One of the ongoing perplexities of President Obama’s Syria policy has been the stark contrast between his muscular rhetoric and halting, hesitant actions. On the one hand, he has insisted that the country’s dictator Bashar al-Assad “must” go and has predicted that his fall is all but assured. But on the other, he has thus far limited himself to authorizing aid in the form of training and intelligence for Syria’s beleaguered rebels.
While we’d be the last to conclude that the case for intervening in Syria is open and shut, we have argued here at Via Meadia that the case for action outweighs the case for doing nothing. Barely. We’ve been making the case that the consequences of inaction were too high for quite a while now, and with every passing week, as the situation on the ground becomes increasingly dire and pushes the more reasonable among the rebels to the sidelines, we are convinced that our initial assessment was the right one, and that the choices available to President Obama and the West generally grow less attractive with each passing day.
But we are not in the Oval Office, and our decision doesn’t have the weighty consequences which the President must bear. It would have been a difficult decision to make a year ago, and it’s certainly no easier now that the war has dragged on so long and shattered Syrian society so thoroughly. We may disagree with the White House on this one, but on questions as tough as this one it’s hard to be dogmatic.
A distressing piece of news analysis from the Associated Press is giving us second thoughts, however. Lara Jakes is reporting that the President’s reluctance in Syria isn’t about the risks and dangers of intervention, or about the difficulties in distinguishing between the “good” rebels and terrorists and radicals linked to Al-Qaeda, or even about concerns over Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule.
Ms. Jakes is reporting that President Obama has had another reason for standing back as Syria bleeds: he’s hoping that American restraint on Syria will persuade Iran to give up on nuclear weapons. Tehran would be that much less likely to make concessions on its nuclear program, the Administration is apparently thinking, if it’s also fighting American-backed rebels in Syria. “The White House has at least for now put the nuclear negotiations ahead of intervening in Syria,” Jakes says, citing “diplomats, former Obama administration officials and experts.” The most prominent person to go on record with this theory is none other than Javier Solana himself:
“I think that the United States has not taken a more active role in Syria from the beginning because they didn’t want to disturb the possibility, to give them space, to negotiate with Iran,” Javier Solana, the former European Union foreign policy chief, said Monday at a Brookings Institution discussion about this week’s talks. Solana, who was a top negotiator with Tehran in the nuclear program until 2009, added, “They probably knew that getting very engaged against Assad, engaged even militarily, could contribute to a break in the potential negotiations with Tehran.”
Senior State Department officials played down this logic, and there’s no way for Via Meadia to know whether Mr. Solana has any special insight into the White House thought process. No matter how well sourced reports like these are, they tend not to give the full story, and always run the risk of stating something out of context or missing some relevant facts. We aren’t jumping to conclusions based on one press report and we’ll wait and see how things shake out. But the potential that this kind of thinking is guiding President Obama’s policy is cause for very serious concern.
There are plenty of good reasons to fight shy of involvement in Syria; trying to get on Iran’s good side by letting Assad murder his people with impunity isn’t one of them. It’s a grotesquely immoral sacrifice of the innocent on the altar of a terrible policy idea. Trying to please the mullahs by giving them their way in Syria would be like trying to quiet Adolf Hitler by giving him the Sudetenland. It would be appeasement, and it would be as dishonorable as it is futile.
Here’s the problem: the calculation the mullahs are making is whether or not, when President Obama tells them that there will be war if they don’t give up on their nuke plans, he really Means It. If they think he’s bluffing, if they think he is either unable or unwilling to compel them to comply, there is no reason on earth for them to give way. The mullahs don’t like President Obama, they don’t trust him, and they want to break his power and his policy in the Middle East.
The struggle in Syria is a vital one for Tehran, and the mullahs are watching American policy with cold and utterly unsympathetic eyes. They know quite well that breaking Assad and his Hezbollah client in Lebanon would be a decisive blow to Iran’s regional strategy. They live in terror that the blow will fall; they are braced for it already. But if the AP story is right, they see something amazing: President Obama has stayed his hand, he is offering Assad a chance to hold power, he is betraying his Israeli and his Sunni Arab and Turkish allies and he is letting tens of thousands of Syrians die in horror and pain… because he really, really hopes Iran will let him off the hook and give him a way out of the nuclear standoff that doesn’t involve a war.
There might be some statesmen somewhere who would see this policy as its proponents might see it: as a dignified and sincere gesture, an open hand for peace. “Have no fear, little mullahs,” Uncle Sam generously says, “I would not hurt you if I could. I spare this hateful tyrant in Damascus today as I would spare you in Tehran tomorrow should you give up your nukes and find yourselves in trouble at home. Don’t worry about America; as long as you have enough Kalashnikovs and goons willing to use them, your hold on power is forever secure. Subvert your neighbors all you like, arm terrorists and enable murder and civil war across the region all you like; just please, please don’t build a bomb and between us all will be well.”
Tehran, unfortunately, will not be moved by this overture, at least not moved in the way some might hope. The reaction is likely to be much colder: they would read a policy choice like this as abject and craven, as a sign of desperation and retreat.
They will not take it as a sign that America can be trusted. They are well past trusting American verbal or even written assurances; President Obama himself destroyed any last flickering thoughts in Tehran that the security of the Islamic Republic could be safeguarded without nuclear weapons by an agreement with the United States. Like almost everyone in the world, they believed that Libya’s Qaddafi had assurances like that when he gave up his nuclear program back in the George Bush years; they watched NATO take advantage of a moment of internal weakness to wreck his regime. Nothing President Obama could say, no document he can sign, will convince them that a future American president wouldn’t take advantage of internal divisions in Iran to overthrow the mullahs if a good chance appeared and it suited our interests or even just our vanity at the time.
Therefore for them this isn’t about trust. They don’t trust the US and see no reason why they can or should. If for some reason they came to trust President Obama, they would have no reason to trust his successors.
For them this is a calculation of interest and of fear. Does Obama really Mean It when he threatens war over the nuclear issue, or is he pathetically bluffing? If they think the threat is real, there is a serious chance they will negotiate if they think war is more dangerous for them than for the US. If they think President Obama is bluffing then they will alternate between threats and hints of compromise as they roll Obama in the Middle East the way Hitler rolled Britain and France in the 1930s.
To the Iranians this hands-off Syria policy, combined with the defense cuts, combined with the retreat from engagement with Iraq, combined with the reversal of course and the dash for the exit in Afghanistan, would amount to clear proof that Obama is as Chamberlainesque as they come: attempting to smooth the reality of inexorable decline with empty, pretty treaties.
If this hopefully-misguided AP dispatch is right, and President Obama really is letting the mullahs use their nuclear program as leverage to convince the US to stay out of Syria, the administration is inadvertently but inescapably sending two unmistakable messages to Tehran. First, that the US is desperate, very desperate, to avoid a war with Iran and will clutch at just about any straw to get out of the hole it’s dug for itself. Second, even the threat of Iran developing a nuclear bomb is enough to get the US to humiliatingly climb down the ladder and allow a blood-smeared dictatorship that the President has repeatedly said “must” go, to stay.
The mullahs would be much dumber than anybody thinks if they didn’t draw the obvious conclusions from this. They’re likely to conclude that the administration will blink if push comes to shove over Iran’s nuclear program because it is more worried about war than about anything else. They probably think that the administration doesn’t really want to intervene in Syria anyway (and they’re almost certainly right), so they won’t see American abstention from Syria as a generous concession to Iran but rather as a sign of the spinelessness and pessimism (call this ‘caution’ and ‘realism’ if you prefer but the result on Iranian thinking will be the same) that will lead to more concessions on other issues. They’re also likely to conclude that if the threat of acquiring nuclear weapons gives Iran this much leverage with the most powerful country on earth, just think what the possession of those weapons will do. This policy as reported by the AP would be such a mix of recklessness and fecklessness that if the dispatch is accurate we should all begin bracing for some major setbacks and disasters in the Middle East.
If this is a policy the administration has only pursued in the last couple of weeks or months, there’s at least a skeleton of a case that could be made for it: Assad is at this point so weak that the US can sell his survival to the Iranians more than once. You can promise to stay out this week, but the mullahs will need to buy another stay of execution next week. Moreover, there is nothing in principle wrong with holding out some kind of prospect of linkage between Syria and the Iranian nuclear issue. But it would have to be structured very carefully: President Obama should at most be offering Iran the hope that if it really does meet his bottom line on the nuclear issue, the US is ready to talk about some of the regional issues of great importance to Iran. But to sell American inaction on Syria in exchange for minor progress in nuclear negotiations would be one of the riskiest calls an American president could make.
If Solana is right that this policy has been driving the White House all along, this is Obama’s initial Iran failure—remaining silent during the 2009 Green Revolution—on steroids. Weakness doesn’t win you the friendship of bullies. And if this dispatch is right, we should expect some ugly repercussions from the Sunni Arabs, the Israelis and the Turks. All these powers want to see Iran’s claws clipped and they want Assad to go; all of these powers chiefly view the value of their US ties at the moment in the light of the confrontation with Iran. If they come to feel that the United States is willing to throw the Syrian lamb to the Iranian tiger, their trust and confidence in the United States, and consequentially America’s power to get things done in the region, would go into a deep eclipse.
The White House has a lot of balls to juggle in its Middle East diplomacy and we hope that even if some staffers have been tempted to use abstention in Syria as a bargaining chip with Iran, they will reconsider on reflection. Iran is more likely to make a deal (and less able to resist military pressure effectively) if it loses its hold on Syria than if it can protect its regional satraps. Insofar as Iran dominates American thinking on Syria, that should cause us to toughen our policy on Assad and step up help both for the rebels and for the forces seeking to limit the power of Hezbollah in Lebanon next door.
Letting someone have the Sudetenland almost never works; as Churchill said, Britain and France had to choose between dishonor and war in the 1938 Czech crisis. They chose dishonor, he said, and will get war.