The language of diplomacy is precise to a fault. Diplomats negotiate for days over the placement of commas, parse every word, and speak slowly and carefully in measured tones. The slightest misstatement or ill-considered word can lead to an international incident. Throughout the Arab Spring, as governments rose and fell and protests turned violent, even deadly, the Obama administration and the State Department had been careful to tread lightly. In a changing region, one that has led to more wars than any other in the world, the United States, stuck between ruthless dictators and unpredictable opposition groups, some of whom had close ties to terrorists, saw only a minefield. “Caution” was the word of the day.
But one country, the most deadly and most dangerous of those swept up into the Arab Spring, stood out: Syria. And in one of the most crucial battlefields of the Arab Spring, the United States was caught off guard and hamstrung by the off-the-cuff comments of its own leaders, Barack Obama and John Kerry, Hillary Clinton’s successor as secretary of state. For all the caution the White House and the State Department had exercised, buzzwords and flippant remarks—unforced diplomatic errors—gave America’s geopolitical rivals an opening.
Syria plays an important role in the puzzle that makes up the Middle East. Egypt’s military has always had a good relationship with the United States—and thus we could tolerate military control. Libya and Tunisia, farther to the west, are more traditionally influenced by the European powers that once colonized them. Yemen, a haven for a potent branch of al Qaeda, had a government so weak that it became a charity case of the U.S. military and the Central Intelligence Agency.
But Syria stood at a crossroads, both geopolitically and strategically. Geographically, Syria served as a buffer between its patron state, Iran; Iraq, where thousands of militants streamed across borders to join the fighting; and West-friendly Lebanon, Jordan, and, most important, Israel. The Israeli military had already destroyed a site purported to be the beginnings of a nuclear power plant inside Syria, and America’s most important ally in the Middle East wouldn’t stand for a neighbor run by Islamic militants.
Complicating matters was Russia’s involvement. Russia, and before it the Soviet Union, has cultivated its relationship with Syria for decades. The two countries do billions of dollars in business annually, and Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, allows the Russian navy to maintain a base at Tartus, the country’s only military outpost in the Mediterranean.
U.S. relations with Syria have been tricky; it’s a country that the United States has at times had strategic relationships with, even if neither country trusted the other. Assad’s father and the first Bush administration had famously “okay” relations. And at the start of the Obama presidency, there was talk of a reset in Syrian relations; to back up the intention, the president even named an ambassador in February 2010, Robert Ford. But his nomination was held up by the Senate, and by the time he was confirmed, via recess appointment at the end of 2010, Syria was just weeks away from the start of a civil war, and the very idea of diplomatic relations between the two countries became remote in a hurry.
The president officially recalled Ford from his Syria post in October 2011—a diplomatic message a country sends when it makes it clear that it no longer condones any of the actions of that government or even recognizes its legitimacy. In this case, President Obama was on the record as saying Assad had to go.
Like other countries involved in the Arab Spring, Assad’s government began facing local protests in March 2011. By the following month, they had escalated to national outpourings of anger. Violent clashes soon followed, and over the next two years more than 140,000 Syrians, most of them civilians, had lost their lives. The powder keg, fueled by ethnic and religious differences that have existed just beneath the surface since World War I, had finally exploded. And like the Syrian dilemma itself, the debates within the halls of American government were equally complex; as America looked on, then slowly began to get sucked into the most complicated civil war of the Arab Spring, the familiar battle lines began forming inside the White House, between those who saw the civil war in humanitarian terms and those who wanted desperately to avoid another military crusade into the Middle East—all while Republican critics on Capitol Hill, perpetually dissatisfied with the administration’s actions, pushed for an undefined resolution.
Interestingly, there was no clear indication of whose side Israel was on. Israelis weren’t fans of Assad, since he was viewed as somewhat of a puppet of Iran; Assad also allowed leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, two militant anti-Israel organizations, sanctuary in Damascus. But Netanyahu preferred the devil he knew (Assad) to the devil he feared (the al Qaeda–supported insurgents). Israel already saw the downside of democracy in the Muslim world take place on two of its borders, in Gaza when Hamas took over by democratic means and in Egypt when, following the initial ousting of Mubarak, the country elected a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer, Mohammed Morsi. Neither outcome made Israel feel safer. Needless to say, Israel expected no less from any supposed democracy play in Syria.
And Israel’s fears were those of the United States. Consequently there was a passive stance about the standoff in Syria for quite some time. But there were certain lines Obama couldn’t allow Assad to cross, and that became clear as the war wore on. After all, if he could call Mubarak out for his actions in Egypt, there was no way he could not decry the same actions by Assad. Of course, the differences between U.S. relationships with the two countries were stark. For one thing, the United States actually had influence over Egypt and leverage to wield. With Syria, it had nothing, unless it somehow got drawn in—something that a bipartisan group of old-fashioned foreign policy interventionists led by John McCain and Lindsey Graham hoped would happen.
They got their potential wish one afternoon in August during the 2012 presidential campaign.
Looking back, it’s a day some may come to view as the time Obama inadvertently got in his own way, thanks to his re-election campaign wanting to score a political point, and it came from an unlikely source.
In Todd Akin, running against Missouri senator Claire McCaskill, Democrats had a straw man brought to life, a candidate who embodied every point Obama’s campaign was trying to drive home about its opponents. Democrats were seeking to exploit their advantages with women voters, and they had no shortage of policy differences with which to contrast themselves with Republicans—especially after an interview with a local Fox affiliate in which Akin had seemingly drawn a distinction between different kinds of rape.
“First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s extremely rare,” Akin said when asked whether women should be able to terminate pregnancies resulting from rapes. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.”1
Akin had demonstrated a shocking lack of scientific knowledge, and of political acumen. He had also handed Democrats a cudgel with which to beat every one of his fellow Republicans, from the presidential ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan down to candidates running for Congress in far-flung states. In the course of the next three months, Akin would be featured in more Democratic attack ads than anyone other than Romney (the Romney team immediately recognized the danger in being associated with Akin and distanced itself even before Obama’s campaign began firing back).
Obama’s campaign team had to figure out how to take advantage of, and amplify, Akin’s comments. Rushing to make a statement could look crass and unpresidential, but waiting for others to pick up the story could be missing an opportunity. Obama’s advisors decided to let the question come naturally, and to let the president swing away at the big fat pitch he would certainly get. So on Monday, August 20, 2012, when Jay Carney entered the press briefing room at the White House, he had a special guest: Obama himself.
“Jay tells me that you guys have been missing me,” Obama began. “So I thought I’d come by and say hello.” Ostensibly, Obama was there to tout billions of dollars in savings on prescription drugs, thanks to the Affordable Care Act. But his real purpose was hardly opaque. Obama called on Jim Kuhnhenn, the veteran Associated Press reporter, for the first question. The AP plays the role of asking the “news of the day” question, and Akin was that day’s “news.”
“You’re no doubt aware of the comments that the Missouri Senate candidate, Republican Todd Akin, made on rape and abortion,” Kuhnhenn said. “I wondered if you think those views represent the views of the Republican Party in general.”
Obama had his whack, lambasting Akin, Romney, and the entire Republican Party. “Rape is rape. And the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we’re talking about doesn’t make sense to the American people and it certainly doesn’t make sense to me,” he said. The campaign team got exactly what it wanted out of the press conference.
Obama took a few more questions. Eventually he called on this author, who asked for the president’s latest thoughts on the civil war in Syria. Syria had a well-known stockpile of chemical weapons; would the United States ever consider sending in the military in order to secure those weapons and to make sure they didn’t fall into the hands of terrorist organizations? There was no prodding about a line in the sand.
The president repeated his talking points: Bashar al-Assad had lost his legitimacy as ruler of the Syrian people and needed to step down. The United States would bolster humanitarian aid and provide limited help to some of the more moderate opposition groups. Then he went further than he had before.
“I have, at this point, not ordered military engagement in the situation. But the point that you made about chemical and biological weapons is critical. That’s an issue that doesn’t just concern Syria; it concerns our close allies in the region, including Israel. It concerns us. We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people,” Obama said. “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”2
“Red line,” in diplomatic-speak, is a heavily loaded word. Red lines are not to be crossed, lest military action follow. Obama’s predecessors have used the phrase only sparingly, and always at moments of extreme tension.
Obama’s choice of language was no accident. In fact, he repeated it just a moment later, in response to a follow-up question: “We have communicated in no uncertain terms with every player in the region that [using chemical weapons] is a red line for us and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons.”
Obama wrapped up and walked out, twenty-two minutes after taking the stage. The news of the moment from that press conference was Akin and the president’s “rape is rape” retort. Akin would lose badly to McCaskill, and women chose Obama over Romney by an eleven-point margin. But the bigger impact of the press conference came with those two little words, “red line,” that set the White House on record for the next year to come.
The White House decided that using such strong diplomatic language would send a clear message to Assad, who at the time appeared increasingly desperate as rebels advanced. Obama didn’t want to get the military involved, given how significant an intervention in Syria would be; in a slide show presentation in early 2012, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Martin Dempsey said that imposing a no-fly zone across Syria would require up to 70,000 troops.3 Those were troops Obama didn’t want to send into harm’s way in yet another Middle Eastern country.
For the next several months, the tough talk appeared to work. But with Assad’s back to the wall, signs of trouble began to emerge. Intelligence agencies started seeing evidence that Assad’s military was moving chemical weapons around, perhaps even preparing them for use. In January 2013, a State Department cable from Istanbul, where U.S. intelligence agencies were closely monitoring the situation across the border in Syria, cited “compelling evidence” that Assad’s forces had used a “poisonous gas” in Homs, one of the rebel strongholds. The assessment was based on seven dead bodies U.S. intelligence forces had analyzed.
The red line, it appeared, had been crossed, and Obama’s calculus would have to change. But the White House wasn’t so sure, and they pushed back on the State Department report, denying that any chemical weapons had been used. The report was “inconsistent” with what the White House knew about Assad’s weapons program, said Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council. The White House didn’t want the red line dabbled with; it wanted proof Assad had blown through the line before acting. It was clear that this president was extremely reluctant to use any force in Syria.
CIA director David Petraeus offered a plan to arm and train groups of rebel fighters at bases in Jordan. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who would stay on at Foggy Bottom another four or five months, supported the plan. So did Dempsey and defense secretary Leon Panetta.
But Susan Rice, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and soon to become Obama’s national security advisor, stood in the way. A few days after Obama drew his red line, Rice warned that arming rebel groups would make the United States more involved than it wanted to be. At that meeting, Obama seemed hesitant to make a quick decision and skeptical of the plan to arm rebels.4
Rice was aligned with Denis McDonough, then the deputy national security advisor and soon to replace Jack Lew as chief of staff. McDonough was worried about the possibility of the United States being bogged down in another long war. But Samantha Power, who had been aligned with Rice and McDonough in earlier debates over the moral obligation to use force, now found herself allied with Clinton, Panetta, and Petraeus, members of the old guard who had feuded with the more idealistic younger set in debates over Libya.
Obama began to fear that anything he did in Syria would go wrong. Stay out, and countless innocent lives could be lost. Get involved, and the lives lost might be American. He began telling advisors that he saw too many risks, and he started using a phrase that became an off-the-record commonplace for him: “Syria was a series of shitty options.”
The allegations of chemical weapons use continued pouring in: Two months later, the Assad regime claimed that the opposition had used chemical weapons. The opposition claimed that Assad’s forces were still using the banned weapons. The White House didn’t buy it; in fact, some on the NSC were concerned that the opposition was making up—or maybe even staging—chemical weapons attacks in an effort to lure the United States into the conflict on their side.
The third allegation against Assad came in April. Obama and his team remained skeptical that these weapons had been used, and with the red line hanging out there, the White House wanted to be certain that Assad had crossed it, clearly and obviously. For six weeks, Western intelligence agencies from France to Israel to the United Kingdom concluded the same thing: that Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons in a small, almost surgical strike. Obama, not eager to enforce his red line without absolute proof, needed more convincing, though he did authorize a CIA plan to ship arms to Syrian rebels.
From the outside, it looked as if the White House was in denial about the intelligence America’s Western allies had collected. National security advisors used what they privately called the “Iraq defense,” contrasting Obama’s slow and steady approach with George W. Bush’s rush to war over weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. The White House made the case that after Bush, American credibility within the intelligence community wasn’t as high as it had been, especially when it involved the existence or use of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction.
But behind the scenes, while making sure that the intelligence was credible was a priority, Obama’s advisors were busy trying to figure out just how to enforce the president’s red line. That was the real delay. Obama’s own diplomatic credibility was on the line—worse, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, was on the opposing side, waiting for a slipup. How could they credibly say Obama was standing by his ultimatum if the response amounted to nothing more than increasing American support for the moderate opposition? John Kerry, the secretary of state, warned that inaction would give Assad the “green light” to continue using chemical weapons.5
Obama was getting pressure from overseas, too. Israel wasn’t heavily invested in the success of one side or the other; after all, the Assad regime’s troubles were dragging down Israel’s primary enemy, Iran, and Iran’s terrorist surrogate, Hezbollah. But during a trip to Israel, Obama was lobbied hard by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who feared that Syria’s chemical weapons could find their way into Hezbollah’s arms. Then, instead of raining down on the suburbs of Damascus, chemical weapons would be falling on Tel Aviv.6
Jordan’s King Abdullah II told Obama the following night that he would let the CIA use his country as a base for drone strikes, an escalation far beyond what anyone in the White House had considered. And King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was urging the Americans to get more involved, too. Assad’s actions had shocked Abdullah, who felt personally attacked when Sunni civilians were killed. And Saudi Arabia and Israel shared a joint interest in seeing the Iranians kept otherwise occupied.
Tom Donilon, the outgoing national security advisor, began to think the United States should arm the rebels. So, too, did Rice, the early opponent. But McDonough, who had a close personal relationship with the president, remained a skeptic. Obama eventually signed a secret finding allowing the CIA to operate training camps in Jordan, thereby giving the White House plausible deniability as more and more extreme militant groups joined the fight against the Assad regime. The CIA had to be doubly careful that it was training the right rebel groups.
On June 13, the White House issued its verdict on the April attack: it was confirmed; the red line had been crossed. But it did so in surprisingly muted fashion, instead of using a presidential address or a dramatic appearance like Colin Powell had made at the United Nations during Bush’s tenure. Now the administration simply declared that it, too, had concluded that Assad had used chemical weapons in a statement issued by Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for strategic communications.
“Following a deliberative review, our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year,” Rhodes’s statement said. “We believe that the Assad regime maintains control of these weapons. We have no reliable, corroborated reporting to indicate that the opposition in Syria has acquired or used chemical weapons.
“The President has said that the use of chemical weapons would change his calculus, and it has,” Rhodes went on. But Obama wasn’t about to commit troops to the region. Instead, Obama said, the United States would boost its nonlethal aid to the Syrian opposition and to the Supreme Military Council, which was already receiving military aid from some neighboring Middle Eastern countries that wanted Assad gone.
“Put simply, the Assad regime should know that its actions have led us to increase the scope and scale of assistance that we provide to the opposition, including direct support to the SMC. These efforts will increase going forward,” Rhodes said.7
The statement was remarkable, especially given that it hadn’t come from the president’s mouth directly. That was a conscious decision on the White House’s part; given the weakness of the statement, why have the president deliver it?
But others in the White House thought Obama’s initial statement, that crossing the red line would force him to change his calculus, gave them enough wiggle room. After all, there were other responses available to a president than lobbing a cruise missile at the presidential palace. “Military action is not the only response to a crossed red line,” a former senior foreign policy advisor said. “We’d put out before where [Assad] had minor incidents, and we took additional steps,” like arming key rebel groups or beginning training at the facility in Jordan.
Despite his words, Obama simply didn’t believe that committing troops to Syria was in America’s best interest, or that his critics in Congress who wanted military involvement understood the scope of the problem ahead.
Kerry began lobbying members of Congress, including in closed-door briefings to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, to allow the CIA to train rebels. Members of Congress wanted to know how he could be certain that American money wouldn’t be going to train al Qaeda rebels, though they eventually signed off on the plans.
The fact was, though, that Obama had few options, and not much room to maneuver. America’s intervention in Libya’s civil war, limited in scope and successful without costing a single American life, was unpopular with Republicans and Democrats in Congress who thought they should have been consulted, and with a war-weary public. The thought of another attack on a Middle Eastern country, especially one that posed no obvious threat to U.S. national security, was unpalatable after a decade of war, no matter how awful the atrocities broadcast on the nightly news.
So the White House hoped, perhaps naïvely, that Assad would take notice and stop using chemical weapons before something bigger happened—something that would necessitate actual military involvement.
Then someone in Assad’s regime clearly stepped across the red line. On August 21, 2013—a year and a day after Obama had drawn his public red line—Assad’s forces launched a large-scale attack in a suburb of Damascus that left hundreds, including children, writhing horribly before they died. It wasn’t clear exactly who had ordered the strike; Germany’s intelligence agency captured radio traffic that suggested Assad himself may not have given permission for it. Some in the U.S. intelligence community believed it was Assad’s brother who had ordered the attack. Regardless of who had given the order, the pictures and video that flooded the Internet put pressure on the United States to respond, and forcefully. Some 1,429 men, women, and children had died gruesome deaths.
This time, the White House wouldn’t drag its feet. Obama would begin building both a coalition of the willing and a legal case for a strike.
The most obvious body that would lend international credibility, the United Nations, was a nonstarter. Russia’s position on the Security Council, where it was one of five permanent members with veto power, made that certain. And Putin was still miffed at what he thought was an abuse of a UN resolution on the Libya intervention—a decision made by Putin’s Russian predecessor, Dmitry Medvedev.
Enough treaties existed, and a sufficient number of other countries had expressed concern over Syria, that the lawyers could search for diplomatic cover while the diplomats began courting potential coalition partners.
Five days after the attack, Secretary of State John Kerry became the highest-ranking U.S. official to indict Assad’s regime. Kerry said at a press briefing that the information that intelligence agencies had obtained, from the reports of the number of victims to their symptoms and firsthand accounts from humanitarian organizations, strongly indicated that chemical weapons had been used. Kerry also accused the Assad regime of trying to cover up the attack.
Part of that cover-up attempt, he argued, included stopping international inspectors from reaching the site of the attack. In Syria, a convoy transporting a team of UN inspectors was attacked by snipers on the very day that Kerry held his press conference. No inspectors were injured, but they were unable to reach their target site, which was proof as far as the United States was concerned of a cover-up.
Two days later, on August 28, Obama sat for an interview on PBS, where for the first time the president of the United States accused the Assad regime of conducting chemical weapons attacks against civilians. Obama used the interview to begin making the case to the American public that military action would be necessary.
“What I… said was that if the Assad regime used chemical weapons on his own people, that that would change some of our calculations. And the reason has to do with not only international norms but also America’s core self-interest. We’ve got a situation in which you’ve got a well-established international norm against the use of chemical weapons,” Obama said. “We cannot see a breach of the nonproliferation norm that allows, potentially, chemical weapons to fall into the hands of all kinds of folks. So what I’ve said is that we have not yet made a decision, but the international norm against the use of chemical weapons needs to be kept in place. And nobody disputes—or hardly anybody disputes that chemical weapons were used on a large scale in Syria against civilian populations.
“We have looked at all the evidence, and we do not believe the opposition possessed… chemical weapons of that sort. We do not believe that, given the delivery systems, using rockets, that the opposition could have carried out these attacks. We have concluded that the Syrian government in fact carried these out. And if that’s so, then there need to be international consequences,” he said.8
But internationally, the coalition of the willing wasn’t proving to be very cohesive. A day after Obama’s remarks, and after British intelligence issued a report adding to the credibility of the charges against Assad, the British Parliament issued a stinging defeat to Prime Minister David Cameron by voting against a resolution supporting military action in Syria. Cameron’s coalition government, which had supported the resolution, was taken by surprise. The White House was not happy with their partners across the pond, especially given the number of high-ranking officials within Cameron’s coalition government who either didn’t show up for the vote or voted against Cameron. It turns out that Cameron had called for the vote too quickly and hadn’t given his supporters in Parliament enough time to come back to London from their August holidays. Cameron’s government, though, was a bit peeved at the United States for dragging its feet for weeks and then suddenly hoping everyone could turn on a dime. Still, Cameron was blindsided by local politics, most notably on the part of the Labor Party, Tony Blair’s political party, which was desperately trying to distance itself from Blair and Iraq. As in the United States, “Iraq Syndrome” had consumed the UK Parliament.
Despite what looked like an important setback, the White House continued pursuing its case and did extract a pledge from the French to get on board. On August 30, the United States released an intelligence community assessment accusing Assad of using chemical weapons multiple times over the previous year. Kerry said, for the first time, that discussions on possible military action were under way.
So certain was the prospect of a military strike that the White House press office advised correspondents to work through the weekend. Speculation in official Washington wasn’t circulating around whether the United States would strike, but when, and how. Saturday night, August 31, or Sunday, September 1, seemed the most likely windows, just hours after the UN inspectors, who were still in Syria, were scheduled to leave. Warships were in place, armed and ready for the order from the commander in chief.
While those discussions played out on the international stage and in the salons of greater Washington, at the White House they involved a surprisingly small number of people. Obama had had enough of Assad’s recalcitrance, and he was leaning toward ordering an attack on key parts of Syria’s military infrastructure. The president knew he had the evidence to back up a strike; he had sent Kerry out to make the case that Assad—whom Kerry had called “a thug and a murderer”—needed to be reprimanded, through military strikes, for the attack. Kerry’s speech appeared to be one of his finest hours as an orator. He met the moment and seemed to prepare the country for war; he was compared favorably to Winston Churchill by supporters of the action and compared to Colin Powell at the UN by detractors. As political theater, it was a huge moment for Kerry.
But hours after Kerry’s speech, on a sunny summer afternoon, Obama and his new chief of staff, Denis McDonough, took a walk around the South Lawn. McDonough has a reputation for being chronically unable to sit still, and the stroll was a habit; this time, he had company. Obama told McDonough he had had a change of heart: he wanted Congress to approve any potential strikes on Syria, ostensibly to provide political accountability but in reality to provide political cover to both parties. And unlike its military action in Libya, the United States didn’t have the same international support for an attack on Syria, making bipartisan buy-in all the more essential. What was really nagging at Obama was the rejection by the British Parliament. Even Bush had the British on his side for Iraq; Obama wouldn’t have that. He knew he couldn’t go it alone. Talk about undermining then candidate Obama’s entire foreign policy modus operandi.
Returning from the walk, Obama called his top foreign policy advisors into the Oval Office, including national security advisor Susan Rice and others. He told them of his new plan to consult Congress and seek approval before ordering strikes on Syria.
There have been few times when Obama’s advisors have so quickly and vociferously disagreed with their boss, but this was one of them. Obama’s plan was completely unexpected, in part because no key leaders in Congress had actually requested a specific vote on military intervention. Even Republican leaders were largely in lockstep with the plans to hold Syria accountable. The last thing John Boehner or Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid or Mitch McConnell, wanted was a vote. They knew many of their members supported the action but had no stomach for having to publicly admit that.
Obama’s advisors, who just hours before had listened to Kerry lay out the U.S. case for military action, felt whiplashed. The NSC staff had believed since the prior weekend that asking Congress for approval wasn’t even an option; they believed they would consult Congress, in the form of private briefings and conversations, rather than actually formally seek legislation. After national security staffers had briefed Obama on the available evidence, they believed he was leaning toward a military strike.
But by the end of the week a growing number of members of Congress had begun to question the administration’s strategy. And surveys showed that the public was decidedly against an attack: an NBC News poll released the morning of Kerry’s speech (and Obama’s decision) showed that 80 percent of Americans believed that Obama should seek Congress’s approval before ordering strikes.
Obama didn’t want to face the backlash of a military strike when the public so clearly opposed one, but his advisors on Friday made the case that Cameron’s defeat could soon foreshadow his own. The vote in Parliament was a preview of the dangers of appealing to Congress, not a warning to seek political cover, they said. Obama countered that the vote in Parliament showed exactly why he needed to seek approval. What’s more, going to Congress would be consistent with what Obama saw as his own governing philosophy.
The advisors tried to talk Obama out of his position late into the night that Friday. But by the morning, they had acquiesced.
On August 31, a Saturday, Obama addressed the nation and declared that he would seek approval from Congress before the strikes. Obama said he was “mindful that I’m the president of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. I’ve long believed that our power is rooted not just in our military might, but in our example as a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
“While I believe I have the authority to carry out this military action without specific congressional authorization, I know that the country will be stronger if we take this course, and our actions will be even more effective,” Obama said.
The senior aides who had tried to talk Obama out of seeking congressional approval believed nonetheless that they would be able to convince Congress to grant that approval. They told reporters that Obama would be acting within his constitutional authority if he decided to strike Syria even if Congress said no.
Congress wasn’t scheduled to return until the following week. The intervening Labor Day and the Jewish holidays made an early return unlikely. The Pentagon conveyed to the White House that a delay wouldn’t diminish the country’s military capabilities in the Middle East, and the White House hoped it would give them a chance to continue winning over allies in Congress and internationally.
In the meantime, Obama actually had a prime opportunity to build an international coalition that week. The G20 countries, representing the largest economies in the world, were scheduled to meet in St. Petersburg, Russia, a gathering that would include a working dinner on Syria. There, Obama could buttonhole G20 nations and rally them to his cause. This was the trip that was supposed to include a stop in Moscow for a one-on-one with Putin, but Obama had canceled, ostensibly as a public snub over Russia’s decision to give asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
The dispute was not an insignificant part of the backdrop of the group dynamics at the G20 meeting.
The leader dinner, a ritual at these summits, lasted much longer than anticipated. Normally a cocktail party/salon-style dinner for the world’s most powerful, this one was very different. It was completely dominated by Obama, who argued for a robust response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons, and Putin, who maintained, without much evidence, that the attacks a few weeks before had been orchestrated by rebels. Heads of state from seventeen other countries and one foreign minister—Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd, had sent a deputy in his place because of that country’s elections—barely spoke as the two Cold War powerhouses, no longer openly hostile but barely concealing their distrust of each other, debated military strikes. France, Turkey, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Britain’s David Cameron sided with Obama. China, India, Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, and Italy sided with Putin.9
Notably silent was Angela Merkel. Throughout the economic recession, Merkel’s Germany had been the backstop, helping fellow European Union members avoid bankruptcy or default, and the German economy was recovering faster than its neighbors’. Merkel’s support was something the White House had counted upon. Without it, and thanks to Putin’s pushback, no clear consensus emerged from the G20 summit.
The White House was desperate to unite more than half of the G20 nations around a Syria policy of some kind. In the end, they passed around a heavily watered-down joint statement condemning the August 21 attack, agreeing that evidence pointed to Syria’s culpability, and calling for an undefined international response. But even that milquetoast response persuaded only ten other nations to sign on: France, Britain, Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and Italy. Merkel’s signature wasn’t on the document.10
Syria, too, expected that an attack would come. In an interview with Charlie Rose on September 9 in Damascus, Assad accused the United States of lying about the chemical weapons attack and of violating international law. “As long as the United States doesn’t obey the international law and tramples over the charter of the United Nations, we have to worry that any administration, not only this one, would do anything. But, according to the lies that we’ve been hearing for the last two weeks from high-ranking officials in this administration, we have to expect the worst,” Assad said.
Kerry had had an exhausting few weeks. Just a few months before his seventieth birthday, Kerry had maintained a breakneck travel schedule. He was reaching out to members of Congress and the international community, while his State Department jet zipped from Washington to Lithuania to Paris to London, where he pressed the flesh with foes and allies alike. Finally, on Monday, September 9, the day Congress was supposed to return, Kerry met with William Hague, the British foreign secretary, and was asked by a CBS reporter whether there was anything Syria could do to avoid an attack.
“Sure,” a weary Kerry said. “He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that. But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.”11
This was decidedly undiplomatic language for a secretary of state, words that sounded more like Kerry the senator than Kerry the diplomat. But they also represented an opportunity for one side that desperately wanted to avoid an American strike—Russia.
If the United States had gotten involved in a military push against Syria, it is unlikely that Assad’s regime would have survived. Without Assad in power, Russia’s toehold in the Mediterranean would have been jeopardized. And Russia was desperate to keep its influence in the Middle East—for some in Moscow, the Cold War had never really ended.
After Kerry’s comments, Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s long-serving foreign minister, pounced. Kerry didn’t seem to believe that Syria could get rid of its chemical weapons in a week, but what about giving them up altogether? Russia proposed requiring Syria to place its chemical weapons under international control, to be removed from the country and dismantled, in exchange for avoiding a military strike. Syria was one of a handful of countries that had never joined the Chemical Weapons Convention; it would do so under Lavrov’s proposal.
Obama, whose chances of getting a resolution through Congress looked less likely, suddenly had an out, an opportunity to extract his administration from a one-way street. He said he would consider Lavrov’s proposal; the following day, Obama discussed it with Cameron and French president François Hollande, another early advocate of military action. France began to draft a resolution that could pass the UN Security Council with Russia’s cooperation, but one that authorized the use of force if Assad failed or refused to hand over his weapons.
That night, for the second time in two weeks, Obama addressed the nation to explain his thinking on Syria, and to hit the Pause button on congressional action. “Over the last few days, we’ve seen some encouraging signs. In part because of the credible threat of U.S. military action, as well as constructive talks that I had with President Putin, the Russian government has indicated a willingness to join with the international community in pushing Assad to give up his chemical weapons. The Assad regime has now admitted that it has these weapons,” Obama said. “It’s too early to tell whether this offer will succeed, and any agreement must verify that the Assad regime keeps its commitments. But this initiative has the potential to remove the threat of chemical weapons without the use of force, particularly because Russia is one of Assad’s strongest allies.
“I have, therefore, asked the leaders of Congress to postpone a vote to authorize the use of force while we pursue this diplomatic path,” he said.
The move infuriated those on Capitol Hill who had backed Obama on Syria. Senator Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican whom the White House saw as one of the few reasonable and pragmatic members of his party, summed up what many came to believe about Obama: “The president just seems to be very uncomfortable being commander in chief of this nation,” Corker told CNN the day after Obama’s second address to the nation.12 Earlier that day, Corker had sent an e-mail to McDonough at the White House. “You guys are really hard to help,” he wrote.
Nonetheless, Obama dispatched Kerry on one more foreign trip, to Geneva, to meet with Lavrov to hammer out the details. The eventual final product required Syria not to rid itself of chemical weapons within a week, but to declare its stockpile in that time frame. The UN and the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons would have access to all chemical weapons facilities, and most of the weapons would be destroyed by the middle of 2014, with the most lethal being the very last Assad would turn over, leading to concerns by some in the United States that he would never give up his most lethal cache.
Still, in the moment, the agreement was a minor, and in some ways insufficient, response to a clear violation of a red line posited by the president of the United States. Even if Assad wasn’t the one who had given the order, his regime had used chemical weapons on multiple occasions against his own people. Obama didn’t explicitly promise a military attack when laying out that red line, but it’s hard to see how changing the calculus led only to an offhand remark from Kerry and a helping hand from Russia’s foreign minister.
The on-again, off-again nature of the debate surrounding Syria was not the image of strength and decisiveness a president wants to convey. Obama got a big part of the outcome he desired—an end to Syria’s use of chemical weapons—but the White House didn’t handle the situation as well as it could have. “We won’t get style points for the way we made this decision,” Obama said later, both privately and publicly.
In the Obama era and for the presidents after him, style points would take on greater weight than ever, both at home and abroad.
Despite his stated and evident obsession with pragmatism—the very thing that had helped get him elected, as a referendum against Bush—Obama himself appeared to be worried that his stature on the national and international stage was shrinking.
In many ways, it was. Where Bush’s actions generally diminished America’s image abroad, Obama’s inaction may have diminished the country’s stature among some of its closest foreign partners. Where Bush rushed to war, Obama waited, and in the eyes even of some of his advisors, he hesitated too long. Where Bush overreacted, Obama underreacted. And where Bush called out his political opponents, questioning their patriotism in the run-up to the war in Iraq, Obama called out his political opponents in hopes of winning their votes—even though ultimately, on this and so many other issues, he couldn’t seem to do so.
Within eight months of Obama’s decision to pull back on a military strike against Assad, the civil war in Syria was as messy as ever and has since spilled over into Iraq, foreshadowing the real possibility that the entire region could end up in a Sunni-Shia hot war. Iraq’s future, as of this writing, is truly in doubt; the likelihood of the country self-partitioning is very real. Meanwhile, a vicious al Qaeda–like group has risen up. They are the most radical fighters against Assad and are seen by the United States as so dangerous that they could aspire to be as lethal and dangerous as al Qaeda in the ’90s pre-9/11. In fact, one U.S. official described the situation in Syria to be more chaotic and unstable than the situation in Afghanistan before 9/11.
Could the rise of this vicious terrorist group, called ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), have been avoided had the United States and its allies acted faster in supporting a moderate opposition to Assad? If Obama had gone through with the military strike, would the fallout have knocked Assad completely out of power, leaving a more civil fight to see who will lead Syria? Would a strike have quickened the speed with which more extreme elements took over?
Or did the Obama administration bungle the entire Arab Spring from the start? One prominent Democratic senator who recently retired believes the fundamental policy mistake was getting involved in Egypt, which led to Libya then Syria. This senator believes that the Obama administration, when it pushed Mubarak out, got so involved in the propping up of a new and real democracy (which was basically short-lived), whether it realizes it or not, that it sent a signal to the oppressed in Syria and elsewhere that the United States would stand by to help any opposition against any authoritarian Mideast ruler. But the politics of engagement overseas is now fraught with peril in the United States, and post-Egypt each subsequent engagement by the United States is more limited. It gives an appearance of weakness around the world and indecision at home, a perilous place for any president. Then again, in the words of the president, it’s a bunch of “shitty options”—which may best sum up the Middle East for the next decade. In fact, early on in the second term, as Syria was becoming messier and messier and the umpteenth attempt to broker peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians was coming to an abrupt end, Joe Biden went to his boss with a simple piece of advice: Just manage the chaos in the Middle East. Don’t make big commitments; nothing will work, it’s that messy. Instead, protect U.S. interests, keep the focus on rooting out terrorism, and then pivot to Asia and Latin America, where, economically, the future of the United States might be more promising. It’s advice the president has been trying to take, but so many Mideast fires erupt, it’s been difficult for him to fully pivot.