History is a somber judge—and it will judge us all harshly if we prove incapable of taking the right path today,” said Kofi Annan as he looked around the table at the Ministers who had answered his invitation to come to Geneva’s Palais des Nations at the end of June 2012 in hopes of resolving the bloody civil war raging in Syria.
Kofi had been through his share of difficult diplomatic negotiations. As the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations, from 1997 to 2006, the soft-spoken Ghanaian had won the Nobel Peace Prize. “Collectively, you have the potential to wield tremendous power and to change the direction of this crisis,” he told us. “By being here today, you suggest the intention to show that leadership.” Yet, as Kofi knew well, opinion in the room was sharply divided over what kind of leadership was actually needed.
The crisis began in early 2011, when Syrian citizens, inspired in part by the successful peaceful protests in Tunisia and Egypt, took to the streets to demonstrate against the authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad. As in Libya, security forces responded with excessive force and mass detentions, which in turn eventually led some Syrians to take up arms to defend themselves and, eventually, to try to topple Assad. It was a lopsided fight, however, and by June 2011, the regime had killed about 1,300 people, including children. (As of early 2014, estimates put the total killed at more than 150,000, but that is likely too low.)
In early 2010, about a year before the maelstrom began in Syria, I recommended that the President nominate Robert Ford, an experienced diplomat who had served across the Middle East, most recently in Iraq, as the first U.S. Ambassador to Syria in more than five years. It was not an easy decision. The United States had withdrawn our Ambassador to signal displeasure with the Syrian regime, and returning one might be taken as an endorsement of Assad. But I thought then, and continue to believe now, that we are generally better served by having an Ambassador on the ground, even with regimes we strongly oppose, to deliver messages and serve as our eyes and ears.
President Obama agreed with my recommendation and nominated Robert in February 2010. He was held up by the Senate because of opposition, not to him personally (his credentials were stellar) but to the idea of sending an Ambassador to Syria at all. Just after Christmas the President used his Constitutional authority to make appointments during the Congressional recess to put Robert in place. He arrived in Damascus in January 2011, just in time to get settled before the demonstrations began. Protests escalated in March, and security forces opened fire and killed protesters in Daraa. Assad deployed the Army. Government forces laid siege to Daraa at the end of April, deploying tanks and conducting sweeps of houses.
The United States strongly condemned all violence against civilians. As a result Ambassador Ford and our embassy team faced harassment and threats, including one serious incident in July 2011, when pro-government protesters breached the embassy compound, smashed windows, sprayed graffiti, and attacked Robert’s residence.
Despite the danger, he went to Hama, the scene of an infamous 1982 massacre, to meet with protesters and express American solidarity and sympathy with those calling for democratic reform. As Robert drove into the city, residents covered his car with flowers. He visited a hospital where people injured by Syrian security forces were being treated, and he tried to learn more about the protesters, what their objectives were and how to establish ongoing contact with them. That visit established Robert’s status as our lead in working with the opposition. Many of the same Senators who had blocked his confirmation were so impressed with his courage and intelligence that they voted to confirm him in early October. This was another example of an experienced diplomat taking risks to get out from behind the embassy’s walls to do the job right.
Despite an international outcry over the violence in Syria, Russia and China vetoed a modest resolution at the UN Security Council in October 2011 that would have condemned Assad’s human rights abuses and demanded that peaceful protests be allowed to proceed. Russia had long-standing political ties with Syria, dating back to the Cold War, including an important naval base on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, and there were religious ties between Syria’s Orthodox Christians and the Russian Orthodox Church. Russia was determined to retain its influence and steadfastly backed the Assad regime.
Bashar al-Assad is the son of Hafez al-Assad, who seized control of Syria in 1970 and served as its leader for thirty years until his death in June 2000. A trained ophthalmologist, Bashar was groomed as his father’s successor only after his older brother’s death in a car accident in 1994, and he assumed the presidency following his father’s death. Bashar’s wife, Asma, had a career in investment banking before becoming First Lady. A 2005 profile of the couple said, “They seemed the essence of secular Western-Arab fusion.” But, as the article noted, this image was a “mirage,” as the high hopes for the new Syrian ruler turned into “a pattern of empty promises, nasty oratory and bloody tactics.” As unrest spread across the Middle East, it was these “empty promises” and unrealized hopes that motivated many of the protests of the Syrian people.
Assad and his ruling clique were Alawites, a Shiite sect closely aligned with Iran that had ruled over the Sunni majority in Syria for decades, going back to the French mandate after World War I. Alawites made up 12 percent of the country. The rebels were predominantly Sunnis, who constituted more than 70 percent of the population, while the Kurds made up 9 percent. Another 10 percent of Syrians are Christians, and approximately 3 percent are Druze, a sect originating from Shiite Islam with elements of Christianity, Judaism, and other beliefs. As the crisis unfolded, one of the biggest challenges we faced was helping the opposition unite across the country’s many religious, geographic, and ideological lines.
In October 2011, the Arab League demanded a cease-fire in Syria and called on the Assad regime to pull its troops back from the major cities, release political prisoners, protect access for journalists and humanitarian workers, and begin a dialogue with the protesters. Most predominantly Sunni Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, backed the rebels and wanted Assad gone. Under pressure from his neighbors, Assad nominally agreed to the Arab League plan, but then almost immediately disregarded it. Regime forces continued killing protesters in the following days. In response the Arab League suspended Syria’s membership.
In December, the Arab League tried again. As before, Assad agreed to their plan. This time, though, Arab monitors were sent to Syria’s battle-scarred cities. Unfortunately even the presence of this international monitoring team did little to calm the violence, and once again it quickly became clear that Assad had no intention of keeping his word. In late January 2012, the Arab League pulled the observers out in frustration and asked the UN Security Council to back its call for a political transition in Syria that would require Assad to hand over power to a Vice President and establish a government of national unity.
By this point the regime’s Army was using tanks to shell residential suburbs of Damascus. The rebels’ determination to resist at all costs was hardening; some were becoming radicalized, and extremists were joining the fight. Jihadist groups, including some with ties to al Qaeda, began trying to exploit the conflict to advance their own agendas. Refugees were fleeing across Syria’s borders in large numbers into Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon. (As of 2014, there were more than 2.5 million refugees from the Syrian conflict.)
At the end of January 2012, I attended a special session of the Security Council in New York to hear the Arab League’s report and debate how to respond. “We all have a choice,” I told the Council. “Stand with the people of Syria and the region or become complicit in the continuing violence there.”
A new resolution supporting the Arab League’s peace plan ran into the same trouble as previous attempts. The Russians were implacably opposed to anything that might constitute pressure on Assad. The year before, they had abstained in the vote to authorize a no-fly zone over Libya and to take “all necessary measures” to protect civilians and then chafed as the NATO-led mission to protect civilians accelerated the fall of Qaddafi. Now, with Syria in chaos, they were determined to prevent another Western intervention. Assad’s regime was too strategically important to them. Libya was “a false analogy,” I argued in New York. The resolution did not impose sanctions or support the use of military force, focusing instead on the need for a peaceful political transition. Still the Russians weren’t having any of it.
I spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov from my plane on the way to the Munich Security Conference and then met there with him in person. I told him we needed a unified message from the international community. Moscow wanted the resolution to be tougher on the rebels than on the regime. Lavrov pressed me on what would happen when Assad refused to comply. Would the next step be a Libya-style intervention? No, I responded. The plan was to use this resolution to pressure Assad to negotiate. “He’ll only get the message when the Security Council speaks with one voice. We have gone very far in clarifying this isn’t a Libya scenario. There is not any kind of authorization for force or intervention or military action.”
The Russian rhetoric about upholding sovereignty and opposing foreign intervention rang particularly hollow given their track record elsewhere. In 2008 and 2014, Putin did not hesitate to send troops into Georgia and Ukraine, violating the sovereignty of those countries, simply because it suited his interests.
As Lavrov and I talked in Munich, there was a surge in violence in Syria. Regime forces targeted Homs, the country’s third largest city and a cradle of the rebellion, with a barrage of shelling that killed hundreds. It was the bloodiest day in the conflict thus far.
I told Lavrov that every word in the resolution in New York had been thoroughly debated. We had made concessions, while keeping the minimum of what we hoped would end the violence and begin a transition. Now it was time to vote. The resolution would be called to the floor that day.
“But what is the endgame?” Lavrov asked. Sitting there in Munich, I could not predict every step to come, and I knew it would be a mistake to minimize the challenges Syrians would face after Assad. But I was sure about one thing: if we did not begin a peace process, the endgame would be grim indeed. There would be more bloodshed, hardening defiance from those whose families were being brutalized and whose homes were being bombed, and a greater likelihood that a full-blown civil war would attract extremists, possibly resulting in a failed state, with different areas of the country controlled by warring factions, including terrorist groups. Every additional day of repression and violence made it more difficult for Syrians to reconcile and rebuild and increased the risk of instability and sectarian conflict spreading from Syria across the region.
A few hours after my meeting with Lavrov, the Security Council convened and called for a vote. I went before the press corps in Munich, saying, “Are we for peace and security and a democratic future, or are we going to be complicit in the continuing violence and bloodshed? I know where the United States stands, and we will soon find out where every other member of the Security Council stands.” Even after the bloodiest day yet in Syria, Russia and China used their veto power to prevent the world from condemning the violence. To block this resolution was to bear responsibility for the horrors on the ground. It was, as I said later, despicable.
As predicted, the situation kept getting worse. The UN and the Arab League named Kofi Annan as their Joint Special Envoy on Syria at the end of February. His mandate was to convince the regime, the rebels, and their respective foreign backers to agree on a political resolution to the conflict.
To support this new diplomatic track, I helped pull together a meeting of like-minded countries to consider other avenues for increasing pressure on the regime and providing humanitarian assistance to suffering civilians, since our first choice was blocked at the UN. We supported diplomacy, but we weren’t going to just wait for it. The roster of those who felt equally compelled to act kept swelling, and we ultimately had more than sixty nations come together in Tunisia at the end of February for what became known as the Friends of the Syrian People. We formed a sanctions working group to cut off Assad’s access to funds (although the Russians and Iranians were quite effective in replenishing his coffers), pledged to send emergency supplies to refugees fleeing the violence, and increased training of Syrian civilian opposition leaders.
Behind the scenes there was a lot of talk in Tunis about funneling weapons to the rebels to begin evening the odds against the regime’s Army and its Iranian and Russian backers. Our partners in the Gulf were watching Sunni rebels and civilians being slaughtered live on Al Jazeera, and they were increasingly impatient. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said he thought supplying weapons was “an excellent idea.” I understood his frustration at how things were going and the desire to shift the military balance on the ground. But there were also reasons to be wary of further militarizing the situation and accelerating the spiral to full-scale civil war. Once guns went into the country, they would be hard to control and could easily fall into the hands of extremists.
Assad’s backers had no such worries. Iranian forces from the Revolutionary Guard and its elite paramilitary unit, the Quds Force, were already in Syria supporting Assad and the Syrian military. The Iranians were playing a key advisory role, accompanying Syrian forces to the field and helping the regime organize its own paramilitary forces. Militants from Hezbollah, Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, also joined the fight on behalf of the Syrian regime. The combined Iranian-Hezbollah presence was critical to the regime’s grasp on power.
I asked Prince Saud if he thought Assad would cooperate with a plan to end the violence and commence a political transition, if we could convince the Russians to agree on one. He did not think so, he said, because Assad’s family would never permit him. Led by his mother, he was under constant pressure to uphold his family’s position and follow his father’s brutal example of how to suppress an uprising. That was a reference to when Hafez al-Assad infamously destroyed the city of Hama in 1982 in retaliation for another uprising.
In Riyadh, at the end of March, I met with Prince Saud and King Abdullah and participated in the first meeting of a new strategic partnership between the United States and all six Gulf countries. Much of the focus was on the threat from Iran, but we also discussed the need to do more to support the rebels in Syria. Late that night I flew to Istanbul, where I met with representatives from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar and heard the same messages about the need to get arms to the rebels.
I was in a difficult position. On the one hand, the United States was not prepared to join such efforts to arm the rebels, but we also didn’t want to splinter the anti-Assad coalition or lose leverage with the Arab countries. “Some will be able to do certain things, and others will do other things,” I said carefully in Riyadh. “So when we talk about assistance, we are talking about a broad range of assistance. Not every country will do the same.” That was as close as I could get to publicly acknowledging what was a fait accompli: Certain countries would increase their efforts to funnel arms, while others would focus on humanitarian needs. (As of April 2014, the United States had pledged more than $1.7 billion in such assistance and is the largest donor of aid for displaced Syrians.)
March 2012 marked the one-year anniversary of the uprising in Syria, and the UN estimated that the death toll by then stood at more than eight thousand. Kofi Annan was methodically meeting with all the players, including Assad himself, trying to thread the diplomatic needle and end the conflict before the casualties mounted any higher. In the middle of the month he unveiled a six-point plan. It was similar to what the Arab League had tried earlier in the year. Kofi called on the Assad regime to pull back its military forces and silence their heavy weapons, allow peaceful demonstrations and access to Syria for humanitarian aid and journalists, and begin a political transition that addressed the legitimate aspirations and concerns of the Syrian people. In an effort to win Russian agreement, he proposed that the UN Security Council ratify his plan in a less weighty “statement” rather than a full resolution. That helped reassure Moscow that it would not be used as a legal basis for military intervention later on. The Western powers went along because it meant finally getting the Security Council on record. In the statement the Council called for a cease-fire and directed Kofi to “facilitate a Syrian-led political transition to a democratic, plural political system . . . including through commencing a comprehensive political dialogue between the Syrian government and the whole spectrum of the Syrian opposition.”
Now that it had gotten on board with the statement, Russia leaned on Assad to accept Kofi’s terms, which he did at the end of March. We had seen how much his word meant, so no one was counting on a cease-fire actually taking hold. As the April 10 deadline approached, the violence showed no signs of slowing. Syrian military forces even fired into Turkey and Lebanon, which raised the specter of a wider regional conflict. But then some measure of quiet did come. The cease-fire was never full or comprehensive, but there was a lull in the fighting. Like the Arab League before it, the UN dispatched teams of observers to monitor conditions on the ground.
Again, however, despite his pledges, Assad never took any credible steps to implement the rest of Kofi’s plan, and the fragile cease-fire soon began to unravel. After about a month Kofi reported “serious violations,” and in late May there was a massacre of more than a hundred villagers in Houla, half of them children. Russia and China continued to prevent the Security Council from compelling compliance with the six-point plan or attaching any consequences for violations. It now looked as if their earlier assent had been little more than posturing intended to ease international condemnation.
I began encouraging Kofi to take another tack. Perhaps he should organize an international conference to focus on transition planning. Without further diplomatic progress, the tattered cease-fire would collapse completely, and we’d be left back at square one. In the first weeks of June, Kofi visited me in Washington, and we spoke often by phone as he shuttled between Moscow, Tehran, Damascus, and other capitals in the region. He agreed that it was time to take the next diplomatic steps and began formulating plans for a summit at the end of June.
In mid-June, increasing violence forced the UN to suspend its observer patrols. I accompanied President Obama to the G-20 meeting in Los Cabos, Mexico, where we sat down with Russian President Putin for about two hours. Syria was the principal topic of discussion.
President Obama outlined our position: Either the international community could sit on the sidelines and watch Syria be torn apart by civil and proxy warfare, with all the resulting negative consequences for regional stability, or Russia could use its influence to encourage a viable political solution. Putin claimed that he had no particular love for Assad, who was causing Moscow quite a headache, and he also professed to have no real leverage with Damascus. I think he personally identified with the challenges Assad faced from internal opposition, and he warned about the growing threat from extremists among the opposition and pointed to how messy transitions had become in Libya, Egypt, and, of course, Iraq.
These were all convenient rationalizations for blocking action while continuing to supply Assad with money and arms. Even though I did not trust Russia’s actions or words, I knew we had no alternative but to exhaust every diplomatic option. “Go back to the Russians and say your team is going to lay down a transition plan, and Russia can be part of the discussion or left on the sidelines,” I advised Kofi after the Putin meeting. As the date of his proposed conference in Geneva approached, I worked closely with Kofi to develop specific language that we hoped might be able to gain consensus. In a curtain-raising opinion piece in the Washington Post, he made his expectations clear. He wanted Syria’s neighbors and the world’s great powers to “commit to act in unison to end the bloodshed and implement the six-point plan, avoiding further militarization of the conflict.” He added, “I expect all who attend Saturday’s meeting to agree that a Syrian-led transition process must be achieved in accordance with clear principles and guidelines.”
On the day before the start of the summit, I urged Kofi to stand by the principles he was proposing: “I understand the tweak here, the clarification there. I can live with that. But the core idea that has to come out of the meeting is that the international community, including Russia and China, are united behind a political transition that would go to a democratic future. That’s sacrosanct. The details can be batted around but we have to keep that core.” Kofi thought that, in the end, the Russians would get on board. “They said change can come but it must be orderly,” he told me. I was not as optimistic, but agreed we had to test.
I arrived in Geneva shortly after 1:00 in the morning of June 30 after a flight from Russia, where I had attended an economic conference of Asian-Pacific nations. Over a long dinner in St. Petersburg, I had pressed Lavrov on the need to support Kofi’s efforts and bring the conflict to an end. I knew the Russians would never be comfortable explicitly calling for Assad to leave office, but, with our help, Kofi had crafted an elegant solution. He was proposing the establishment of a transitional unity government exercising full executive power, which would be broadly inclusive but exclude “those whose continued presence and participation would undermine the credibility of the transition and jeopardize stability and reconciliation.” That was code for excluding Assad. The Russians wanted words that papered over the difference between us (Assad must go) and them (we’re not going to force him to go) and leave it up to the Syrians to sort out.
Lavrov took a hard line. He claimed Russia wanted a political resolution, but he wouldn’t agree to anything that might make that possible. I pointed out that if we failed to reach an agreement the next day in Geneva based on Kofi’s proposal for an orderly transition, the UN-led diplomatic effort would collapse, extremists would gain ground, and the conflict would escalate. The Arabs and the Iranians would pour in even more weapons. Sectarian tensions and a growing flood of refugees would further destabilize Syria’s neighbors, especially Lebanon and Jordan. I still believed the Assad regime would eventually fall, but it would take much more of the Syrian state and the region with it. Such a scenario wouldn’t serve Russia’s interests or preserve its influence. But Lavrov wouldn’t budge. Boarding my plane to Switzerland, I knew we’d have to continue pressing the Russians and working to get everyone else on board with a text.
In Geneva I met first with British Foreign Secretary William Hague and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius to take stock of what we wanted to achieve at the conference. Hague and I then talked with Hamad bin Jassim of Qatar, and Turkish Foreign Minister Davutoğlu, who pushed us to consider supporting the rebels with military aid regardless of the outcome in Geneva. They knew the United States and Britain were not prepared to do that but wanted to be heard nonetheless.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presided over the opening session of the meeting of what he called (optimistically) the Action Group on Syria with Foreign Ministers from the five permanent members of the Security Council, along with Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and the European Union. Neither Iran nor Saudi Arabia was invited.
At the start of the meeting, Kofi outlined his goals: “We are here to agree on guidelines and principles for a Syrian-led political transition that meets the legitimate aspirations of the Syrian people. And we are here to agree on actions that each and every one of us must take to turn these objectives into reality on the ground, including consequences for non-compliance.” He presented a document that would enshrine the transition he was proposing.
I welcomed Kofi’s plan to pave the way for a democratic transition and “a post-Assad future.” The United States shared his goal of a democratic, pluralistic Syria that would uphold the rule of law and respect the universal rights of all its people and every group, regardless of ethnicity, sect, or gender. We also agreed that it was important to maintain the integrity of the Syrian state and its institutions, particularly enough of the security infrastructure to prevent the kind of chaos we had seen in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein and the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and government. For a new agreement actually to be implemented, I said, it would need a UN Security Council resolution “imposing real and immediate consequences for non-compliance.” In addition nations with influence on the warring parties would have to pressure them to accept and support the transition. That meant that Russia should use its clout with the regime, while the Arabs and the West would do the same with the rebels to get them all on board.
We preferred stronger language than what Kofi was suggesting on certain points (for example, we would have liked a more direct reference to Assad’s departure), but, in the interest of simplicity and consensus, we agreed to accept the document as it was written, and we urged all other nations to follow suit.
The public portion of international meetings like this is typically scripted. Each country and organization states its position, and it can be rather boring. The action generally starts when the cameras leave. That’s what happened here.
We left the ceremonial hall and crowded into a long rectangular room with Kofi and Ban Ki-moon at the head and the Ministers, each with a single aide, arranged on each side of two facing tables. Emotions ran high; at one point Ministers were shouting at one another and even pounding the table. Eventually the commotion settled into a running argument between me and Lavrov. That’s where this had always been headed.
Eventually it seemed as if the Russians might accept a transitional governing body, if we could get the language right. Lavrov balked at Kofi’s phrase excluding those who would “undermine the credibility of the transition and jeopardize stability and reconciliation.” I offered a new formulation to break the deadlock. The transitional governing body would include members of both the government and the opposition chosen “on the basis of mutual consent.” Finally the Russians agreed.
It’s easy to get lost in the semantics, but words constitute much of a diplomat’s work, and I knew they would shape how the rest of the world received our agreement and how it was understood on the ground in Syria. I offered “mutual consent” as a way out because, in practice, there was no way Assad would pass such a test; the opposition would never consent to him. We retained the phrase “full executive powers” to describe the mandate for the proposed transitional governing body; that meant Assad and his cronies would be stripped of their authority. To strengthen our case, I made sure the agreement explicitly put the Syrian security and intelligence services, along with “all governmental institutions,” under the control of the transitional governing body and called for “top leadership that inspires public confidence” (another standard Assad would never meet).
I insisted that we should go next to the Security Council and pass what’s called a Chapter VII resolution, which would authorize tough sanctions in the event of noncompliance. Lavrov was noncommittal on that, but he agreed to use Russia’s influence to support Kofi and his plan and joined all of us in signing on the dotted line of what we had negotiated. Then we all went out to explain it to the world.
Trouble started almost right away. The press missed the intent and plain meaning of “mutual consent” and read it as an admission that Assad could stay in power. The New York Times filed a gloomy report under the headline “Talks Come Up with Plan for Syria, but Not for Assad’s Exit.” Lavrov did his best to fuel this interpretation. “There is no attempt to impose any kind of a transition process,” he told the press. “There are no prior conditions to the transfer process and no attempt to exclude any group from the process.” That was technically true but blatantly misleading.
Kofi dismissed Lavrov’s spin. “I will doubt that the Syrians—who have fought so hard for their independence, to be able to say how they’re governed and who governs them—will select people with blood on their hands to lead them,” he said. I backed him up: “What we have done here is to strip away the fiction that [Assad] and those with blood on their hands can stay in power. The plan calls for the Assad regime to give way to a new transitional governing body that will have full governance powers.” Over time the opposition and civilians in Syria came to see the Geneva Communiqué for what it was: a blueprint for Assad’s departure.
It was a bad summer for Syria. After signing the agreement in Geneva, the Russians ultimately refused to back the Chapter VII resolution at the UN or exert any real leverage with Assad. Although disappointing, their behavior was hardly surprising.
In August, Kofi resigned in disgust. “I did my best and sometimes the best is not always good enough,” he told me. “I don’t know what else you could’ve done, given the intransigence of the Russians on the Security Council,” I replied. And I told him, “I can’t imagine how we could’ve done any more than what we did. At least in Geneva we had a framework, but they were just immovable.” Meanwhile the casualties in Syria climbed into the tens of thousands, and the crisis spun further out of control.
I was growing increasingly frustrated but kept at it. When we ran into the Russian-made brick wall at the UN, I kept pressing forward along non-UN tracks, holding more meetings of the Friends of the Syrian People, which by now had expanded to about a hundred nations. The challenge was to convince all the parties—Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers on the one side, the rebels and the Arab states on the other—that a final decisive military victory was impossible and they should focus on reaching a diplomatic solution. That was going to take a great deal of carefully and consistently applied pressure. The United States and our partners steadily ratcheted up sanctions on the Assad regime. We froze their assets, imposed travel bans, and restricted trade. The Syrian economy was in free-fall. But with Russia and Iran bankrolling Assad’s war effort, the fighting continued unabated.
Assad kept escalating the use of air power and began firing Scud missiles to overwhelm the rebels, which killed even more civilians. The opposition, despite efforts by the Europeans, Arabs, and the United States, remained in disarray. We provided rebels with “nonlethal” aid, including communications gear and rations, starting in March 2012, but we held the line against contributing arms and training. There were many voices, particularly among the Syrian opposition, crying out for us to support them as we had supported the Libyan rebels. But Syria was not Libya.
The Assad regime was much more entrenched than Qaddafi, with more support among key segments of the population, more allies in the region, a real Army, and far more robust air defenses. Unlike in Libya, where the rebel Transitional National Council had controlled large swaths of territory in the east, including Benghazi, the country’s second largest city, the opposition in Syria was disorganized and diffuse. It struggled to hold territory and to coalesce around a single command structure. And, of course, there was one other crucial difference: Russia was blocking any move at the UN on Syria, in large measure to prevent a replay of Libya.
In the early days of the fighting many had assumed Assad’s fall was inevitable. After all, the previous leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen were all gone. It was hard to imagine that, after so much bloodshed and getting a taste of freedom, the Syrian people would just settle down and agree to accept dictatorial rule once again. But now, in the second year of civil war, it seemed increasingly possible that Assad would hang on, even if it meant tearing the country apart and fomenting destructive sectarian strife. Syria could be doomed to a long and bloody stalemate. Or it could become a failed state, with the structure of government collapsing and chaos ensuing. And the longer the conflict dragged on, the more danger there was that the instability would destabilize vulnerable neighbors, like Jordan and Lebanon, and the more likely it was that extremists would build support inside Syria.
I started referring to Syria as a “wicked problem,” a term used by planning experts to describe particularly complex challenges that confound standard solutions and approaches. Wicked problems rarely have a right answer; in fact, part of what makes them wicked is that every option appears worse than the next. Increasingly that’s how Syria appeared. Do nothing, and a humanitarian disaster envelops the region. Intervene militarily, and risk opening Pandora’s box and wading into another quagmire, like Iraq. Send aid to the rebels, and watch it end up in the hands of extremists. Continue with diplomacy, and run head-first into a Russian veto. None of these approaches offered much hope of success. But we had to keep at it.
As it became clear that the Geneva effort was stalemated, I and others on the Obama national security team began exploring what it would take to stand up a carefully vetted and trained force of moderate Syrian rebels who could be trusted with American weapons. There are real risks to such an approach. In the 1980s, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan armed Afghan rebels called mujahideen who helped end the Soviet occupation of their country. Some of those fighters, including Osama bin Laden, went on to form al Qaeda and turned their sights on targets in the West. Nobody wanted a repeat of that scenario.
But if rebels could be vetted and trained effectively, it would be helpful in a number of ways. First, even a relatively small group might be able to give a big psychological boost to the opposition and convince Assad’s backers to consider a political solution. Hezbollah gave credence to this view on the other side, when they helped shift the war in Assad’s favor by deploying only a few thousand hard-core fighters.
Second, and more immediately, our action—or inaction—had consequences for our relationships with our regional partners. It wasn’t a secret that various Arab states and individuals were sending arms into Syria. But the flow of weapons was poorly coordinated, with different countries sponsoring different and sometimes competing armed groups. And a troubling amount of matériel was finding its way to extremists. Because the United States was not part of this effort, we had less leverage to corral and coordinate the arms traffic. I had heard this firsthand in difficult conversations around the Gulf. If, however, America was willing finally to get in the game, we could be much more effective in isolating the extremists and empowering the moderates inside Syria.
One of the prime worries about Syria—and one of the reasons it was a wicked problem—was the lack of any viable alternatives to Assad on the ground. He and his allies could plausibly argue, like Louis XV of France, “Après moi, le déluge.” (After Assad, chaos.) The power vacuum in Iraq after the fall of Saddam and the disbanding of the Iraqi Army offered a cautionary tale. But if the United States could train and equip a reliable and effective moderate rebel force, it could help hold the country together during a transition, safeguard chemical weapons stockpiles, and prevent ethnic cleansing and score settling.
But could it be done? The key would be thoroughly vetting the rebel fighters to ensure we first weeded out the extremists and then maintained close intelligence sharing and operational coordination with all our partners.
In Iraq and Afghanistan the United States spent considerable energy training local soldiers, trying to mold them into a cohesive national army capable of providing security and defeating insurgencies. General David Petraeus, who commanded the U.S. military effort in both countries before becoming Director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 2011, knew firsthand how hard this could be. Despite some successes, the Iraqi and Afghan security forces were still struggling to find their footing. But through his experience in those countries, Petraeus had learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t.
I invited Petraeus to my house in Washington for lunch on a Saturday afternoon in July to discuss whether it was possible to vet, train, and equip moderate opposition fighters. If he thought this kind of effort could be accomplished in Syria, that would mean a lot. He had already given careful thought to the idea, and had even started sketching out the specifics and was preparing to present a plan.
Our military’s top brass, reluctant to get involved in Syria, consistently offered dire projections of the forces that would be required to overcome Assad’s advanced air defenses and conduct a Libya-style no-fly zone. But Secretary of Defense Panetta had become as frustrated as I was with the lack of options in Syria; he knew from his own time leading the CIA what our intelligence operatives could do.
In mid-August, I headed to Istanbul to consult with President Abdullah Gül, Prime Minister Erdoğan, and Foreign Minister Davutoğlu. Turkey was deeply troubled by what was happening across its border and trying to cope with the massive influx of refugees from Syria, some of whom I met while there, as well as periodic incidents of cross-border violence, including Syria’s shooting down a Turkish fighter jet over the Mediterranean. The loss of that plane was a dramatic reminder that this crisis could explode into a regional conflict at any moment. In my meetings I affirmed that the United States and the rest of our NATO allies were committed to Turkey’s security against Syrian aggression.
Although there had been continuous consultations between us and the Turks since the conflict started, I thought we should intensify operational planning by our militaries in order to prepare contingency plans. What would it take to impose a no-fly zone? How would we respond to the use or loss of chemical weapons? How could we better coordinate support for the armed opposition? The Turks agreed, and two days later Davutoğlu and I got on the phone to discuss our thinking with the Foreign Ministers of Great Britain, France, and Germany.
I returned to Washington reasonably confident that if we decided to begin arming and training moderate Syrian rebels, we could put in place effective coordination with our regional partners. By now interagency planning was in high gear, and Petraeus presented the plan to the President. He listened carefully and had a lot of questions. He worried that arming the rebels was not likely to be enough to drive Assad from power and that with all the weapons already flowing into the country from Arab nations, our contributions would hardly be decisive. And there were always unintended consequences to consider. The story of the mujahideen in Afghanistan remained a powerful cautionary tale never far from anyone’s mind. The President asked for examples of instances when the United States had backed an insurgency that could be considered a success.
These were very reasonable concerns, but Petraeus and I argued that there was a big difference between Qatar and Saudi Arabia dumping weapons into the country and the United States responsibly training and equipping a nonextremist rebel force. And getting control of that mess was a big part of our plan’s rationale. What’s more, the goal was not to build up a force strong enough to defeat the regime. Rather the idea was to give us a partner on the ground we could work with that could do enough to convince Assad and his backers that a military victory was impossible. It wasn’t a perfect plan, by any means. In fact, the best I could say for it was that it was the least bad option among many even worse alternatives.
Despite high-level support from the National Security Council, some in the White House were skeptical. After all, the President had been elected in large part because of his opposition to the war in Iraq and his promise to bring the troops home. Getting entangled in any way in another sectarian civil war in the Middle East was not what he had in mind when coming into office. And the President thought we needed more time to evaluate the Syrian opposition before escalating our commitment.
The risks of both action and inaction were high. Both choices would bring unintended consequences. The President’s inclination was to stay the present course and not take the significant further step of arming rebels.
No one likes to lose a debate, including me. But this was the President’s call and I respected his deliberations and decision. From the beginning of our partnership, he had promised me that I would always get a fair hearing. And I always did. In this case, my position didn’t prevail.
With the plan to arm the rebels dead in the water, I threw myself back into the diplomatic push, trying to further isolate and pressure the regime while addressing the humanitarian catastrophe. In August 2012, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had appointed Lakhdar Brahimi, an experienced diplomat from Algeria, to succeed Kofi Annan. He and I met and talked often, right up until my tenure ended. At a meeting of the Friends of the Syrian People in September, I announced additional aid to help get food, water, blankets, and critical medical services to people suffering in Syria. I also pledged increased support for civilian opposition groups, including satellite-linked computers, telephones, cameras, and training for more than a thousand activists, students, and independent journalists. As more parts of Syria slipped free from the regime’s control, we would also help local opposition groups provide essential services, such as reopening schools and rebuilding homes. But all of these steps were Band-Aids. The conflict would rage on.
By the time I departed the State Department in early 2013, tens of thousands of Syrians had been killed. Millions more had fled. International diplomacy had reached a standstill. Our fears were being realized as extremists were eclipsing the more moderate leaders of the Free Syrian Army.
In March 2013, little more than a month after I left office, troubling reports started coming in from around Aleppo that the Assad regime had begun using chemical weapons for the first time. This had been a major concern for two years. Syria was believed to maintain some of the biggest stockpiles of mustard gas, sarin, and other chemical weapons in the world. Throughout 2012, we had received sporadic reports that regime forces were moving or mixing chemical agents. In response both President Obama and I issued stark warnings. In August 2012, President Obama said that moving or using chemical weapons was a red line for the United States. The clear implication was that if the regime crossed that line, actions, potentially including military force, would be taken. In 2012, that threat seemed to be an effective deterrent, and Assad backed down. So if these new reports about chemical weapons were true, the conflict in Syria had just taken a very dangerous turn.
The President again said that the use of chemical weapons would be a game changer, but U.S. intelligence agencies were not yet ready to say with any certainty that an attack had actually happened. More investigation was needed. In June 2013, in a low-key statement, the White House confirmed that it finally felt confident that chemical weapons had indeed been used on a small scale on multiple occasions, killing up to 150 people. The President decided to increase aid to the Free Syrian Army. On background, administration officials told the press they would begin supplying arms and ammunition for the first time, reversing the President’s decision the previous summer.
Then, in August 2013, the world was shocked by images of a massive new chemical attack in opposition neighborhoods around Damascus. The reported death toll would climb to more than 1,400 men, women, and children. This was a major escalation and a blatant violation of both the President’s red line and long-standing international norms. Pressure began building immediately for a robust response from the United States. Secretary of State Kerry took the lead in condemning the attack, calling it a “moral obscenity.” President Obama said, “We cannot accept a world where women and children and innocent civilians are gassed on a terrible scale.” Americans wondered whether military action was imminent.
Some commentators and members of Congress asked why the President cared so much about chemical weapons when Assad had been killing so many people with conventional weapons. Chemical weapons are in a category by themselves. They have been banned by the international community since the 1925 Geneva Protocol and 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention because they are gruesome, indiscriminate, and inhumane. As President Obama explained, “If we fail to act, the Assad regime will see no reason to stop using chemical weapons. As the ban against these weapons erodes, other tyrants will have no reason to think twice about acquiring poison gas, and using them. Over time, our troops would again face the prospect of chemical warfare on the battlefield. And it could be easier for terrorist organizations to obtain these weapons, and to use them to attack civilians.”
As the White House geared up for action, Prime Minister David Cameron lost a vote in the British Parliament to authorize the use of force in Syria. Two days later President Obama announced his intent to order air strikes to deter and degrade future use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. But in a move that surprised many in Washington, the President said he would seek authorization from Congress, which was in recess, before acting. Suddenly Congress was plunged into a fierce debate about what to do. Parallels were drawn with the run-up to the war in Iraq. Worst-case scenarios and slippery slopes were invoked. The President’s plan for a limited strike to uphold a crucial global norm seemed to get lost in the bluster. As the days went by, the tide of public opinion began to turn against the White House. Vote counters in Congress began predicting that the President might lose, which would deal a serious blow to U.S. prestige and credibility. I watched the back-and-forth with consternation. Syria had become even more of a wicked problem. I supported the President’s efforts with Congress and urged lawmakers to act.
During this time, I spoke with Secretary Kerry and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough about ways to strengthen the President’s hand abroad, especially in advance of his trip later that week to the G-20 summit in St. Petersburg, where he’d see Vladimir Putin. Not wanting Putin to be able to hold the contentious Congressional debate over the President, I suggested to Denis that the White House find some way to show bipartisan support ahead of the vote. Knowing that Senator Bob Corker, the leading Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was no fan of Putin’s, my advice to Denis was that he be enlisted to help send a message. The idea was to use a routine committee hearing that week to hold a vote on the authorization to use military force that the President would win. Denis, always open to ideas and very familiar with the ways of Congress from his time serving on Capitol Hill, agreed. Working with Corker, the White House got the vote. While not the world’s most significant statement, it was enough to telegraph to Putin that we were not as divided as he hoped. Denis called back a few days later to see if I had any other ideas, and said that the President wanted to call me the next day. Knowing how much he had on his plate, I told Denis the President shouldn’t feel it was necessary. But Denis said that POTUS (the President of the United States) was going to call, and we spoke the next day about the state of play of his Congressional efforts and other ongoing developments on the international stage.
In a fortuitous coincidence, I was scheduled to go to the White House in person on September 9 for an event about illegal wildlife trafficking. At the State Department I had learned that African forest elephants were nearing extinction. While unfortunate on its own, what caught my attention was one of the reasons behind it: terrorists and armed groups like Al Shabaab and the Lord’s Resistance Army had entered the illegal ivory trade as a means of funding their illicit and destabilizing activities across Central Africa. When I left government and joined Bill and Chelsea at the Clinton Foundation, Chelsea and I began working with leading conservation groups to organize a global response that would “stop the killing, stop the trafficking, and stop the demand.” Thanks in part to our lobbying, the White House also saw this as an important issue, and President Obama signed an executive order in the summer of 2013 to step up antitrafficking efforts. Now the White House was holding a conference to plan next steps, and they wanted Chelsea and me to be there. Of course, all anyone in the rest of the world wanted to hear about was Syria.
That morning, at a press conference in London, Secretary Kerry was asked if there was anything Assad could do to prevent military action. “Sure,” Kerry replied, “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.” Although Kerry’s answer may have reflected conversations he was having with allies and the Russians, it sounded to the world like an offhand remark. A State Department spokesperson downplayed it as “a rhetorical argument.” The Russians, however, seized on Kerry’s comment and embraced it as a serious diplomatic offer.
When I arrived at the White House at 1 P.M., top administration officials were debating how to respond. I was given a briefing, and then I went into the Oval Office to talk with the President. It was strange being back in that familiar room for the first time since I’d stepped down seven months earlier, once again discussing an urgent international crisis. I told the President that if the votes for action against Syria were not winnable in Congress, he should make lemonade out of lemons and welcome the unexpected overture from Moscow.
There were reasons to be cautious, of course. This latest diplomatic ploy by the Russians could be just another delaying tactic to keep Assad in power at all costs. The large chemical weapons supply wasn’t good for them either, with its own restive Muslim population. But the prospect of eliminating Assad’s chemical weapons stockpile was worth the risk, especially since the President was facing a potentially damaging standoff with Congress. This wouldn’t end the civil war or do much to help civilians caught in the crossfire, but it would remove a serious threat to Syrian civilians, neighbors including Israel, and the United States itself. As the conflict worsened and instability increased, so too would the chances that these chemical weapons would be used again against Syrian civilians or transferred to Hezbollah or stolen by other terrorists.
I told the President that I still believed it was crucial to pursue a diplomatic solution that would end the conflict. I knew exactly how hard this would be. After all, I had been trying since March 2011. But the road map we had signed in Geneva the previous year still offered a path forward. Maybe cooperation on chemical weapons would create momentum for broader progress. It was unlikely, but worth testing.
The President agreed and asked me to make a statement. Outside the Oval, I huddled with Ben Rhodes, the President’s Deputy National Security Advisor and top foreign policy speechwriter, scribbling new language at the top of my remarks on ivory trafficking. Like Denis McDonough, Rhodes was one of the President’s aides whom I had come to trust and value over the years. He had also grown close with members of my team, and they would reminisce about how far we’d all come since the bad old days of the 2008 primary campaign, and how they missed working together. Now I was glad once again to have his advice on how to send just the right message to the world.
When I walked into the wildlife event in the White House auditorium, it was packed with more cameras and journalists than had probably ever reported on elephant poaching before. I started with Syria: “If the regime immediately surrendered its stockpiles as was suggested by Secretary Kerry and the Russians, that would be an important step. But this cannot be another excuse for delay or obstruction, and Russia has to support the international community’s efforts sincerely or be held to account.” I also stressed that it was the President’s threat to use force that spurred the Russians to look for a way out.
The White House decided to put off the vote in Congress to give diplomacy a chance to work. Secretary Kerry flew to Geneva and hammered out the details for removing chemical weapons with Lavrov. Just a month later, the UN agency charged with implementing the deal, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It was quite a vote of confidence. Remarkably, as of this writing, the agreement has held, and the UN is making slow but steady progress dismantling Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal, despite extraordinarily difficult circumstances. There have been delays, but more than 90 percent of Syria’s chemical weapons had been removed by late April 2014.
In January 2014 Special Representative Brahimi convened a second UN conference on Syria in Geneva with the goal of implementing the agreement I had negotiated back in June 2012. For the first time representatives from the Assad regime sat down face-to-face with members of the opposition. But talks failed to produce any progress. The regime refused to engage seriously on the question of a transitional governing body, as mandated by the original agreement, and their Russian allies stood faithfully behind them. Meanwhile the fighting on the ground continued unabated.
The humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Syria is heartbreaking. As usual, innocent women and children are bearing the brunt of the suffering. Extremists continue to gain ground, and intelligence officials in the United States and Europe warn that they could pose a threat well beyond Syria. In February 2014, CIA Director John Brennan reported, “We are concerned about the use of Syrian territory by the Al Qaeda organization to recruit individuals and develop the capability to be able not just to carry out attacks inside of Syria, but also to use Syria as a launching pad.” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper put an even finer point on it, saying that at least one extremist group in Syria “does have aspirations for attacks on the [American] homeland.” With a bloody stalemate continuing in Syria, this danger will only grow, and the United States and our allies will not be able to ignore it. More moderate members of the Syrian opposition also recognize the threat posed by the extremists trying to hijack their revolution, and some have launched efforts to drive them out of rebel-held territory. But that will be an uphill battle, requiring a diversion of arms and men away from the fight against Assad. In April 2014, there were reports that the United States would provide additional training and arms to certain rebel groups.
As Kofi Annan said at the first Geneva summit, “History is a somber judge.” It is impossible to watch the suffering in Syria, including as a private citizen, and not ask what more could have been done. That’s part of what makes Syria and the broader challenge of an unstable Middle East such a wicked problem. But wicked problems can’t paralyze us. We need to keep urgently seeking solutions, however hard they are to find.