The unfolding humanitarian and geopolitical catastrophe in the Syrian city of Aleppo has given Barack Obama the occasion to reflect publicly on his fateful choice not to more deeply involve America in the destructive five-and-a-half-year civil war that has killed up to half a million people, displaced over 10 million others (internally and externally), and even spread its destabilizing effects to another continent (Europe).
But Obama seems to have been so consumed by the question of what would have happened had he intervened with direct military action in Syria that he's overlooked the bigger question: having renounced military coercion against the Syrian regime, why didn't he simply renounce regime change altogether?
The fact of the matter is, the Syrian conflict has dragged on only because Washington, even now, still supports the rebellion to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Through its Gulf Arab and Turkish allies, the US has funded and armed the insurgents who otherwise would have run out of money and materiel a long time ago. The whole covert war waged by the CIA alone has consumed billions of dollars since 2011 - an effort akin to the proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Quite a pity that it's all gone to an ultimately losing effort.
It's not that Obama wasn't aware that it would very likely be a losing effort. He had held his fire in 2013 partly because he already knew that if he threatened Assad, the Iranians would immediately pull out of the then still largely secret nuclear deal deliberations, and partly because even then he was fearful of how Putin might react. In hindsight, that was the moment when he should have dropped the whole policy of regime change altogether: if the US wasn't going to lead the operation itself, it could only hope that its own regional allies would be able to out-escalate Assad's allies, but Obama was already aware of Moscow's and Tehran's bottom lines, so it's somewhat baffling why he still retained a diplomatic stance that depended on them not doing the utmost (in the end) to shore up their client state in Damascus.
Of course, hindsight is always 20-20, and Obama saw other factors at the time which were more favorable to staying the course of backing the revolution's primary goal. Neither Russia nor even Iran, he thought, wanted an indefinite quagmire in Syria, and he was convinced that US support for the rebels could sustain just such a stalemate. This belief persisted even after ISIS blew the whole region up in mid-2014 and created a new urgency to get the Syrian conflict over and done with.
It turns out, though, that Obama just never gave himself that bit of extra wiggle room that a more prudent or attentive realpolitik power broker would have: instead of conceding political and diplomatic ground to lock in military gains, the US-backed rebellion in 2014 and 2015 only became more uncompromising in its demand that Assad leave immediately to face a dishonorable exile at best or a war crimes tribunal at worst. This not only made it more likely that Assad would unleash even more havoc on the opposition and suck in even more brazen Iranian and Russian support, but it also closed off the best chance for a political settlement favorable to Washington, its regional allies, and the democratic West: a removal of Assad himself without the destruction of his regime.
With Assad's back against the wall in the spring of 2015, it would have been prudent to work with Putin to secure a political transition that would end with the Baathist paramount leadership's abdication under the condition of immunity from forced exile or prosecution for war crimes. The aim would have been to perform a "brain transplant" of the regime so that its mind could be altered while leaving its body intact, thereby allowing collaboration between loyalist and opposition elements to kickstart the creation of a more democratic order under a new constitution. Much further bloodshed could have been averted if the Obama administration pressed its utmost leverage on the opposition to enter into this process without regard for Assad's or his inner circle's personal fate; absent such a change of heart and strategy by the opposition, it can only have become an increasingly desperate all-or-nothing contest for the survival of the entire Syrian state, not merely Mr. Assad, and this ensured a descent into deeper and more savage violence - to ultimately pull in the Russians on top of the Iranians in support of the regime.
Instead, as we approach the anniversary of the Russian intervention in Syria, Obama and his top policymakers are smarting from having been effectively cornered into renouncing regime change because the rebels can only realistically bargain for much less - probably little more than their mere political survival at this point. Had they seized their position of strength in early 2015 to settle for something less than they aspired to but well within their hard military capability to secure, Assad would plausibly have become a mere private citizen surrounded by his heavily armed Alawite clan and perhaps a broader Alawite enclave on the Mediterranean coast under special UN protection, wondering whether his dubious future prospects in the country make it better for him to just emigrate to Iran or Russia.
The outgoing US president will have much to think about in the coming years, but eventually he'll recognize that on Syria, in the first place, he should have paid much closer attention to the crisis to be able to more proactively drive the opposition's negotiating strategy and tactics; then perhaps he would have had the "aha" moment he now concedes may have appeared to a Churchill or even an Eisenhower.
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