The Long Game, page 15
That is why President Obama’s decision to resume the military relationship—while at the same time fundamentally changing the ways it is financed and spent—was the right one. This effort to modernize the relationship is key to ensuring that US-Egyptian security ties, which have served American interests for many years, remain an investment worth making for the Long Game.
CHAPTER 5
THE TIDE OF WAR
No issue has tested the Long Game more than Syria. Nor has any foreign policy dilemma proved more vexing or demoralizing for those of us who played a role in shaping and implementing it.
What started in 2011 as another Arab Spring ember ignited into a regional inferno. In her memoirs, Hillary Clinton accurately described Syria as a “wicked problem”: it defied easy solutions, and all the choices were bad. “Do nothing, and a humanitarian disaster envelops the region,” she wrote. “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 watch it run headfirst into a Russian veto. None of these approaches offered much hope of success.”1 And over time, the choices only became worse.
Looking back on the course of the Syria crisis, it is tempting to see this only as a story of lost opportunities, serial missteps, and inept decision-making. The outcomes have been truly horrific—with more than 300,000 killed, millions of refugees, the rise of the Islamic State, and a disintegration of regional order that the world will be grappling with for at least a generation. This might seem to be a clear failure of American policy. But when one weighs the possibilities for greater US action alongside competing goals, and the demands of managing trade-offs and risks, it is more accurately a cautionary tale of the limits to American, or anyone else’s, power.
“MANAGED TRANSITION”
Early on, the administration settled on the objective of seeking Bashar al-Assad’s departure from office. This was initially seen as reflecting the momentum of the Arab Spring, and we thought that Assad would go the way of Mubarak. As the violence spiraled, the administration concluded that Assad’s departure would remove the essential driver of the conflict.
Therefore, the more difficult question has been how to achieve this goal while avoiding major risks and exceedingly high costs—developing a policy that, in the totality of American interests, is balanced and sustainable. To listen to the critics, getting Assad to go should have been easier. They argued that because Assad had stubbornly clung to power, Obama either had no strategy to loosen his grip, lacked the fortitude to bring it about, or had given up on the goal altogether.
Yet setting a political objective is not the same as designing a policy to achieve it. Simply because the United States could not wave a wand and make Assad disappear did not mean Obama lacked a strategy. In fact, “Managed Transition” best describes the Obama approach to Syria’s future—although the phrase neither qualified as a compelling bumper sticker nor was it ever codified in a strategic document. Obama himself did not use the phrase publicly until the fall of 2015, more than four years after he first said Assad had to go. The United States wanted Assad out, but it wanted the leadership transition to proceed in a way that would not lead to even greater chaos and bloodshed. The policy debates inside the administration (as well as in the public debate about Syria) resided in the fundamental, and uncomfortable, tension between the two words “managed” and “transition.”
There has never been any doubt that the United States has the power to bring about a transition in Syria. Since 9/11, decapitating brutal regimes was something it had a proven track record of doing quite effectively. But none of those transitions were particularly tidy. After the regimes had been toppled by American military power, the result was further instability, and in the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, a massive sacrifice of US lives and resources to try to help those countries get back on their feet. While Obama wanted Assad to be gone, he did not want to repeat the mistakes of the past. In discussions at the White House and inside the Pentagon, we knew we could use military force to end Assad’s regime, and discussed many ways to do so. Yet we always got stuck on the question of what would come next. In these kinds of situations, Obama later said, “we have to refrain from jumping in with both feet.”2
That is why there was such emphasis on having Assad’s departure be “managed.” The best outcome would be for Assad to leave as part of a negotiated settlement, in a way that would allow a transitional government to take hold and basic order to be preserved. We wanted to give the Syrian opposition a stake in the outcome and establish the context for the international community to provide support. We didn’t want the entire government to implode and create the kind of chaos we saw in Iraq. We wanted to be sure that in any transition, our core security interests would be met—especially, up until mid-2014, ensuring that chemical weapons would remain secured. So by pressuring Assad through economic, political, and military pressure, we hoped to achieve his departure through diplomacy.
The problem was that Assad never seemed tempted to leave. This surprised us—early in the crisis, most officials believed Assad lacked the necessary cunning and fortitude to stay in power. He was being kept afloat by the lifeline from his principal backers, Russia and Iran. Perhaps, like Saddam and Qaddafi, he was just delusional about his popularity and the nature of his enemies. Whatever the reason—and it was likely a combination of factors—a managed departure seemed far away. As things in Syria got worse, the conversation turned to risking more forceful steps to bring about a transition.
WE WERE ALWAYS dangling between the horns of the policy dilemma; whether one placed more emphasis on “managed” or “transition” determined the moves you advocated and the risks you could live with. We considered steps to bring about a quicker, less-managed transition—hoping the regime would topple by increasing the pressure or intervening directly with military force—we kept returning to the consequences and the costs we would then have to carry.
At the Pentagon, the two military options we considered most carefully were to create a “no-fly zone” over Syria and a “buffer zone” or “safe area” inside Syria, along the border with Turkey. These also happened to be the most popular ideas among commentators and our regional partners. Both seemed appealing. Eliminating Assad’s air power would remove a crucial military asset, and a safe zone would be a place for internally displaced Syrians to shelter and perhaps serve as a base from which the Syrian opposition could operate. Yet as we explored these options beyond the first move, the questions became much more difficult, as it was hard to see how they would actually solve the core problem—or prevent further escalation.
Creating a no-fly zone seemed easy enough in theory, but grounding Assad’s air force seemed unlikely to be decisive. The US military had maintained a no-fly zone in Iraq for over a decade after the first Gulf War, but this did not ease concerns about Saddam’s effort to develop WMD. In Bosnia in the 1990s, the NATO-enforced no-fly zone did not prevent ethnic cleansing on the ground. In Libya, a no-fly zone would not have prevented the regime’s forces from fighting. So if one wanted to use American air power to make a difference, it would have meant a similar kind of “civilian protection” mission as we had in Libya, a substantial undertaking few advocated.
The “safe area” concept was even more uncertain. Our Turkish colleagues were particularly enthusiastic about this idea—which they called a “safety belt”—arguing that it would be a way to relieve the tremendous Syrian refugee crisis they were grappling with (which would, of course, eventually explode into Europe). We started talking seriously with the Turks about this idea in the fall of 2012, establishing a formal military working group to explore the possibilities.
In meeting after meeting, Turkish officials presented us with detailed maps about where such safe areas could be located and how they could be configured. We pursued these discussions at great lengths over many months. But they always got hung up on the same issues: how we would enforce these areas, how they would be administered, who would provide the troops, and what would happen if they came under attack.
As one of my White House colleagues put it at the time, a safe zone would be like a “tethered goat”—if attacked, and it almost certainly would have been, we would be obliged to defend it. The lawyers asked what legal authority we would have to do this (since there was no chance we would get a UN authorization given Russian opposition, and a safe zone would technically violate Syrian sovereignty). No one wanted American troops to protect a safe zone and, unsurprisingly, no other country came forward with a credible commitment. Although there were assertions that other countries would step up to help if only we took the first step, there was little evidence that this would be true—it was hard to escape the implication that, in the end, the United States would again be left holding the bag.
MOREOVER, FOR THE first several years of the crisis, concerns about Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles colored every aspect of the administration’s discussions about how much it could ratchet up the pressure on Assad. We viewed chemical weapons as his most lethal trump card; if we pushed too hard he could unleash havoc. Or, if the regime suddenly collapsed with its state institutions hollowed out, as had happened in Iraq and Libya, then the weapons could easily become vulnerable to theft. We had visions of the massive looting in Iraq that had taken place after the fall of Saddam in 2003, except instead of museums and government buildings, this time it would be chemical weapons sites. In the effort to get rid of Assad, we did not want to create an even more terrifying security threat with chemical weapons on the loose—something that we rightly would have been held responsible for.
Although the administration stressed the importance of Assad’s departure as the political objective, during 2011-14 chemical weapons were seen as a higher priority for America’s security interests. This presented a dilemma. After the deal with Russia to remove the chemical weapons, the regime was a necessary silent partner in relinquishing its stockpiles. When that process was complete in mid-2014, the largest obstacle to putting more pressure on Assad was removed, as we no longer needed his regime to help get the chemical weapons out.
The deal to get chemical weapons out of Syria also taught different lessons, shaping both the US and Russian approach toward the conflict in the years to come. In Washington, this showed that Russia had leverage over Assad, and that when pressed it would use its influence to get the regime to relent. Yet Moscow took away something else: that Assad was indispensable to get anything done inside Syria.
THROUGHOUT THE SYRIAN crisis, President Obama has resisted any proposal that would have led to the United States owning the problem outright. He was as candid about this in his public statements as he was clear to his aides behind closed doors. When asked in a 2013 interview how he weighed what to do about Syria, the president recited the kinds of questions he had consistently raised privately: “Would a military intervention have an impact? How would it affect our ability to support troops who are still in Afghanistan? What would be the aftermath of our involvement on the ground? Could it trigger even worse violence or the use of chemical weapons? What offers the best prospect of a stable post-Assad regime?” Describe for me specifically what will work, the president would demand, and if you can make a case we can get this done, we’ll do it.
Obama believed that while acting might provide short-term satisfaction, in the end it would do more harm than good. It was not that Obama was seeking to avoid military intervention at all costs, but because he was cognizant about the implications for his overall global strategy. Such decisions are not made in isolation from other interests. With deeper intervention, Obama warned in 2014, “there was the possibility that we would have made the situation worse rather than better on the ground,” and US involvement would have meant “we would have the fourth war in a Muslim country in the span of a decade.”3
The logic of Obama’s concerns was compelling—and he had been warning about it since he first ran for president. Writing in The Audacity of Hope, he was very clear about the “script” the United States needed to avoid. Once the US intervened in such conflicts, it would “spur insurgencies based on religious sentiment and nationalist pride, which in turn necessitates a lengthy and difficult US occupation, which in turn leads to an escalating death toll on the part of US troops and the local civilian population. All of this fans anti-American sentiment among Muslims, increases the pool of potential terrorist recruits, and prompts the American public to question not only the war but also those policies that project us into the Islamic world in the first place.” This was the clear lesson of Iraq, yet many critics chose to ignore or dismiss it, as though the conflict had never happened. Puzzled by this amnesia, Obama agreed with Secretary Gates, who said in a 2011 speech that anyone who advised sending a big land army back into the Middle East “should have his head examined.”4
So we found ourselves in an uncomfortable box—we wanted Assad to go, but not if the cost entailed significant military intervention. As we sought a managed outcome, with diplomacy slowly plodding along, one grappled with the painful realization that a political transition away from Assad was not coming anytime soon. Meanwhile, Syria was burning.
HISTORY’S GHOSTS
To help understand how many officials in the Obama administration—including me—approached the Syria crisis, one must pause to take a brief historical detour. For in many ways, the roots of the debate about what to do in Syria go back to the 1990s debates about the Balkans—starting with the Srebrenica massacre more than two decades ago.5
In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed nearly 8,000 innocent Muslim civilians in Srebrenica, a small valley town in eastern Bosnia. This massacre—the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II, one that occurred while UN peacekeepers stood by fecklessly and NATO refused to intervene—shamed the international community, and its lessons have loomed over the debate about American military intervention ever since.
Srebrenica became a brutal symbol of the price of inaction. Had the United States and its allies intervened sooner, the tragedy could have been prevented. As a stunningly self-critical 1999 report by then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan concluded, “The cardinal lesson of Srebrenica…is that a deliberate and systematic attempt to terrorize, expel, or murder an entire people must be met decisively with all necessary means.”
Like the failure to act in order to prevent the Rwanda genocide the year before, Srebrenica was a stain on America’s power and reputation. It also exposed the limits of the international system to forge collective action, even in the face of genocide. But the terrible event galvanized the United States to intervene in Bosnia, launching airstrikes and negotiations that led to the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords. Once America acted through a combination of force and diplomacy, it ended a war and renewed US leadership. The lesson seemed clear: the United States should never again stand by idly in the face of evil.
This bitter legacy directly influenced the post-9/11 debate about whether to invade Iraq in 2003. The painful memory of Srebrenica is one of the reasons the Bush administration received support for going to war against Iraq from many Democrats (myself included) who saw confronting Saddam as necessary, at least in part, by upholding the “responsibility to protect.”
From a strategic and humanitarian perspective, the case to intervene in Iraq seemed even stronger than in the Balkans. Saddam Hussein had already proved his willingness to massacre civilians (the slaughter of Kurds in the 1980s and the Shia after the 1991 Gulf War offering the most stark examples), and his military was a far greater threat than that posed by Bosnian Serbs. Therefore, the argument went, the United States needed to stand firm and not hide behind dithering allies or a weak UN, as it had in Bosnia in 1995. As George Packer observed in 2002, Bosnia had turned many liberals into hawks.6
So in March 2003, the United States did in Iraq what many believed it waited too long to do in Bosnia (and did not do at all in Rwanda): it used force to prevent a dictator from further terrorizing innocents—a risk that seemed worth taking to protect our common interests and uphold our values.
Yet the disaster that unfolded in Iraq taught a competing lesson. Intervening in such conflicts can unleash havoc that the United States is neither prepared nor willing to handle, and impose costs that harm other interests at home and abroad. Iraq’s legacy was another “never again”: that America should not topple governments and occupy countries without a clear sense of what it wants to achieve and what sacrifices it is willing to endure.
In significant ways, the lessons of the Balkans and Iraq then shaped the Obama administration’s thinking about the 2011 intervention in Libya. Again, there was an impulse to act decisively to stop a looming humanitarian catastrophe, which we described as a “Srebrenica on steroids.” But we also had concerns about what would come next if we intervened and the very real possibility of enveloping the United States into a protracted conflict like Iraq.
The decision to intervene created deep divisions within Obama’s national security team and was a rare instance where his two heavyweight advisers—Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates—ended up on opposite sides. In trying to bridge these differences, Obama sought to apply the lessons of both Srebrenica and Iraq, threading the needle between taking urgent military action to save lives while preventing the United States from getting sucked into another morass.
The Libya intervention prevented a massacre and helped bring down a dictator, and for a moment it appeared to offer a more hopeful lesson. Yet now, when Libya suffers from insecurity and chaos, no one takes pride in what that country has become. Obama believes that things would have been worse had the United States not intervened, but has expressed regrets about what has happened in Libya since Qaddafi’s demise. When considering using force elsewhere, the experience of Libya forced him to ask: “Do we have an answer for the day after?”
