The Syria Dilemma

by Philip Gourevitch June 4, 2012

In April of 1993, President Bill Clinton and Elie Wiesel presided over the dedication of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C. Wiesel spoke first. He asked, “What have we learned?,” then went on to say, “Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something. I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep since for what I have seen. . . . I am saying that we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country.” Clinton let the remark go, and stuck to his prepared text, calling the museum “a constant reminder of our duty to build, and nurture the institutions of public tranquility and humanity.” The next year, when genocide decimated Rwanda, the United States did nothing to stop it, and another year passed before NATO took decisive action to end the war in Bosnia.

This April, Wiesel was back at the museum, this time with President Barack Obama. Again, Wiesel spoke first, and again he asked if anything had been learned. “If so, how is it that Assad is still in power?” he said. Obama was more ready for Wiesel than Clinton had been. He noted that he is the first President to have declared that “preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national-security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States.” That’s why we flew against Muammar Qaddafi, in Libya, he said; and why American Special Forces are in Uganda to help hunt down the child-abducting warlord Joseph Kony.
As for Syria, it has been nearly fifteen months since nonviolent protesters began calling for political change, and President Bashar al-Assad’s security forces began massacring them. The United Nations estimates that Assad’s men have now killed some ten thousand Syrians and tortured or imprisoned many more. Since last August, Obama has been saying that Assad must step down “for the sake of the Syrian people.” But, at the museum, the President acknowledged, “We cannot control every event.” He announced new sanctions as well as “a legal effort to document atrocities so killers face justice, and a humanitarian effort to get relief and medicine to the Syrian people.”
The horrors in Syria are symptoms of a tangle of political crises that present no clear course of action for the United States, or its allies, or any other constellation of the international community. The Arab League and the U.N. jointly appointed former Secretary-General Kofi Annan to negotiate with Assad. The Syrian President, playing for time, agreed to a plan to establish a ceasefire; demilitarize the cities and towns; oversee the release of arbitrarily detained people; insure freedom of movement for aid groups and the press, and freedom of assembly and association for peaceful demonstrators; and foster conditions for political dialogue. The Annan plan went into effect at the end of March, but none of its conditions have been met. The violence has escalated, as opposition fighters targeted military installations, and Assad’s forces redoubled their campaign of punishment. Meanwhile, foreign jihadis have begun setting off bombs in Syria—the largest, two weeks ago, killed fifty-five people and wounded hundreds—stoking fears that such groups would seek to hijack the predominantly Sunni anti-regime forces, as the country slides into civil war. Last week in Lebanon, the assassination of an anti-Assad cleric triggered sectarian fighting in Beirut.

Syria cannot be addressed in isolation. What concerns the United States most in the region is trying to avert war between Israel and Iran. (Last week, during negotiations in Baghdad to curtail Tehran’s nuclear program, Washington’s hopes ran prematurely high.) There is a risk of a regional Sunni-Shiite conflagration, as Saudi Arabia, which backed Bahrain’s crackdown on Shiite protesters, has advocated arming Syria’s opposition. There are Turkish misgivings about Kurdish rebels establishing bases in Syria; and Israeli anxieties about Assad’s accelerating military assistance to Hezbollah forces. There is also the question of Syria’s enormous chemical-weapons stockpiles: might Assad use them? Can they be secured if he falls? And there is the problem of Russia’s support for Syria—its lone remaining client state in the Middle East—and China’s support for Russia, particularly after both countries were angered by NATO’s use of its U.N. mandate to provide humanitarian protection in Libya to achieve regime change there. (Russia has called on the International Criminal Court to investigate allegations of NATO war crimes in the campaign against Qaddafi.)
To Syria hawks, like Senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham, the solution to the crisis is simple: an American- and NATO-led air war against Assad. But, at the NATO summit in Chicago last week, there was no support for the idea. Proponents of intervention like to point out that Obama’s Permanent Representative to NATO, Ivo Daalder, was the co-author of a piece in Foreign Affairs which said that the “victory” in Libya should serve as a model for future interventions to prevent atrocity and support positive political change. But none of the conditions that worked to NATO’s advantage in Libya—its geographical and political self-containment, Qaddafi’s abandonment, the efficacy of the opposition forces, the ease of executing the mission from the air—pertain in Syria. Instead, the situation has all the makings of just the sort of quagmire that NATO is impatient to get out of: the main item on the agenda in Chicago was to declare the plan to withdraw all combat troops from Afghanistan in 2014 “irreversible.”
A few days earlier, at the G8 summit at Camp David, Obama had reiterated his call for Assad to relinquish power, but the Russians continue to regard the Syrian President as he represents himself, as a force of stability. Mikhail Margelov, speaking for Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, said, “One cannot avoid a question: if Assad goes, who will replace him?” The hawks have no answer, nor, for that matter, does anybody else, including the main opposition group, the Syrian National Council, a coalition of seven infighting factions—ranging from Christians to Kurds to the Muslim Brotherhood—composed almost entirely of exiles, whose only consistent demand is for international military intervention. The Free Syrian Army, an equally unlikely group, shares that goal, but has lately turned against the S.N.C., which now purports to be forming its own military wing.
As a rule, Obama has avoided any rigid foreign-policy doctrine, preferring to indicate broad principles and then respond to crises case by case. By contrast, the absolutist rhetoric of moral certainty that the Holocaust museum inspires allows no room for political judgment; or even for acknowledging the political nature of the crises in which atrocities arise. Nonetheless, at the museum, Obama announced the creation of an Atrocities Prevention Board, to be run out of the White House, with the aim of coördinating the government’s response to outrages around the world. It is essentially a technocratic instrument of statecraft. Still, Obama seemed to recognize the awkwardness of such an initiative at a time when Assad remains in power, and the Taliban stands poised to reclaim swaths of Afghanistan. “There will be senseless deaths that aren’t prevented,” he said. “There will be stories of pain and hardship that test our hopes and try our conscience.” That, perhaps, is what we have learned. ♦

ILLUSTRATION: Tom Bachtell