The Long Game (4 page)

The rest of the world was no more enthusiastic about the prospect of American military intervention. Once the British bowed out, France was the only ally willing to join the US (the days of “freedom fries” seemed like ancient history); Turkey and Saudi Arabia voiced support but did not commit to participating in eventual strikes. Most Arab countries stayed silent, worried that lending support would expose them to retaliation, and some wouldn't back the strikes because they would not go far enough and leave Assad in power. The UN Security Council was tied up in knots because of Russia's opposition. Even the Israelis were skittish, worrying that instead of eliminating the threat of Syria's chemical weapons, military strikes could set them loose.

Then, just as the US seemed headed toward intervening in Syria on its own—without the support of most of the world, Congress and, by extension, the American people—a stunning twist occurred that led to an outcome none of us had expected, planned for, or even dreamed was possible.

AN OPENING FOR DIPLOMACY

It started with another ad-lib. During a September 9 press conference in London, Secretary Kerry was asked if there was anything Assad could do to avoid an attack. Sure, Kerry said in exasperation, the Syrian leader could admit that he had chemical weapons (something he still refused to do) and give them all up peacefully, but “he isn't
about to do it and it can't be done.” Like Obama's original red line a year earlier, this offhand remark wasn't intended to be a policy pronouncement. But soon after Kerry walked off the stage he received a call from his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, who was then meeting with a delegation of Syrian diplomats in Moscow and wanted to talk with the secretary of state about his “initiative.”
¹⁹

The idea of working with the Russians to deal with Syria's chemical weapons had been batted around for several months and had come up in several conversations between President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Kerry later said he had discussed it with the Russian foreign minister, and some Israeli leaders later claimed that they had had the idea first.

Washington and Moscow had deep disagreements over Syria. Russia continued to be one of Assad's only friends and the Syrian military's chief supplier. But even Moscow worried about chemical weapons. When we had been concerned in the past about the possible use or security of Syria's chemical stockpile, the Russians had reliably passed messages to Damascus. While they remained stalwart defenders of Assad, we tested how we could build on our mutual interest in preventing the spread of chemical weapons, but the overtures had never led anywhere.

The credible threat of military force changed that. Now Moscow was ready to pressure Assad to comply. Maybe this reflected their own concerns about chemical weapons; or perhaps this was driven by their desire to keep an ally in power; or possibly they were simply trying to stay relevant geopolitically. Whatever the reason, after meeting with the Russians in Moscow, the Syrians publicly admitted for the first time that they had chemical arms and committed to signing the Chemical Weapons Convention, the international treaty that bans such weapons. The Syrians were pledging to come clean—not just revealing what they had, but getting rid of their chemical weapons altogether.

Initially the administration approached the Russian offer skeptically. Putin had every reason to want to delay military action. Moreover, the idea of dismantling Syria's stockpile was daunting—there seemed to be thousands of steps before we could be sure something like this had any hope of working. But Obama wanted to test the proposition. After all, if
not
using force enabled the US to achieve something that was unquestionably in its security interests and had once seemed impossible, while also avoiding the risks entailed by military action, how could it not take such a deal?
²⁰

W
ITH
US N
AVY
ships still ready to launch strikes, American and Russian diplomats spent several days hammering out the details of an agreement for the specific steps Syria would take to allow international inspectors to find, remove, and destroy its chemical arms. The Syrians signed on and the UN Security Council endorsed the deal, which for the first time authorized international action if Assad failed to comply. In just a matter of weeks, we had gone from plotting over how to deal with one of the world's largest arsenals of chemical weapons to implementing a plan to eliminate all of them.

The scope and ambition of the agreement—everything was scheduled to be complete in less than a year, in the middle of a civil war—were stunning. The
New York Times
aptly described it as “one of the most challenging undertakings in the history of arms control.”
²¹
A mountain of complicated details had to be sorted out, such as how the inspectors would be kept safe, how the weapons would be transferred out of Syria, and who would assume the responsibility for destroying them.

Eventually the task would be performed through an elaborate multinational effort: international inspectors would locate and verify Syria's chemical materials and then supervise their transport to Danish and Norwegian ships, with Russia and China providing security. Then, because no country wanted to have Syrian chemical weapons
on its territory, they would be placed on a US Navy ship, the
Cape Ray,
which was specially outfitted to convert the weapons material into hazardous waste so they could be safely disposed.

By June 2014, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the international group responsible for overseeing this effort, announced that the over 1,300 tons of Syria's declared chemical weapons were now safely out of the country and on their way to being destroyed. For its efforts the OPCW was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As the
Washington Post
observed in June 2014, “the international effort to find, verify, pack, transport, and ultimately destroy the Syrian weapons has been unprecedented in countless ways. Never before have such lethal substances been packaged in bullet-proof containers and carried on flatbed trucks through the front lines of a war zone. Never before have such weapons been destroyed at sea.”
²²

A FAILURE OR SUCCESS?

Without a bomb being dropped, Syria had admitted to having a massive chemical weapons program it had never before acknowledged, agreed to give it up, and submitted to a multinational coalition that removed the weapons and destroyed them in a way that had never been tried before. From my perspective at the Pentagon, this seemed like an incontrovertible if inelegant example of what academics call “coercive diplomacy,” using the threat of force to achieve an outcome military power itself could not accomplish.
²³

Yet the near unanimous verdict among observers is that this episode revealed Obama's core weakness. Even the president's sympathizers call the handling of the red line a “debacle,” an “amateurish improvisation,” or the administration's “worst blunder.” They contend that Obama whiffed at a chance to show resolve, that for the sake of maintaining credibility, the US would have been better off
had the administration not pursued the diplomatic opening and used force instead. In this sense, a mythology has evolved from the red line episode—that if only the US had used force, then it could have not only have addressed the chemical weapons threat, but solved the Syria conflict altogether. This conventional wisdom warrants unpacking.

Some of this can be explained by politics, with partisans unwilling to give Obama credit for any success. More serious are those who argue less about the outcome than the way it came about. Presidents get rewarded for linear results, especially when things happen the way the policy sages say they are supposed to. Moreover, because one of the core attributes of being a Washington insider is being “in the know,” one of the special few privy to what's really happening, surprises are frowned upon.

So Obama's sudden pivots—first by abruptly pausing to go to Congress, then by seizing an unexpected opening for diplomacy—struck many as unseemly. It did not help that unscripted comments both got the US into this situation (Obama's original red line) as well as out of it (Kerry's musing that Syria could avoid strikes by giving up its chemical weapons). Where the president saw nimble improvisations adjusting to new opportunities, the critics saw lurching indecision. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, spoke for many in the establishment when he described Obama's moves as “the most undisciplined stretch of foreign policy of his presidency.”
²⁴

Many foreign leaders asserted that failing to respond militarily had damaged the administration's credibility. Although no Arab countries were willing to contribute their own forces and most Arab leaders even refused to support Obama publicly when he asked for it, nearly all blamed him for not intervening. Even though the chemical weapons threat was removed, they questioned whether they could trust the US to follow through on its commitments to them (as
Defense Secretary Hagel later asserted, they believed the president had “debased his currency”). Even some Europeans were disappointed—especially the French, who felt politically exposed as the only country that was willing to strike with the United States. When asked about the red line two years later, the French defense minister said, “We are sorry that it happened, and we keep being sorry for that.”

G
IVEN SUCH PERCEPTIONS
, it is worth reflecting on what might have happened had the US barreled forward and attacked Syria. Would we have been better off? It is highly unlikely that the tons of Syrian chemical weapons would have been safely removed from the country. Even if an initial salvo deterred Assad from using more chemical weapons, he would still have had hundreds of tons remaining since the strikes would have only eliminated a small fraction of his arsenal.

Therefore it is safe to assume that there would be, with good reason, absolute hysteria about such weapons on the loose (consider the attention paid to the credible reports that some unaccounted-for weapons might be, or that extremists are cooking up their own crude weapons using industrial chemicals like chlorine). The rise of ISIS has been terrifying enough; it would be exponentially more dangerous if it had had the chance to get its hands on hundreds of tons of Syrian chemical weapons.

In fact, had President Obama acted as he was ready to do in the fall of 2013, it is likely that substantial numbers of American troops would have had to be deployed to Syria to secure those remaining chemical weapons depots over which Assad had lost control. If President Obama had passed up the opportunity for diplomacy and used force, and if that had in turn led to a loose chemical weapon being used to strike Israel or conduct a terrorist attack in the US or Europe, he deservedly would have been blamed and held accountable.

Perversely, critics at home and abroad treat the removal of Syria's chemical arsenal as an afterthought—as minor and insufficient—and
instead choose to assert that Obama soiled America's reputation. It is as though they place higher value on being “tough,” especially if it involves military force, than on lasting accomplishment. In the name of maintaining “credibility,” they criticize Obama for not acting, even if doing so would have delivered a less advantageous outcome.

This is especially odd given our recent past. In Iraq, the US went to war in 2003 to address a WMD threat that did not exist, and the devastating result cost resources, took thousands of American lives and wounded many others, tarnished US leadership, and unleashed a regional firestorm we are still dealing with today. In Syria in 2013, the US addressed a WMD threat that
did
exist—and was of far greater scale, with as much as ten times the amount of chemical weapons materials the intelligence community wrongly estimated in Iraq—by
avoiding
the use of force. Yet this is widely perceived as a blow to American prestige.

H
OW CAN THIS
be? The first part of the problem is the definition of—and fixation with—credibility. Perceptions do matter, but I think Obama would agree with the point made by the political scientist Richard Betts, who observes that “credibility is the modern antiseptic buzzword now often used to cloak the ancient enthusiasm for honor. But honor's importance is always more real and demanding to national elites and people on home fronts than it is to [those] put into the point of the spear to die for it.” Obama is deeply skeptical of the Washington establishment's obsession with credibility, believing that the logic sets a trap leading to bad decisions. As he once argued, “dropping bombs on someone just to prove you're willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force.”
²⁵

A second issue is process. Procedure and presentation are important, and Obama concedes that this was not a textbook execution of foreign policy. “We won't get style points for the way we made this
decision,” he has said.
²⁶
By exposing the public to the sausage-making of policy—by thinking out loud, making clear all the uncertainties and risks, and shifting directions abruptly—the administration created an impression that it lacked confidence.

This perception was exacerbated by the sudden, and clumsy, move to go to Congress for approval. It was the right decision, but it should not have been made on the fly (and not
after
Kerry had been sent out to make such a Churchillian call for action) and with no consultation with our allies, especially the French, who were the only ones willing to act with us. To this day, many believe that going to Congress was just a cynical move by the president to pass the buck and avoid strikes. I never believed this to be true, and remain unaware of any evidence to prove such an assertion. Although Obama asked for congressional support, he always made clear he would act without it.