balance of power much in Syria.
Obama’s proposals are also not likely to reduce the humanitarian crisis. Even his most muscular proposals — airstrikes and aid to the rebels — would probably intensify the conflict and increase the number of people killed or displaced. (Several studies of past military interventions, including as recently as from 2012, confirm this observation.) Nearly all of the deaths in Syria have come through conventional weapons and, as Time magazine’s Michael Crowley notes, “The images of children crippled by conventional bombs were sickening, too.”
(More here.)
Whatever the twisted path, whether by design or accident, the Obama administration has ended up in a better place on Syria than looked possible even days ago. The president was wise to take up and begin to test the Russian offer to remove and possibly destroy Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons. In fact, the offer has forced some clarity from a sometimes muddled U.S. foreign policy. For the president to turn this situation into a foreign policy success, he will have to maintain that clarity.
There are three distinct arguments for intervention in Syria, which are sometimes mixed together in calls for action. The first is regime change, which would require policies to help the rebels topple Bashar al-Assad’s government. The second is humanitarian, to do something to stop the enormous sufferingthere. The third is simply to underscore and enforce an international norm against the use of chemical weapons.
President Obama has now firmly committed himself to the third — and only the third — objective. In his speech Tuesday, he rejected the first, explaining that the United States “cannot resolve someone else’s civil war through force, particularly after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.” His proposed military action would be even smaller in scale than the Libyan strikes, he noted, and, thus, would be unlikely to shift the balance of power much in Syria.
Obama’s proposals are also not likely to reduce the humanitarian crisis. Even his most muscular proposals — airstrikes and aid to the rebels — would probably intensify the conflict and increase the number of people killed or displaced. (Several studies of past military interventions, including as recently as from 2012, confirm this observation.) Nearly all of the deaths in Syria have come through conventional weapons and, as Time magazine’s Michael Crowley notes, “The images of children crippled by conventional bombs were sickening, too.”
(More here.)
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