On August 30th, 2013 President Barack Obama confounded many of the lessor hawks and full blown Neocons within and without his administration by not taking vigorous military action against the regime of Bashar al-Assad following the chemical weapons attack in Ghouta, Syria nine days earlier. His friend, and Secretary of State, John Kerry, had, only hours earlier, spoken at The State Department making a compelling case for immediate action:
“My friends, it matters here if nothing is done. It matters if the world speaks out in condemnation and then nothing happens.
America should feel confident and gratified that we are not alone in our condemnation and we are not alone in our will to do something about it and to act.
The world is speaking out. And many friends stand ready to respond. The Arab League pledged, quote, “to hold the Syrian regime fully responsible for this crime.” The Organization for Islamic Cooperation condemned the regime and said we needed, quote, “to hold the Syrian government legally and morally accountable for this heinous crime.”
His former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton and others in his State and Defense Departments were urging him to punish Assad and his military for the heinous gas attacks which left as many as 1700 Syrians dead.
In the Senate inveterate Neocons like John McCain and Lindsey Graham were goading him to action with their usual bellicose and semi-informed pronouncements.
But, at the last minute, the President decided to ask Congress to weigh in by authorizing the use of Military Force, which he had to know would effectively table the action as the Congress in question was unlikely to approve his any initiative, short of renaming the White House the Whites Only House.
What caused the President to stay his hand?
Attacking Syria would be supported by many, if certainly not all, of the key players in the Pentagon, by a Press ever eager to sling laudatory ink in the wake of munitions flung by a resolute Commander - In- Chief, by the ever present Neocons in the permanent Government, whom his thoughtful foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes had taken to calling derisively The Blob.
Assad certainly deserved a wake up call; in defense of his minority governing coalition of Alawi and Druze Muslims, Christians and secularists who resist living under majority Sunni Muslim rule, Assad has brutally responded to the uprising in his country (he would eventually join with his Russian allies in a bombing campaign that has nearly wiped Allepo off the map) and had established a system of penal facilities that could best be described as medieval in it’s methods. His brutality is matched in ferocity, if not political strength, by that of his enemies, ISIL, Wahhabi extremists who seek to bring all of the Sunni Muslims in Syria and Iraq under their control (and, perhaps, Saudi, influence), The al-Nusra Front (also known as al-Qaeda in Syria) and Turkey who seek more influence in Northern Syria to better control Kurdish Separatists who threaten their own borders.
The Syrian Civil War is such a bloody labyrinth of intersecting cultural, national and religious conflicting interests that one can understand the reluctance of the measured and careful Obama to brashly commit the United States to becoming a determinant factor in it’s outcome. As fervently as the Neocons desire Assad’s removal, who will then insure that a triumphant Isil or al-Nusra will not decimate the non-Sunni populations of Syria, as they have other communities that have fallen under their control? Assad’s ally, Iran, has played a critical role in defending the U.S. installed government in Baghdad. What would happen there? These are things that weigh on a Presidents mind, one who bears responsibility rather than brandishing pet ideological theories or think tank constructed models.
Yes, the pressure to DO Something in Syria was formidable that Friday in 2013 and yet the President balked.
Why?
Seymour Hersh
“Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria’s infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack.
For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’
The joint chiefs also knew that the Obama administration’s public claims that only the Syrian army had access to sarin were wrong. The American and British intelligence communities had been aware since the spring of 2013 that some rebel units in Syria were developing chemical weapons. On 20 June analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’. (According to a Defense Department consultant, US intelligence has long known that al-Qaida experimented with chemical weapons, and has a video of one of its gas experiments with dogs.)”
The New York Times reports that ISIL has used Chemical Weapons at least 52 times in Iraq and Syria since 2014. And though this report specifies chlorine and sulfur mustard agents (and certainly does not absolve Assad from their use) can we be sure, in light of The Tokyo Subway attack in 1995 that these much better financed terrorist organizations have not obtained it for use in provoking the United States into an ill considered response?
Not that this will matter much to the current occupant of the White house.
President-Not_Obama will strengthen his hold on power by any means he can.
“Our administration never would have gotten this done in 48 hours,” one former senior official of the Obama administration told me. “It’s a complete indictment of Obama.”
“I feel like finally we have done the right thing,” Anne-Marie Slaughter, who served as Obama’s first-term chief of policy planning at the State Department and long publicly urged a more forceful response to Assad’s horrific attacks on civilians during the six years of war that have wracked Syria, told me. “The years of hypocrisy just hurt us all. It undermined the U.S., it undermined the world order.”
Slaughter, now the head of the New America Foundation and a major backer of Trump’s defeated opponent Hillary Clinton last November, tweeted, “Donald Trump has done the right thing on Syria. Finally!! After years of useless handwringing in the face of atrocities.” I later asked her if it was awkward to be cheering for Trump now. “I’m just glad to see it,” she said. “It was the right thing.”
The Neocons have gotten the President they wanted.
I think we have lost the one we need.
