The Long Game (3 page)

Since the Syria crisis erupted in 2011, what to do about its massive chemical weapons stockpile was one of the most perplexing—and scariest—issues the Obama administration faced. At over 1,300 metric tons spread out over as many as forty-five sites in a country about twice the size of Virginia, Syria's arsenal of chemical weapons was the world's third-largest. It was ten times greater than the (erroneous) CIA estimate in October 2002 of Iraq's chemical weapons, and fifty times more than Libya declared in late 2011. Since the Syrian regime denied it even possessed these weapons, what we knew about them
came from intelligence gathered by the US and others. But often these were just informed guesses, so we could never be sure of the stockpile's scale (which we thought could even be larger) or level of security.

Among the many concerns emanating from the Syrian catastrophe, chemical weapons dominated our attention. We worried whether Assad would use those weapons against his own people. We thought he might lash out and use them to attack an ally like Israel. And we were perhaps most focused on the possibility that the weapons would get in the hands of extremists who were gaining strength and taking hold of territory inside Syria.

At the White House and Pentagon, we constantly puzzled over how practically to take out the chemical weapons. The scope of the problem made it overwhelming, hanging like a dark shadow over every aspect of our deliberations. On numerous occasions intelligence indicated that such weapons were about to be used or the security of a storage depot was under threat, and the administration would scramble to prevent something from happening. Sometimes that meant talking directly to the Syrian regime to warn it off, or getting the Russians to pressure Assad, or preparing military options. Some of these scares found their way into press reports; many did not.
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This was the context for President Obama's first utterance about the use of chemical weapons as a “red line” in an August 2012 White House press briefing. The president had been very focused about the disposition of chemical weapons, and had sat through hours of tense briefings on the subject. While he believed the Syrian conflict touched many American interests—humanitarian, regional stability, and the rise of extremists—chemical weapons security was most urgent and directly threatened US national security. So when the president was asked by NBC journalist Chuck Todd about what might happen if there were indications the chemical weapons were insecure
or about to be used, Obama spoke openly about his determination not to allow the weapons to be used or end up in the wrong hands.

“That's an issue that doesn't just concern Syria,” he warned. “It concerns our close allies in the region, including Israel. It concerns us.” The president said he had made very clear to Assad and others that “a red line for us is [when] we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” He further described it as something that would “change my calculus” regarding the use of force.
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Obama considered this a statement of fact rather than a new policy declaration—this wasn't the conclusion of a policy process or formal decision. In diplomacy, there is always a danger in thinking out loud. Some of his aides were surprised that he went as far as he did—I was one. The president's statement was undeniably true—if chemical weapons were used it would be a game-changer, regardless of whether he had publicly called it a red line or not—but we had not yet fleshed out a plan to enforce such a threat. In the months that followed, we scrambled to develop our military plans and establish the legal rationale for action.

As the August 2012 statement became widely interpreted as a sacrosanct commitment to act militarily rather than a self-evident analytical comment—therefore turning every stray report of Syria crossing the red line into a dramatic test of US resolve—Obama surely came to regret that he had taken the bait and uttered it in the first place. It serves as another reminder why it is never wise for a president to answer a hypothetical question.
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B
Y THE SPRING
of 2013, concerns about Syria's chemical weapons had reached a fever pitch. There had been a steady stream of reports about chemical weapons use on a small scale, and importantly, solid intelligence with corroborating soil and blood samples. Mindful of the lessons of Iraq, the administration pressed the intelligence
community for greater specificity. But we were careful to give intelligence analysts the space to make their conclusions—we all remembered that the Bush team had been accused of pressuring the intelligence community into concluding that Saddam had chemical weapons to justify intervention in 2003, and no one wanted to repeat that mistake.

The Israelis were especially worried. Syria's massive arsenal had been designed for use against them. So while they stayed quiet over most aspects of the Syria conflict (as long as the unrest did not turn on them) they had become very agitated about the security of the chemical weapons. The essence of Israel's military doctrine is to possess the capability to eliminate any threat by itself, yet Israeli defense officials had no answer to the threat of Syria's chemical arsenal. Of their many security concerns, this was their highest priority.

During a visit to the Israeli Defense Ministry at that time, I met with their senior official in charge of defending against weapons of mass destruction, who explained how they were distributing gas masks and antidotes to every Israeli citizen.
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To address these concerns, the US had increased information sharing with Israel about the whereabouts and security of Syria's chemical stockpiles, and we started joint contingency planning about what we might do if such weapons got on the loose.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was seized with the issue. He used his first meeting with the new secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel, in April 2013, to make a strong case for action. Meeting in his Jerusalem office, I recall Netanyahu raised his usual concerns about Iran and Hamas, yet at that moment he was most animated about Syria.

Nearly leaping out of his chair, the prime minister said we needed “to think outside the box,” even suggesting that together the British, Americans, and Israelis should divide responsibility for securing each
of Syria's estimated forty-five chemical weapons sites. I remember he urged us to discuss what we could do specifically—such as mining the sites to make them too dangerous to enter, seizing them with special operations forces, or destroying them with airstrikes. Although most of this seemed a bit too creative and we did not pursue any of these ideas with the Israelis, Netanyahu's stern message to us was clear. We knew we'd have to do something. The question was when and how.

T
HE
N
ETANYAHU MEETING
coincided with an ominous milestone in the Syria conflict. On April 25, the White House announced for the first time that the intelligence community assessed the Syrian regime had used chemical weapons on a small scale. With the red line crossed, the question of what we would do about it surged front and center.
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None of the options were appealing. This was a stark example of the fact that for many foreign policy problems, the choice is not between bad and good, but bad and worse. The challenge seemed so massive and complex that it was hard to know where to begin. At a White House meeting to discuss military actions, one senior Pentagon colleague remarked that “Iran is a tough problem, but it pales in comparison with Syria.” The storage facilities were dispersed throughout the country, and there didn't seem to be any way to secure them without putting boots on the ground. Military planners estimated that this could take as many as 75,000 troops. The sites would be hard to blow up safely from the air, and we worried about the toxic chemical plumes airstrikes could create.

To the president's critics, the decision was a no-brainer. With the red line crossed, they wanted America to act immediately, and to them Obama's caution was more inept than prudent. In March 2013, the top two senators on the Armed Services Committee, Arizona Republican John McCain and Michigan Democrat Carl
Levin, urged the president to use precision strikes to destroy Assad's aircraft and SCUD missile batteries.
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The conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer urged Obama to establish a no-fly zone by destroying Assad's air defenses.
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And Hillary Clinton's former director of policy planning (and my former boss) Anne-Marie Slaughter took to the pages of the
Washington Post
to argue that “standing by while Assad gasses his people will guarantee that, whatever else Obama may achieve, he will be remembered as a president who proclaimed a new beginning with the Muslim world but presided over a deadly chapter in the same old story.”
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The media joined the bandwagon as well, constantly peppering administration officials with questions about why they weren't intervening, almost taunting them to do so. But this seemed all part of another same old story: once we did act, and things would not improve and in fact might get worse, the mood in favor of action would likely shift. As one White House official described at the time, “The pressures on us to intervene now are enormous. But the day after you do something, the pressures go in the other direction.”
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T
HIS CONTRADICTORY AND
thankless dynamic—clamoring for military action, then expressing outrage that you are actually (or even considering) doing so—characterized the intense congressional debate about using force in Syria in September 2013, following the large-scale chemical attack.

Always mindful to protect their constitutional powers, congressional leaders initially praised the president's decision to ask for their support. But as public opinion polls showed most Americans skeptical of using force, the mood on the Hill quickly soured. Phone calls were pouring into congressional offices to urge a vote against action. A survey by the Pew Research Center at that time found that 48 percent of the public opposed air strikes against Syria; just 29 percent supported them.
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Immediately after the president's Rose Garden announcement, teams of administration officials flooded Capitol Hill to brief members and their staffs on all aspects of the issue—from the specifics of the attack and everything we knew about Syria's chemical weapons program to the types of targets we would hit and the kinds of weapons we would use. Members of Congress were suddenly very worried about the risks. They wanted to know for sure that using military force would work, that once we destroyed the sites the chemical weapons would be kept secure, and that Assad would not retaliate against our troops or allies like Israel.

They demanded answers to questions to which there were no certainties. Although we were confident the planned strikes would affect Assad's thinking, we could not guarantee it—nor could we say for certain what might happen next. The best we could offer was that we believed the strikes would degrade some of Assad's capabilities and deter him from acting again. We could not promise that a military response would solve the problem. In fact we had to prepare for the possibility that it may backfire.

As one of those dispatched to make the case, I spent the better part of two weeks with my colleagues on Capitol Hill meeting with all variety of members and their staffs. Sometimes we briefed a single member in his or her office or in a classified meeting room in the bowels of the Capitol; other times it was with a party caucus, a congressional committee, or a state delegation; in one instance, it was the entire House of Representatives. Since it was the congressional summer recess and many members were away from Washington (many of them flew in for briefings and then returned home), we arranged for large briefings with staff, all of them trying to get up to speed on the issue. In one such meeting, US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford and I briefed nearly 400 House staffers in a packed congressional auditorium—it was reminiscent of a Vietnam-era teach-in, except we were advocating for the use of force, not agitating against it.

The case for action was swallowed with a healthy dose of skepticism. It wasn't easy for members of Congress: In a matter of weeks, the administration was asking them to travel the same treacherous journey it had been struggling with for two years in Syria. Now they too had to accept all the dangers and own all the consequences. Once members started to consider the risks of acting—especially now that they were part of the decision—most became unsure. Some even complained that the administration, in asking for their approval and obliging them to share responsibility, had put them in this position.

Although the vast majority of Congress worried that we would do too much, some complained that we would do too little—this latter group wanted to make the crossing of the red line a pretext to expand the mission and overthrow Assad. If one had followed the press up to that point, it was easy to believe that hawkish voices like Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham, who had been most prominent in advocating the use of force, represented a powerful base of support. But they were exposed to be very lonely. Long the administration's sharpest critics, they were now its strongest supporters; but on this occasion, they had little influence in persuading their colleagues.

Trying to navigate between these two extremes proved difficult. We had planned a discrete use of military power, at once devastating and tightly scoped. Yet this was tough to explain, and led to some mixed messages. To reassure those who worried about escalation, we stressed the limits of the campaign, with Secretary Kerry promising the strikes would be “incredibly small.” But at the same time, the strikes would pack a punch—as Secretary Hagel said, they would be “more than pinpricks.”

Despite our efforts, the president's case was losing momentum. The prospect for getting congressional approval looked dim. Republican Senator Marco Rubio said he was “unconvinced that the use of force proposed here will work” (a position he proudly defended on the 2016 presidential campaign trail).
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Senator Ted Cruz explained
he did “not believe a limited airstrike, as proposed by the president, will lead to success or improve conditions in Syria.” He warned that if the “proposed military strike against Assad succeeds, al-Qaeda could be strengthened and terrorists could seize control of Syria's vast cache of chemical weapons.”
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Senator Rand Paul declared: “War should occur only when America is attacked, when it is threatened or when American interests are attacked or threatened. I don't think the situation in Syria passes that test.”
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