A Reckoning Will Come in Syria
A missile is seen crossing over Damascus, Syria April 14, 2018. SANA/Handout via REUTERS[Published in The Atlantic.]
It is undoubtedly a good thing that a small international coalition of the willing responded to Syria’s latest chemical outrage with a limited military strike. But it marks only the first step in an effective strategy to stop Syria’s use of chemical weapons—and more importantly, to hold Russia accountable for its promise to oversee a chemical weapons-free Syria.
Syria and Russia have displayed characteristic bluster and dishonesty, warning of “consequences” for a crisis that the Syrians themselves provoked by apparently violating, once again, their 2013 agreement not to use chemical weapons. Any confrontation with destabilizing bullies is dangerous, and there is no predicting whether and how they’ll respond.
Even a limited and justified effort to contain Syria and its allies carries a risk of escalation. The Trump administration, with its capricious chief executive and broken policy-making process, is ill equipped to forge the sort of complex strategy needed to manage Russia, Syria, Iran, and a Middle East in conflict. Nor has it so far displayed much interest in building the international cooperation necessary to implement such a strategy—although it was a pleasant development that the United States was joined this time by France and the U.K. rather than proceeding unilaterally. However, the considerable drawbacks of the Trump administration don’t give the West a pass when it comes to Syrian use of chemical weapons, and Russia’s belligerent expansionism. Both need to be checked and contained, even considering the additional risks Trump creates.
In order to have any real impact on chemical weapons use, the response needs to be sustained. Every time the regime uses chemical weapons, there needs to be a retaliation, which specifically targets the regime’s chemical-weapons capacity—command and control, delivery mechanisms including aircraft and bases, storage, research, and the like. A political strategy is indispensable as well. Since Russia is the guarantor of the failed 2013 chemical weapons agreement, the West needs to keep Russia on the hook for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons. The Pentagon chief suggested that these strikes were a one-off, and only time will tell which of Trump’s preferences prevail.
Deft diplomacy will also be necessary to reduce the risks of wider war. It doesn’t help that Trump is undermining the nuclear deal with Iran at the same time as he is ratcheting up the stakes in Syria. One key determinant now is how much Russia is willing to add action to match its relentless campaign of lies and bluster about Syria and chemical weapons. Another is whether Iran, Assad, and Hezbollah are willing to sit on their hands after these strikes. In the past, all three have been willing to refrain from action despite angry promises.
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The problem is the context. Any American action in the Middle East ought to be embedded in a comprehensive, engaged strategy—which is not likely to be forthcoming. Today, we can be sure that America’s significant moves—from proposals to withdraw military assets fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq, to promises to degrade the capabilities of Bashar al-Assad or limit the reach of Hezbollah or Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—will land à la carte, increasing the danger of miscalculation and violent, destabilizing escalation.
At stake is how to manage disorder in the Middle East, and more important still, where to draw the line with a resurgent Russia.
Containing rival powers is an art, not a science. Military planners talk about the “escalation ladder” as if it were a chemical equation, but in reality escalation hinges on unpredictable questions of politics, interests, psychology, hard power, and willingness to deploy it.
Obama’s strategy could most simply be understood as a desire to contain regional fires with minimal involvement, while keeping an equal distance from regional antagonists, including Saudi Arabia and Iran, and difficult regional allies including Turkey and Israel. The U.S. got involved in the fight against ISIS, by this logic, with minimal resources and local alliances that it knew couldn’t outlive the immediate counter-terrorism operation.
In the Syrian context, Obama early on made clear that the United States commitment to principles of democracy and human rights would remain primarily rhetorical. Today, the United States has discarded even many of the rhetorical trappings of American exceptionalism. Trump has made clear that he doesn’t apply a moral calculus to superpower behavior. But he’s also expressed personal outrage about Syria’s use of chemical weapons—and he visibly takes umbrage at being personally embarrassed or humiliated.
Whether one thinks it’s wise or fully baked, President Trump also has a Middle East strategy. He wants to reduce America’s footprint, and disown any responsibility for the region’s wars, as if America played no role in starting them and suffers no strategic consequence from their trajectory. He wants to outsource regional security management to regional allies. Most of this is continuous with Obama’s approach, except when it comes to regional alliances; Obama attempted a “pox on both your houses” balance among all of America’s difficult allies. In his biggest departure from his predecessor, Trump has tilted fully to the Saudi Arabian side of the regional dispute, and has erased what little daylight separated American and Israeli priorities in the Middle East.
This is the bedrock of Trump’s moves in the region—moves that are all the more consequential because they are overtly about confronting, or trying to check, Iran and Russia.
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The United States has a critical national interest in reestablishing the chemical weapons taboo. It also has countless other equities in the Middle East that require sustained attention and investment, of diplomatic, economic, and military resources. A short list of the most urgent priorities includes preventing the resurgence of ISIS or its successors; supporting governance in Iraq; limiting the reach and power of militias supported by Iran; and reversing the destabilizing human and international strategic toll of the world’s largest refugee crisis since World War II. A major regional war will only make things worse.
Given the stated priorities of the president, the most realistic possibility is an incomplete, and possibly destabilizing policy of confrontation, containment, and reestablishment of international norms.
But a reckoning can’t be deferred forever. Iran has been surging further and further afield in the Middle East, to great effect. Russia has been testing the West’s limits mercilessly since the invasion of Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. At some point, the United States and its allies will stand up to this expansionist behavior, although there’s wide latitude about where to set limits. When the West, or some subset of NATO, does confront Russian ambitions, there’s no pat set of rules to keep us safe. Such confrontations are inevitable, and dangerous, and unpredictable. The best we can do is enter into them carefully, with as many strong allies as possible, and clearly stated, limited expectations about what we intend to accomplish.
The United States and its allies also need to more carefully distinguish things they dislike (Iranian influence in Iraq) from things they won’t tolerate (Hezbollah and Iran building permanent military infrastructure in the Golan). Rhetoric in the region often conflates the two. Israeli officials, for instance, talk about “intolerable” developments in Syria, but in practice their security policy often allows for a great deal of ambiguity about just what level of military threat they’re willing to tolerate along their frontiers. Iran, Hezbollah, and now Russia have made grandiose claims about retaliating if the United States takes action, but after past strikes by both the United States and Israel, the actual response has been quite restrained.
The United States and its allies need to set limited, achievable goals. The U.S. might for instance stand firm against the use of chemical weapons, or against new military campaigns against sovereign states, but it can’t very well seek to turn back the clock to a Syria free of Russian and Iranian influence.
In addition, the United States can help the world remember who is the author of this dangerous impasse: Syria, Iran, and Russia, who have serially transgressed the laws of war, lied in international forums, and mocked countless agreements, including the shambolic deal that was supposed to rid Syria of chemical weapons in 2013. This won’t justify American actions or give them political cover, but it is a key reason why we’re in such a difficult position in the first place. Despite American restraint, or even American willingness to tolerate war crimes by Syria and its allies, Syria and its allies have insisted on pushing past every limit and exhausting the world’s willingness to turn a blind eye toward abuses so long as those abuses stay within national boundaries.
Finally, to have any impact at all the United States will need to pay consistent and sustained attention. Russia, Syria, and Iran have gotten away with murder, literally, and have found themselves able to run circles around Western governments that still care to some extent about international norms and institutions. They are dangerous, but they are far weaker than their words would suggest. The West cannot deter every action it does not like, yet it can draw boundaries and impose a cost—but it must do so consistently.
This weekend’s strikes have established a bar and set a perilous, but unavoidable, process in motion. What counts is what comes next.
The Logic of Assad’s Brutality
A child and a man are seen in hospital in the besieged town of Douma, Eastern Ghouta, Damascus, Syria. Picture taken February 25,2018. REUTERS/Bassam Khabieh
[Published in The Atlantic.]
Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, might have great contempt for the sanctity of human life, but he is not a reckless strategist. Since 2011, he has prosecuted an uncompromising war against his own population. He has committed many of his most egregious war crimes strategically—sometimes to eliminate civilians who would rather die than live under his rule, sometimes to neuter an international order that occasionally threatens to limit his power, and sometimes, as with his use of chemical weapons, to accomplish both goals at once. When he does wrong, he does it consciously and with intended effect. His crimes are not accidents.
The Syrian regime’s suspected chemical-weapons attack on Saturday in Douma, a suburb of Damascus, suggests that Assad and his allies have accomplished many of their primary war aims, and are now seeking to secure their hegemony in the Levant. But two major factors still complicate Assad’s plans. One is Syria’s population, which to this day includes rebels who will fight to the death and civilians who nonviolently but fundamentally reject his violent, totalitarian rule. The second is President Donald Trump, who has expressed a determination to pull out of Syria entirely, but at the same time has demonstrated a revulsion at Assad’s use of chemical weapons.
Almost precisely one year ago, Assad unleashed chemical weapons against civilians in rural Idlib province, provoking international outrage and a symbolic, but still significant, missile strike ordered by Trump against the airbase from which the attacks were reportedly launched. Assad’s regime was responsible for the attacks and its Russian backers were fully in the know, later evidence suggested, but Damascus and Moscow lied wantonly in their hollow denials.
This weekend, it appears, Assad’s regime struck again. Fighters in Douma refused a one-sided ceasefire agreement, and haven’t buckled despite years of starvation siege warfare and indiscriminate bombing. In what has become a familiar chain of events, the regime groomed public opinion by airing accusations that the rebels might organize a false-flag chemical attack in order to attract international sympathy. An apparent chemical attack followed, killing at least 25 and wounding more than 500, according to unconfirmed reports from rescue workers and the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations. The Syrian government and the Russians have once again blamed the rebels, knowing that it will take months before solid evidence emerges, by which point most attention will have turned elsewhere. The pattern is by now predictable. In all likelihood, solid, independent evidence will soon emerge linking the attacks to the Syrian regime.
Assad already has unraveled the global taboo against chemical weapons, in the process exposing the incoherence of the international community. Syria has exposed the international liberal order as a convenient illusion. Western bromides of “never again” meant nothing when a determined dictator with hefty international backers committed crimes against humanity.
Why now? This latest attack in Ghouta, if it holds to the pattern, makes perfect sense in the calculus of Assad, Vladimir Putin, and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The successful trio wants first and foremost to subdue the remaining rebels in Syria, with an eye toward the several million people remaining in rebel-held Idlib province. A particularly heinous death for the holdouts in Ghouta, according to this military logic, might discourage the rebels in Idlib from fighting to the bitter end. Equally important, however, is the desire to corral Trump as Syria, Russia, and Iran did his predecessor, Barack Obama.
After the humiliating August 2013 “non-strike event,” when Obama changed his mind about his “red line” and decided not to react to Assad’s use of chemical weapons, the Syrians had America in a box. The White House signed up for a chemical disarmament plan that proved a farce. By the time the agreement had unraveled and Assad was back to using chemical weapons against Syrian citizens, the public no longer cared and Obama was busy discussing his foreign policy legacy.
Trump’s Middle East policy remains a mystery. He has long appeared unconcerned with rising Russian power in the Middle East, but today tweeted that there would be a “big price” for Russia, Iran, and Syria to pay. He seems to prefer a smaller U.S. military footprint, talking repeatedly about pulling troops out of Syria and Iraq. He’s savaged the deal that shelved Iran’s nuclear program, and doesn’t appear impressed by the shabby chemical-weapons agreement in Syria. He doesn’t seem interested in a long-term strategic engagement in the Arab world, but he’s also not interested in propping up the status quo. His reaction to the Khan Sheikhoun attack a year ago aligned with these preferences: He abhorred the attack and spoke with uncharacteristic humanity about the children killed by Assad, and ordered a pointed but limited response. He wasn’t interested in escalating or intervening against Russia or Assad, but he also had no interest in pacifying or reassuring them.
One result of Trump’s confusing Syria policy is that Assad and his backers can’t quite be sure what America is planning—a pullout or a pushback. Hence another chemical attack, which will test the range of America’s response and, perhaps, will paint Trump into the same corner where Obama’s Syria policy languished.
For Assad, there is utility in such a feint, and no real risk. In 2013, he and the rest of the region braced in fear for an expected American response, which was widely expected to jolt the regional state of affairs. Assad has learned his lessons since then. No meaningful American response will be forthcoming, no matter how hideous the war crime. America remains deep in strategic drift, unsure of why it continues to engage in the Middle East, and prone to spasms of hyperactivity rather than sustained attention.
Although we can’t be sure—yet—exactly what happened in Ghouta, we can be confident that it was no accident. Assad is determined to cement his grip once again over Syria, no matter how thoroughly he has to destroy his country in order to restore it. And with Putin’s backing, he is determined to thoroughly discredit what remains of the international community and U.S. leadership. They can’t be sure what Trump will do, but their apparent cavalier use of chemical weapons on the one-year anniversary of the Khan Sheikhoun attacks suggests they’re reasonably confident that the U.S. president won’t take serious action.
This most recent attack, as tragic as it is, is no turning point. It’s more of the same from Assad and his allies, as they solidify the grisly, dangerous norms that they’ve been busy enshrining since 2013.
After Khan Sheikhoun, “War Crimes” Might Have No Meaning
RESIDENTS IN SARAQIB, A CITY IN THE SYRIAN PROVINCE OF IDLIB, PROTEST THE CHEMICAL ATTACKS IN NEARBY KHAN SHEIKHOUN.
SOURCE: FACEBOOK/EDLIB MEDIA CENTER
[Published at The Century Foundation.]
The latest chemical weapon attack in Syria assaults the most foundational values of our international order just as surely as it shocks the conscience. The attack on Khan Sheikhoun on April 4 bears the hallmarks of previous regime attacks; it will take time to fully assess the evidence, but there is already a powerful body of evidence implicating Syria’s government in the strike.
What does “never again” mean if one of the most closely watched dictators in the world can repeatedly get away with violating a global ban on chemical weapons in a scorched-earth campaign against the last holdouts resisting his abusive regime?
How are we in the future to rely on the delicate web of international institutions erected after World War II, on matters of core concern to humanity (and for that matter, to U.S. interests), if we allow those institutions to be gutted by a coalition of autocrats willing to brazenly test the resolve of a Western-dominated international order?
There are plenty of painful matters to unpack as a result of the apparent regime attack on Khan Sheikhoun, which will take its place in the long catalogue of horrors that is Syria’s civil war.
Some questions concern Syria, and its likely future under Bashar al-Assad, the country’s newly confident hereditary ruler. What kind of daily atrocities can Syrians expect from a ruler who, as he arcs toward victory, demonstrates such rapacious thirst not for reconciliation but for vengeance against civilians?
Other questions affect the entire global community of nations: What meaning remains in international humanitarian law—the laws of war—that are supposed to govern what weapons belligerents can use, how they choose their targets, and how they can treat their prisoners of war? Such laws are often observed in the breach, but we are testing the limits of how often war crimes can be committed without rendering the whole concept terminally abstract.
After World War II, even powerful nations understood they had a stake in limiting the horror of total war; after all, they had all just experienced its extremes—and most understood they had committed some atrocities as well as suffering at enemy hands. The Geneva Conventions of 1864 were the first laws governing warfare, but international momentum really coalesced with the Geneva Conventions of 1949. From this shared understanding—and not from some spirit of altruism—were born a new set of norms: No genocide, no chemical weapons, no torture of prisoners of war, no completely indiscriminate bombing.
Of course, since the end of World War II, these norms have been tested and transgressed, at times by the United States. But the mutual agreements survive because they have given rise to an extensive web of laws, treaties, and institutions, and because even powerful nations that occasionally abuse those laws tend to do so while claiming to uphold them—a surprisingly effective way of propping up even a partially observed norm.
Tests of international will took on a new and more toxic form in Syria’s civil war. Assad’s use of chemical weapons ultimately strengthened his regime’s standing rather than turning it into a pariah. His temerity and the feckless international response, together, strike a body blow against an international consensus that was already weakened by the excesses of the American-led global war on terror after 9/11.
The first step came in August 2013, when Assad killed more than a thousand civilians in a nerve gas strike on the Damascus suburbs. It was the one move that risked punitive strikes against the regime, or potentially more broadly, bringing the United States fully into the war on the side of the rebels. Assad risked it anyway. American airstrikes on Damascus appeared imminent until a surprise eleventh-hour agreement was reached to dismantle Syria’s entire chemical weapons stockpile. Russia and the United States brokered the deal, and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (one of those all-important international organizations upon which we depend for what rule of law persists in the global order) oversaw its implementation.
But the deal faltered after the first year, in a painfully chronicled failure. In documented attacks since 2013 it appears that Assad’s forces have used chlorine, which is not listed in the Chemical Weapons Convention. If sarin or a similar nerve agent was used in the Khan Sheikhoun attack, it would represent a significant shift.
Today, American foreign policy aims for transactional, whitewashing failed governance and human rights abuses if dictators are willing to cooperate on counterterrorism.
The strike in Khan Sheikhoun, if it is eventually proven to be a regime act, will mark the second brazen contravention of international norms—and this time, it comes at a moment when Bashar al-Assad already appears on the cusp of obtaining most of what he seeks from his erstwhile enemies, potentially prevailing against long odds. Why risk that imminent victory and possibly turn a President Trump who appears predisposed to deal with Damascus against Assad?
We might never know the motive for the gas attack, but its impact will be clear. The countries that have voiced opposition to Assad will now have to consider whether to match actions to their words. And Russia and China, the most powerful countries that sympathize with the transactional dog-eat-dog view of international relations, will have to decide whether to exercise their United Nations Security Council vetoes to limit any response to Khan Sheikhoun.
Unless the unlikely occurs and a sizable portion of the international community stands against the outrage, we’ll be another step closer to an international order without order, a world of war where there’s no longer any such thing as a war crime.
What Could Possibly Motivate a Chemical-Weapons Attack?
A picture taken on April 4, 2017 shows destruction at a hospital in Khan Sheikhun, a rebel-held town in the northwestern Syrian Idlib province, following a suspected toxic gas attack.
Omar Haj Kadour / AFP / Getty
[Published in The Atlantic.]
At present, U.S. intelligence officials say the attack has the “fingerprints” of an Assad regime strike. In a statement on Tuesday, President Donald Trump directly condemned Assad for the attack, but suggested that President Barack Obama’s weakness set the stage for the continuing use of chemical weapons in Syria. “Today’s chemical attack in Syria against innocent people, including women and children, is reprehensible and cannot be ignored. … These heinous actions by the Bashar al-Assad regime are a consequence of the past administration’s weakness and irresolution,” the statement read.
None of this answers the central question of motive, which remains as much a mystery today as it was after the 2013 nerve gas attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. There are a few clues, however. Some can, indeed, be found in Obama’s hasty retreat from his red line on chemical weapons. Another can be found in Trump’s warm words for Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, uttered on Monday at the White House during the official debut of a new, unabashedly transactional foreign policy that marginalizes issues of human rights and governance.
This is not to suggest a causal link between Trump’s bear hug of Sisi and the attack the following day on one of the last persistent rebel holdouts in Syria—the Ghouta attack took place after Obama explicitly threatened retaliation for such a thing, after all. But the brazenness and horror of the attack suggest a gutting of the very heart of foundational international norms. Whether intentional or not—and it might well be a calculated move—this attack marks a second frontal assault on global norms against chemical warfare, along with the international institutions that undergird that ban.
The first challenge, the Ghouta chemical attack in August 2013, was sadly successful. It put to rest any notion that the U.S.-led international order was willing to enforce its red lines, even one as globally important as the taboo against chemical weapons, which grew out of universal horror at the gas attacks on the trenches during World War I. Obama’s red line, and the flawed deal that followed that dismantled most but not all of Assad’s chemical weapons capacity, taught Syria and its backers an important lesson: at least in this current epoch, the guarantors of the international order are no longer heavily invested in its ethical core or its literal enforcement. Obama laid down only one explicit marker that would prompt him to intervene in Syria—the use of chemical weapons. Assad used them anyway, and found great reward in testing even the most supposedly sacred limits. That was the real lesson of 2013, and it wasn’t lost on Assad, Sisi, Putin, or other transactional authoritarians.
For nearly the entire Syrian civil war, Assad has offered a deal to the foreign powers that backed the rebellion. If these foreign governments returned to the regime’s fold, all would be forgiven, and Assad’s nexus of intelligence services would resume (or in some cases, start) a morally compromised but effective counterterrorism partnership against common enemies, from ISIS to jihadi operatives now in the West. American and European diplomats expressed distaste for such a Machiavellian deal. But after Europe’s unity fractured in the wake of the refugee crisis, some of its governments began, discreetly, to discuss the inevitability of Assad’s permanence. While his gulag and the methods of his intelligence services horrified them, they also could imagine tangible benefits from intelligence cooperation to root out terrorists. Privately, Syrian officials remind their Western counterparts that their extensive files could help them identify militants or jihadis currently hiding in plain sight in Turkey, the European Union, or the United States. Obama gave up on regime change, but was eager to keep his distance from the dictator in Damascus.
Institutions and governments that stand by idly or ineffectually as Assad makes a mockery of the chemical weapons taboo and the agreement that supposedly emptied Syria of chemical weapons years ago will find themselves ill-equipped to cope with later crises about which they care far more than they do about Syria.
This leads back to the question of motive.
The U.S. government’s confidence aside, it will take time for conclusive proof about this latest attack to emerge in the public sphere, as it did in 2013, of the regime’s culpability. From a Syrian tactical viewpoint, this attack was utterly gratuitous. Syria’s government, which at this stage is handily winning the civil war, does far more killing with conventional weapons. So in terms of the human toll, chemical attacks are but one piece in a horrifying network of crimes.
But the attacks do more than just murder Syrians: they expose the international order as a sham, and weaken the same institutions that are supposed to restrain Assad and his chief backers, Russia and Iran. A weakened and humiliated United Nations—or European Union or United States for that matter—behoove the maneuvers of Moscow, Tehran, and Syria, which more often than not find themselves targets of the wrath of an international order dominated by Washington and Brussels.
It could be that the attack in Idlib was the work of a rogue or a madman. But it’s all the more likely, given the carefully studied impact of the 2013 chemical fiasco in Syria, that Assad expects even greater dividends this time than he reaped during the last round. If he can drop chemical weapons on the same day that a conference in Brussels is discussing plans to reconstruct Syria, without any substantive response, then he’ll inch even closer to his current goal of winning a Western-funded rebuilding plan on his own terms. He hopes to cudgel the West into funneling reconstruction money through his regime, which committed most of the destruction in the first place. It’s absurd that until last year, the same Western governments that were calling for Assad’s ouster and funding for armed militants to overthrow him would now pay to restore his abusive authority— it’s also very possible.
A chemical attack seems folly at this pivotal moment, with Europe and the United States pondering whether to reluctantly restore relations with Assad. But sadly, it’s the kind of gamble that has worked for Assad in the past.
As usual, the first victims are Syrian civilians, caught in Assad’s total war. But an equally important casualty might be what remains of the international institutions that are supposed to fight war crimes and atrocities. Today Syrians suffer. Tomorrow, the world.
Red Lines and Taboos in Syria
[Orginally published at The Blog of the Century.]
Chemical weapons hold a special kind of horror. Ever since the widespread and horrifying use of chlorine and other poison gases in the trenches of the First World War, most nations have agreed not to use any of the increasingly sophisticated agents they have concocted.
It is because of this well documented taboo and the Chemical Weapons Convention that the United States government has said that it “will not tolerate” any deployment of chemical weapons in the Syrian conflict.
But beyond moral revulsion, what will it mean not to tolerate the use of chemical weapons? What if clear and convincing evidence is presented that Bashar al-Assad has used nerve gas or some other chemical weapon against his citizens? What is the White House to do differently—and why, ultimately, should this particular method of mass murder rise to a new level than the workaday means (mortar shells, bullets, rockets, bombs) employed until now to kill upwards of 70,000 people in Syria?
There’s an argument to be made that chemical weapons are potentially so lethal, and so easy to spread, that states must establish a strong deterrent to their use. But that thinking doesn’t really hold up. Iraq used chemical weapons against its own citizens in the 1980s with support from the US government, which tried to blame Iran for the battlefield use of toxins. In that case, chemical weapons were just one atrocity among many in an eight-year conflict, and the world didn’t see a spate of nerve gas attacks by stateless militants.
In Syria today, the White House must decide whether to invest more resources in the conflict. Already, the US is arming and funding the rebel factions that it finds most palatable. It has held back from doing more because of the plethora of Islamist extremists in the opposition and because of the uncertainty of what would follow in the event of a state collapse in Syria. If in fact the Syrian regime is using chemical weapons, there would be more urgency to resolving the question of whether the US should do more.
But the basic calculus won’t change.
The US wants to see a stable Syria, which is unlikely to happen any time soon, and unlikely to happen at all so long as Bashar al-Assad is in power. So far, there is no clear alternative. On one side, a bankrupt family regime; on the other, a splintered opposition with no unified leadership, no clear plan for after Assad, an Islamist flavor and a major streak of jihadi extremism.
The US and the other foreign sponsors of the opposition have funneled money and weapons to their preferred groups, hoping that incremental and indirect intervention will mould the opposition into a more coherent structure. This might or might not happen, but until a viable leadership actually controls a sizeable portion of the rebels, outside powers—including the US—are unlikely to escalate their involvement. This constraint holds whether or not the regime is using chemical weapons (and whether or not, as many allege, some factions of the opposition are also committing war crimes).
Confirmed chemical weapons use will surely create a public outcry and intensify the moral case for intervention, and the ensuing pressure will surely affect the White House calculus. But it’s unlikely on its own to make the US go to war in Syria, or propel a coalition like the one that intervened in Libya. That kind of game-changing development will require a real shift in the structure of the opposition.
Greater crimes by the regime—be it use of chemical weapons, or ever more prolific massacres—could galvanize such changes. But misbehavior or crimes committed by some rebel factions could well cancel out any momentum to get involved.
The latest evidence is worrisome indeed. But it doesn’t yet open the way for an international intervention.
