SYRIA & OBAMA I:O’S FOREIGN POLICY FIASCO FANS ISOLATIONISM, STRENGTHENS IRAN, RISKS REGIONAL WAR

(Erratum: In the Briefing on Tuesday,  Sept 3 we mistakenly attributed the editorial, “The Price of Dithering”, to the Boston Globe. In fact it was published in the Boston Herald. We apologize for the error. – ED)

Contents:
 

Syrian Deterrence, Israeli Style: Charles Krauthammer ,  National Post, Sept. 6, 2013—We have a problem. The president proposes attacking Syria, and his top military officer cannot tell you the objective. Does the commander in chief know his own objective? Why, yes. “A shot across the bow,” explained Barack Obama.

Gambling with the Presidency: Ross Douthat, New York Times, Sept. 7, 2013—Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a foreign policy fiasco. ll along, it’s been clear that President Obama has nothing but bad options in Syria’s civil war. Now, though, he’s found a way to put Congress in a similarly unfortunate position.

The Hawk's Case Against Obama on Syria: Stephen F. Hayes, Wall Street Journal,  September 4, 2013—Perhaps historians will provide a clear understanding of Barack Obama's head-snapping decision to pause his administration's urgent case for military strikes in Syria to seek the formal authorization he says he doesn't need from a Congress he disdains.

On Topic Links

The Constitution, the Sour Spot,  & the Great Syria Train Wreck: Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest, Sept. 8, 2013

Obama's Successful Foreign Failure: Norman Podhoretz, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 8, 2013

Forget Syria, target Iran: Daniel Pipes, Washington Times, Sept. 8, 2013

Tolerate Assad Now, Pay on Iran Later: Dan Margalit, Israel Hayom, Sept. 9, 2013

Has the EU Abandoned the US on Military Action in Syria?:Benjamin Weinthal, Jerusalem Post, Sept. 9, 2013

President Obama’s Shift on Syria and Western Strategy: Lt. Col. (ret.) Jonathan D. Halevi, JCPA, Sept. 1, 2013

How Obama Got Syria so Wrong: Trudy Rubin, Philly,  September 08, 2013

How We [Syrians] Lost the Syrian Revolution: Edward Dark, Al-Monitor, May 28, 2013

To Stop Iran, Obama Must Enforce Red Lines With Assad: Stephen J. Hadley, Washington Post, Sept. 8, 2013

SYRIAN DETERRENCE, ISRAELI STYLE

Charles Krauthammer

National Post, Sept. 6, 2013

    U.S. Sen. Bob Corker: “What is it you’re seeking?”

    Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “I can’t answer that, what we’re seeking.”

                            — Senate hearing on the use of force in Syria, Sep. 3.

We have a problem. The president proposes attacking Syria, and his top military officer cannot tell you the objective. Does the commander in chief know his own objective? Why, yes. “A shot across the bow,” explained Barack Obama.

Now, a shot across the bow is a warning. Its purpose is to say: Cease and desist, or the next shot will sink you. But Obama has already told the world — and Bashar Assad, in particular — that there will be no next shot. He has insisted time and again that the operation will be finite and highly limited. Take the shot, kill some fish, go home.

What then is the purpose? Dempsey hasn’t a clue, but Secretary of State John Kerry says it will uphold and proclaim a norm and thus deter future use of chemical weapons. With a few Tomahawk missiles? Hitting sites that, thanks to the administration having leaked the target list, have already been scrubbed of important military assets? This is risible. If anything, a pinprick from which Assad emerges unscathed would simply enhance his stature and vindicate his conduct.

Deterrence depends entirely on perception and the perception in the Middle East is universal: Obama wants no part of Syria. Assad has to go, says Obama, and then lifts not a finger for two years. Obama lays down a red line, and then ignores it. Shamed finally by a massive poison gas attack, he sends Kerry to make an impassioned case for righteous and urgent retaliation — and the very next day, Obama undermines everything by declaring an indefinite timeout to seek congressional approval.

George Jonas: A strange time to ask permission

Here’s what’s happening: U.S. President Barack Obama says the Constitution doesn’t require him to seek congressional authorization to strike Syria, but he will ask Congress anyway because that’s the kind of guy he is. His cheering section under the baton of Secretary John Kerry goes viral. See, warmongers? Here’s beyond the call of duty for you. He doesn’t have to, but he will. Quick, a medal for Mr. Obama for going the extra mile!

This stunning zigzag, following months of hesitation, ambivalence, contradiction and studied delay, left our regional allies shocked and our enemies gleeful. I had strongly advocated going to Congress. But it was inconceivable that, instead of recalling Congress to emergency session, Obama would simply place everything in suspension while Congress finished its Labor Day barbeques and he flew off to Stockholm and St. Petersburg. So much for the fierce urgency of enforcing an international taboo and speaking for the dead children of Damascus.

Here’s how deterrence works in the Middle East. Syria, long committed to the destruction of Israel, has not engaged Israel militarily in 30 years. Why? Because it recognizes Israel as a serious adversary with serious policies. In this year alone, Israel has four times launched airstrikes within Syria. No Syrian response. How did Israel get away with it? Israel had announced that it would not tolerate Assad acquiring or transferring to Hezbollah advanced weaponry. No grandiloquent speeches by the Israeli foreign minister. No leaked target lists. Indeed, the Israelis didn’t acknowledge the strikes even after they had carried them out. Unlike the American president, they have no interest in basking in perceived toughness. They care only about effect….

And yet here is Obama, having yet done nothing but hesitate, threaten, retract and wander about the stage, claiming Wednesday in Sweden to be the conscience of the world, upholding not his own red line but the world’s. And, incidentally, Congress’ — a transparent attempt at offloading responsibility. What should Congress do?

To his dovish base, Obama insists on how limited and militarily marginal the strike will be. To undecided hawks like Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who are prepared to support a policy that would really alter the course of the civil war, he vaguely promises the opposite — to degrade Assad’s military while upgrading that of the resistance.

Problem is, Obama promised U.S. weaponry three months ago and not a rifle has arrived. This time around, what seems in the making is a mere pinprick, designed to be, one U.S. official told the Los Angeles Times, “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”

That’s why Dempsey is so glum. That’s why U.S. allies are so stunned. There’s no strategy, no purpose here other than helping Obama escape self-inflicted humiliation. This is deeply unserious. Unless Obama can show the country that his don’t-mock-me airstrike is, in fact, part of a serious strategy for altering the trajectory of the Syrian war, Congress should vote no.

Contents

GAMBLING WITH THE PRESIDENCY

Ross Douthat

New York Times, Sept. 7, 2013

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a foreign policy fiasco.

All along, it’s been clear that President Obama has nothing but bad options in Syria’s civil war. Now, though, he’s found a way to put Congress in a similarly unfortunate position. When the House and Senate vote on whether to authorize strikes on Bashar al-Assad, they’ll be choosing between two potentially disastrous paths: either endorse a quasi-war that many constituents oppose and that this White House seems incapable of justifying on the merits, or vote to basically finish off the current American president as a credible actor on the world stage.

The second option seemed relatively unlikely a week ago, but now — in the House especially — it looks like a live possibility. The politics of a “yes” vote are lousy: the bases of both parties are opposed, the public in general is skeptical, and the president isn’t popular enough to provide cover for legislators worried about how another military adventure would play back home.

These political considerations wouldn’t loom so large if the strategic case for war were clearer. But neither the president nor his secretary of state seems to have figured out what kind of intervention the administration is proposing or why.

The strongest case for striking the Syrian regime is also a relatively modest one: The president drew a line around the use of chemical weapons, Assad crossed it, and a punitive strike is the best way to persuade him not to cross it more flagrantly still. The goal would be to contain a dictator’s most destabilizing impulses, and serve notice to other potential bad actors that there is a price to ignoring American warnings. The historical models would be our 1986 strike on Muammar el-Qaddafi or Operation Desert Fox against Saddam Hussein in 1998; each campaign had a limited purpose that didn’t open into wider war.

The case for a punitive intervention is hardly airtight. (The ’86 strike, for instance, did not induce Libya’s government to cease supporting terrorism.) But it’s more credible than the case the administration has been making, which has been much more expansive in its justifications for war, and therefore much less credible in its promise of a strictly limited involvement.

Secretary of State John Kerry, especially, has consistently spoken about Syria in the language of a crusading Wilsonianism — complete with outraged moralism, invocations of Munich and references to the Holocaust, and sunny takes on the alleged moderation of the Syrian opposition.

Yet if this intervention is actually about making Syria safe for democracy, the strike being contemplated is wildly insufficient to that end. So either the White House is secretly planning for a longer war or else it has no clear plan at all. And either possibility would be a plausible reason for a conscientious Congress to vote against this war. A lot of observers I respect, conservative and liberal, are hoping for exactly that outcome….

But it’s important to recognize just how unprecedented such a vote would be, and how far the ripples might ultimately spread. It wouldn’t just be a normal political rebuke of President Obama. It would be a remarkable institutional rebuke of his presidency, with unknowable consequences for the credibility of American foreign policy, not only in Syria but around the world.

Presidential credibility is an intangible thing, and the term has been abused over the years by overeager hawks and cult-of-the-presidency devotees. But the global system really does depend on other nations’ confidence that the United States means what it says — that the promises the White House and the State Department make are binding, that our military commitments aren’t just so much bluster, and that when the president speaks on foreign policy he has the power to live up to his words.

It is to President Obama’s great discredit that he has staked this credibility on a vote whose outcome he failed to game out in advance. But if he loses that vote, the national interest as well as his political interests will take a tangible hit: for the next three years, American foreign policy will be in the hands of a president whose promises will ring consistently hollow, and whose ability to make good on his strategic commitments will be very much in doubt…..

Contents

THE HAWK'S CASE AGAINST OBAMA ON SYRIA

Stephen F. Hayes

Wall Street Journal,  September 4, 2013

Perhaps historians will provide a clear understanding of Barack Obama's head-snapping decision to pause his administration's urgent case for military strikes in Syria to seek the formal authorization he says he doesn't need from a Congress he disdains.

Until then, the struggle to make sense of the Obama administration's ad hoc decision-making and confusing rhetoric on Syria will continue. The latest twist came Wednesday, when the president tried to explain away his declaration last summer that "the red line for us" would be Bashar Assad's use of chemical weapons. "I didn't set a red line," Mr. Obama said during a news conference in Stockholm, Sweden, claiming that he had been speaking for the entire world—even Congress.

He was similarly considerate of Congress on Saturday, when in announcing his decision he explained that he is "mindful that I'm the president of the world's oldest constitutional democracy" and that the power of America is "rooted not just in our military might but in our example as a government of the people, by the people and for the people."

Mr. Obama hasn't always been mindful of such things, boasting for three years of his willingness to disregard Congress. At Georgetown University three months ago, Mr. Obama announced that he would bypass Congress to address what he described as the urgent threat of climate change. Global warming, he averred, "is a challenge that does not pause for partisan gridlock. It demands our attention now." He has done the same on immigration and the economy. "If Congress won't act, I will," he has said.

Even on matters of war and peace, Mr. Obama has ignored Congress. He didn't consult Congress before launching military strikes in Libya in March 2011, and on the same day a bipartisan group of lawmakers filed suit to force him to seek congressional authorization, the administration sent Congress a 32-page report that included an explanation as to why the president could act without legislative approval. The report argued that the limited campaign, which featured no U.S. ground troops, was "consistent" with the 1973 War Powers Act and does not "require further authorization."

It is therefore not surprising that congressional Republicans, once likened to "terrorists" by Vice President Joe Biden, are skeptical that Mr. Obama's decision to seek a legislative imprimatur on Syria grows out of a sudden interest in bipartisanship and the constitution. That the president's longtime adviser, David Axelrod, gleefully tweeted about the political implications—calling Congress "the dog that caught the car"—only feeds the cynicism.

It isn't at all unreasonable to wonder whether Mr. Obama's decision to go to Congress is little more than an attempt to share responsibility with Republicans for authorizing an intervention that goes badly, or to blame them for constraining him if they don't.

Nevertheless, the president's political maneuvering alone shouldn't keep Republicans from supporting intervention. What should stop them are doubts about his plans and competence. This is especially true for hawks who might otherwise be inclined to support him….

[I]n announcing that his message is merely to send a message, the president undermined his primary objective. A "shot across the bow" implies further action if the warning is unheeded. In his repeated assurances that any U.S. action would be "limited" and "tailored" and "narrow," Mr. Obama has made clear that he has little appetite for escalation.

The decision to escalate is not his alone. As former CIA Director Michael Hayden said Monday on CNN, there is a strong likelihood that Assad and his patrons in Tehran will retaliate: "We want it to be one and done—the president's made that very clear: Very limited strikes, very limited objectives—deterring, degrading the potential use of chemical weapons. He's doing it, our president, to show resolve . . . . But guess what, Assad and his Iranian and Hezbollah allies are going to want to show resolve, too. They're not going to want to give the United States a free ride for this kind of action."

The Iranians, Mr. Hayden says, will be "engineering some kind of response." What will Obama do then?

Even Syrians who might benefit from U.S. military intervention are apprehensive about the limited strikes telegraphed by the White House. "A light strike would be worse than doing nothing," Abdel Jabbar Akaidi, head of the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo province, told Syria Deeply, a blog about the conflict, this week. "If it's not the death blow, this game helps the regime even more. The Syrian people will only suffer more death and devastation when the regime retaliates."

On Aug. 20, 2012, Mr. Obama described his "red line" on Syria. "We have been very clear to the Assad regime—but also to other players on the ground—that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons being moved around or being utilized. That would change my calculus."

But when U.S. intelligence confirmed in June that Syria had used chemical weapons, nothing changed. White House national security aide Ben Rhodes declared that this breach of Mr. Obama's red line would trigger "military support"—meaning lethal aid—from the U.S. to the Syrian opposition. On Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry testified that the Syrian regime had used chemical weapons 14 times. The U.S. aid never arrived.

To believe that an Obama-led intervention will end well requires disregarding everything he's done—or hasn't done—over two years in favor of an illusory expectation that he'll act with newfound determination to shape the outcome in a region ravaged by war. That's unlikely.

There are many reasons for the U.S. to intervene in Syria: more than 100,000 dead, two million refugees, the repeated use of chemical weapons by a dictator who sponsors anti-American terrorists and is the puppet of a regime in Iran that is the world's foremost state sponsor of terror. The moral imperative is clear; the strategic case is solid.

But a successful intervention requires a commander in chief committed to changing the war's momentum and changing the regime in Damascus. The White House has eschewed both. The only thing worse than not intervening in Syria would be a failed intervention—an outcome that will make future American interventions, by this president or another, in Syria or elsewhere, even more difficult.

If President Obama exercises the authority he claims and launches a serious campaign to end the slaughter in Syria and change the regime in Damascus, Republicans should support him. Until he does, they should oppose him.

Mr. Hayes is a senior writer for the Weekly Standard.

The Constitution, the Sour Spot, and the Great Syria Train Wreck: Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest, September 8, 2013—There’s a tough issue that humanitarian interventionists need to take into account when it comes to Syria. There is really no good way to read the Constitution that gives the president an unlimited unilateral power to order US forces into combat for humanitarian missions, and it is even harder to find justification for a unilateral power to order retaliatory strikes.

Obama's Successful Foreign Failure: Norman Podhoretz, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 8, 2013—It is entirely understandable that Barack Obama's way of dealing with Syria in recent weeks should have elicited responses ranging from puzzlement to disgust. Even members of his own party are despairingly echoing in private the public denunciations of him as "incompetent," "bungling," "feckless," "amateurish" and "in over his head" coming from his political opponents on the right.

Forget Syria, target Iran: Daniel Pipes, Washington Times, Sept. 8, 2013—Here’s advice to the members of Congress as they are asked to endorse an American-led attack on the government of Syria: Start your consideration by establishing priorities, clarifying what matters most to the country.

Tolerate Assad Now, Pay on Iran Later: Dan Margalit, Israel Hayom, Sept. 9, 2013—Syria 2013 is Spain 1936-1939. The fascist victory in Madrid and Barcelona paved the way to World War II. A serious victory for Syrian President Bashar Assad in the cruel civil war he has been waging in Syria will end up paving the way for an Iranian attempt to take over the greater Middle East. Whoever doesn't want to pay the price for curbing Assad now will have to pay it back in innocent blood with compound interest in upcoming battles.

President Obama’s Shift on Syria and Western Strategy: Lt. Col. (ret.) Jonathan D. Halevi, JCPA, Sept. 1, 2013—U. S. President Barack Obama’s decision to seek congressional approval for military action against Syria will delay any punitive military action against the Assad regime at least until mid-September. The American commitment to act in Syria now depends to a large extent on President Obama’s ability to garner broad legitimacy at home, an outcome not to be taken for granted.

How Obama Got Syria so Wrong: Trudy Rubin, Philly,  September 08, 2013—Unless President Obama can show Congress that his planned Syria strike is linked to a larger – and coherent – strategy, legislators should just say no.

How We [Syrians] Lost the Syrian Revolution: Edward Dark, Al-Monitor, May 28, 2013—So what went wrong? Or to be more accurate, where did we go wrong? How did a once inspirational and noble popular uprising calling for freedom and basic human rights degenerate into an orgy of bloodthirsty sectarian violence, with depravity unfit for even animals? Was it inevitable and wholly unavoidable, or did it not have to be this way?

To Stop Iran, Obama Must Enforce Red Lines With Assad: Stephen J. Hadley, Washington Post, Sept. 8, 2013—The Arab Awakening has caused a crisis in the Middle East that will take years to sort out. There is one Middle East crisis, however, that must be resolved in months, not years. Every American committed to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon should urge Congress to grant President Obama authority to use military force against the Assad regime in Syria.

Has the EU Abandoned the US on Military Action in Syria?:Benjamin Weinthal, Jerusalem Post, Sept. 9, 2013—U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s forceful push for European countries to join a coalition to strike Syria militarily, to deter its use of chemical weapons, is stumbling. France remains the US’s only pro-strike ally among the 28 EU member countries. And even the tough French rhetoric is melting.

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