The Long Game (18 page)

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.
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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?”

T
HE COMBINED EXPERIENCES
of Bosnia, Iraq, and Libya infused the debate over what to do about Syria, yet the lessons were often difficult to reconcile. The conflict comprised the worst elements of the others—with hundreds of thousands of innocents slaughtered, a ruthless dictator, extremists, refugees, and weapons of mass destruction—and no easy answers. Sitting in the Situation Room debating what the United States should do, the presence of the historical ghosts was palpable—after all, most of us had forged our careers in the intense policy battles of these previous interventions. Their contradictions shaped the difficult policy compromise that defined American policy toward Syria.

My former White House colleague Philip Gordon has summarized the dilemmas of intervention this way: In Iraq, the US intervened and occupied, and the result was a costly conflict whose consequences America will grapple with for a generation. In Libya, the US intervened but did not occupy, and the result is chaotic instability. And in Syria, the US neither intervened nor occupied, and the result has been catastrophic for the Syrian people and the region.
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Yet to complete (and further complicate) the picture, one cannot overemphasize the importance of Bosnia, where US dithering failed to prevent a genocide, but its belated intervention ended a war.

Policymakers often turn to the past to navigate the present, both to learn lessons and avoid mistakes. This has been especially true with the Syria crisis—when debating what to do, history loomed large. “A president does not make decisions in a vacuum,” Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg. “He does not have a blank slate.”
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We would often recall the costs of inaction and the good that can come when the United States takes risks and asserts leadership. But we also forced ourselves to remember how easy it is for the United States to lose its way.
America has the power to act, but the challenge is how it should do so while heeding the lessons of the past. Alas, on Syria, history did not provide a short cut.

CONTAIN AND MITIGATE

Getting rid of Assad, as important as that would be, was only one piece of the strategy. As the administration labored to bring about a transition through pressure and diplomacy, we also were focused on ensuring that the crisis did not grow into something far worse. Unfortunately, history will show that, at best, we were only partially successful.

If “managed transition” was the political objective, an additional goal could be summed up by another mantra, this one never uttered: “contain and mitigate.” Like a doctor dealing with a particularly advanced cancer, we were seeking to ease the side effects and prevent the disease from metastasizing while searching for a lasting answer—we needed to create the time and space for a managed transition to occur.

While Syria could not be fully “cured” anytime soon, we believed it was in our interest to contain the conflict from threatening our close partners who bordered Syria—especially Israel, Jordan, and Turkey—and to prevent wider regional instability. And we also sought measures to mitigate the worst aspects of the Syria crisis, whether that meant addressing the humanitarian emergency caused by millions of displaced people or ameliorating the tremendous suffering of those still left inside Syria.

Humanitarian support was the most visible manifestation of this strategy. As of late 2015, the US had provided over $4.5 billion in relief for those internally displaced inside Syria and the refugees flooding into neighboring countries.
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Given the insecurity inside Syria and the fact the US government had no presence there, an
elaborate system was established to get the support to those in need (working with series of local middlemen).

B
UT THE VITAL
tool to implement “contain and mitigate” was, notably, the very thing the administration's critics accused it of not using enough of: the military. This came in two ways.

First, we “hardened” Syria's neighbors. This meant, starting in 2012, deploying various American military assets to reassure our partners, build their capabilities to address any spillover, and deter Assad from attacking them. For example, the United States stationed Patriot anti-missile systems in Jordan and Turkey (and each required several hundred troops to operate and protect). We also deployed a squadron of F-16s to Jordan, which regularly trained with Jordanian forces and flew missions to make clear to Assad that America had Jordan's back. Between 2012 and 2015 the United States also provided approximately $3.6 billion in military assistance to Jordan, especially to help it address critical needs like intelligence and border security. By 2015, the military had about 2,200 troops stationed in Jordan—a number that, while not secret, the Jordanians had asked us to keep quiet for fear that it would provoke Assad.
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Second, the administration tried to make the opposition more cohesive and capable. This policy unfolded slowly, consuming countless hours in White House meetings, with every detail closely examined, parsed, and debated.

The challenge was immense. The Syrian opposition was a disjointed and ragtag bunch, with poor leadership, little organization, and bitter internal rivalries. They were also getting pounded relentlessly by Assad's military. Although Syria was awash with weapons, the opposition was outgunned by the regime, who through the course of the conflict used its full arsenal—airpower, heavy armor, SCUD missiles, and chemical weapons—against them. Russia and Iran provided substantial support. To try to shore up the opposition, many
regional players—especially the Saudis, Qataris, and Turks—flooded resources into Syria in the hope that with more money and guns, the opposition could at least stay on its feet, and eventually turn the tide against Assad.

While the conflict raged on, and the steady stream of weapons and cash continued to flow into Syria, concerns mounted that the wrong elements of the opposition—the extremists, some affiliated with al-Qaeda—were being strengthened. Yet the United States was not in the game. Why were we so slow? Part of the reason stemmed from a lack of understanding about who the opposition was and worries that if we provided military assistance, it would end up in the wrong hands.

But other questions that many had—especially in the White House—were about effectiveness, accountability, and risk. Would providing assistance actually work? It was one thing to provide arms and resources, but would the opposition know what to do with them? How could we be sure that the opposition would not end up using the weapons in the wrong ways—to commit human rights abuses or war crimes? And would arming the opposition put us on a slippery slope toward large-scale intervention?

D
URING
2012,
THE
administration deliberated these questions exhaustively. Over time it made incremental decisions to provide some support that balanced these risks. For example, after starting with humanitarian assistance and medical supplies, the United States eventually began to provide the opposition with “non-lethal” combat support like communications gear, body armor, and medical supplies. As much as we credited ourselves publicly for such steps, we knew this still left us playing at the margins. So by the summer of 2012, many senior officials began advocating that the United States do more, arguing we should build a full-scale program to equip and train the opposition.

In her memoirs, Hillary Clinton describes how she and then-CIA Director David Petraeus began discussing this idea and advocating for it. My boss at the time, Secretary of Defense Panetta, also wanted us to step up (as did I). We believed that while arming and training such a force might not prove decisive, it would at the very least provide a psychological boost to the opposition and give Assad reason to doubt his future. Just as important, it would give us more influence over the opposition's direction; we worried that the support from countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar was ending up in the hands of extremists, and without some “skin in the game,” we had little leverage with our partners.

By the fall of 2012, Petraeus had a plan to vet, arm, and train opposition fighters, and he and Clinton took the idea to the president.
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Yet Obama remained unconvinced that such an effort would have the intended effect. He was concerned about the nature of the Syrian opposition, believing we needed to know more about it before providing lethal support. That argument left us in a chicken/egg situation: we could learn a lot more about the opposition if we were trying to recruit and train them, but we could not start doing so because we knew too little.

Fundamentally, at that time the president believed there were too many open questions, and that such a modest step was not worth the risk of putting us on a slide away from contain and mitigate and toward deeper American involvement. In his assessment of the tradeoffs, the significant downside of entanglement outweighed the modest upside of limited training. As Clinton recalled, for Obama, getting involved “in any way in another sectarian civil war in the Middle East was not what he had in mind when coming into office.”
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W
HILE
O
BAMA DECIDED
not to proceed with the training effort in the fall of 2012, the planning continued to mature. And just several months later, in the summer of 2013—after reports of the chemical
weapons attacks—the White House announced that the United States would provide direct military assistance to the rebels.

Numerous press accounts reported this new policy as the beginning of the effort that the president had decided against months earlier.
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The White House simply described this as, in the words of Ben Rhodes, “military support” to the armed opposition that “is going to be different in both scope and scale in terms of what we are providing to the [Syrian armed opposition] than what we have provided before.”
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The administration's most strident critics, led by Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham, called the decision to provide lethal assistance “long overdue.”