Barack Obama made the biggest gamble of his presidency on Saturday. By saying that he'd seek Congressional authorization to wage air strikes on the Syrian regime in response to its use of chemical weapons, he quite literally put the geopolitical standing of the United States to a vote. If he loses, then Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un will have discovered that America's fatal flaw is a commander-in-chief who wants to line up behind legislators before taking what he himself acknowledges is necessary military action. This will not be that wondrous paradox of "leading from behind," it will be a you-first deferral of leadership altogether, and to a body notoriously riven between and amongst war-weary centrists, a handful of ardent hawks, and not a few Tea Party ignoramuses and libertarian isolationists. (Public opinion has a greater collective taste for sending cruise missiles into Syria than it does for congratulating the national legislature on anything.)
For those who already believe that Congress is little more than a rubber-stamp assembly for America's most powerful lobby groups, the failure to secure a war vote will suggest that if a totalitarian wishes to gas 1,400 people to death in his capital city, he need only check with the special interests. Syrians have already noticed the sudden efflorescence, like algae at the bottom of a pool, of various "peace" campaigns on Facebook and Twitter, most of which are nakedly pro-Assad in their orientation. The Kremlin is said to be mulling whether or not to dispatch a Duma delegation to pressure Congress against military action, a strategy the United States need never repay in kind when it comes to persuading the Duma to change its mind on institutionalizing homophobia or American adoption bans. Meanwhile, the Russian state-owned media want us all to know that they're hip to what really makes the world go round; they've been warning of a massive Syrian retaliation against Israel should the U.S. intervene. Herein lies another easy backfire in Obama's Hill initiative. As Jeffrey Goldberg has pointed out, there's a nervous irony in seeing this president deputizing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to sell a policy whose long-term consequence may be the toppling of an Arab dictatorship that is more and more becoming a suzerain of Iran.
These are my criticisms of the president's approach. But there is also much to be said for his gamble if the vote passes. He'll have made every elected representative, and therefore the American people who elected them, co-owners of his Syria policy. He will have also achieved far greater legitimacy in confronting Assad and dispelling any suggestion that this undertaking was cowboyish or adventurist in nature. (Even Rand Paul, who professes to care only for Syria's Christian minority and seems to believe that the mullahs are still undecided about whether or not to get involved in this conflict, gets to have a vote).
So what are Obama's odds? So far, Speaker of the House John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi all support the president. Yet there are mutterings that this may not be sufficient. According to Politico, "[s]everal lawmakers and aides who have been canvassing support say that nearly 80 percent of the House Republican Conference is, to some degree, opposed to launching strikes in Syria. Informal counts by Obama allies show that support in Congress for Obama's plans is in the low dozens." And yet, the G.O.P. never likes to look a squish on matters of national security, particularly when it's the guy they see as the second coming of Jimmy Carter sending warships to the Middle East. The White House can effectively marshal the argument that if sheer hatred for Obama or suspicion of his incompetence is motivating a "no" vote, then it will be the Republicans explaining to their constituencies why they gave succor to a mass murdering tyrant and emboldened Iran in its quest for a nuclear bomb. Even the socialists in France are sounding more macho.
The more pressing question I have is this: Where is the president ultimately going on Syria and does he have an actual strategy not just for winning the argument for intervention but for waging a worthwhile and successful campaign?
Last week, the White House line was all about preparing the nation for a quick and easy "punitive" strike against Assad, a "shot across his bow," as the president put, meaning essentially a Tomahawk-delivered demarche and nothing more. As far as deterrence is concerned, this simply wouldn't work: Assad would weather the missiles, and then start right back up again, probably using WMD -- a fact now well appreciated by Secretary of State John Kerry.
Yet even in nothing-to-see-here mode, the administration was sending flirtatious hints that it was purposefully downplaying its own war plan to win maximum domestic and international support. First, you do not need two or three days of bombardment to make a point. But this was the circulated timeframe for proposed airstrikes, based on anonymous leaks from "senior officials" to the press. Second, the draft text of the war bill the White House released to Congress was remarkably expansive: "the objective of the United States' use of military force in connection with this authorization should be to deter, disrupt, prevent, and degrade the potential for, future uses of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction." The new draft of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee version, said to be a curtailment of executive war powers, still gives the president a full three months to finish the job, two without notifying Congress of his intentions.
One can do quite a lot to "deter, disrupt, prevent, and degrade" the potential for WMD uses in three months, including taking out runways and control towers of military airbases, striking at artillery and rocket launching positions and blasting the headquarters of the Fourth Armored Division and Republican Guard. How long would the five naval vessels now stationed in the eastern Mediterranean hang around after the first sorties were over? We haven't been told.
More hints have followed.
On Labor Day, Senators McCain and Graham emerged from an hourlong meeting in the White House cautiously confident that what Obama had in mind was not a one-off airstrike but an actual game plan for weakening Assad and strengthening the Free Syrian Army, without which there is no point in doing anything.
McCain claimed that while the president was fuzzy on the specifics, the intervention in mind would not be "cosmetic" but "very serious." (I have it on good authority that McCain had been told this by Vice President Joseph Biden even before British parliament decided to absent itself from any military engagement in Syria.) The only real detail to emerge was that a 50-man cell of CIA-trained rebels in Jordan were already moving into the war zone. Those rebels are not there to deliver ICC indictments.
Then on Monday, September 2, Obama's own rhetoric shifted in a meeting with Congressional leaders: "We have a broad strategy that will allow us to upgrade the capabilities of the opposition," he said, "allow Syria to ultimately free itself from the kinds of terrible civil war, death and activity that we've been seeing on the ground."
How do we help Syria "free itself" to the negotiating table? By sending a shot across Assad's bow?
When talking about Syria, Obama often sounds like Humpty Dumpy: words mean what he chooses them to mean, neither more nor less. This is primarily because he doesn't like the subject of Syria at all and he never wanted to do what he now has to do: go to war. He's in the self-created difficulty of arguing against his former self, who for two years gave reason upon reason for not getting involved in this country's messy affairs--chiefly by comparing them to those of Iraq. Now Syria isn't Iraq, and this time things will be different. It must be so frustrating to flip a switch and not see the lights go on immediately.
Nevertheless, the language has begun to grow slightly more intelligible. Although he still clings to a "political settlement" for Syria and negotiations with the Russians in Switzerland, John Kerry seems to realize that this will never happen to any civilized party's satisfaction without first dictating the terms of those negotiations to Moscow, Tehran and Damascus. He was quite clear, in testifying before the Foreign Relations Committee, that "[t]here is no way possible that by mutual consent, Assad is going to be part of" a future Syrian government; and yet he invoked the Geneva protocol to make this point, even though that document makes no explicit mention of Assad's departure, and even though any talk of Assad's fate was left open-ended at Kerry's infamous palm-slapping press conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov where "Geneva 2" was first introduced to the world.
Moreover, whenever Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin Dempsey were grilled by clarity-seeking senators on what, exactly, the commander-in-chief was playing at, each eventually conceded the obvious: of course airstrikes are going to hurt Assad's war-making ability, further vitiate his regime and consequently help the armed opposition. Hagel, for instance, said in his opening remarks, "we are not seeking to resolve the underlying conflict in Syria through direct military force." But he said this, in response to a question from McCain, who asked if in degrading the regime's military capability the United States wouldn't also be changing the "momentum" in favor of the rebels: "Degrading a military capability, as you know, is a -- is a pretty significant part of momentum shifts."
The strategy emerging seems to resemble what I call the Luca Brasi method of diplomacy: Put a gun to Assad's head and force him to negotiate. Already, this appears to be paying dividends. Kerry has noted that in the last week, since talk of war has escalated, 100 people have defected from the Syrian military, 80 of them officers. The most high-ranking have been Ali Habib Mahmud, an Alawite member of Assad's inner circle, and Abultawwab Shahrour, the chief forensics investigator in Aleppo who claims to have first-hand proof of the regime's use of chemical agents. Furthermore, Russia has just suspended the sale of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Assad, citing the regime's lack of payment. Sources also tell me that for the first time in two years, FSA units in north Syria -- Liwa al-Tawhid and the Farouq Brigades in particular -- are getting a steady and much-needed supply of weapons from Turkey, stockpiles of which have likely been purchased by Saudi Arabia and no doubt green-lit for delivery by Washington as a bit of hard power in advance of the even harder variety.
As for the "momentum" question, one of the greatest shibboleths of the last three months has been assessments that put the rebels on the losing side of this war. No one seemed to understand why Assad would gas them in Eastern Ghouta because no one seemed to even realize that the rebels had so firmly entrenched themselves in Eastern Ghouta, withstanding gunships, artillery, rockets and even prior releases of nerve toxins. In a very well done piece for Der Spiegel, Christoph Reuter and Holger Stark debunk this conventional wisdom by showing that, apart from the fall of Qusayr and Homs (strategic necessaries for the regime, but not the opposition), Assad's forces have been suffering several debilitating losses. Khan al-Assal in the Aleppo, the sight of an early chemical weapons attack, fell in July as did Minnagh airbase. Last month, rebels took Khan Assir, the last transit corridor for the regime's remaining troops in Aleppo who are now completely choked off. And in Rif Dimashq, Reuter and Stark write, not even the August 21 sarin attack enabled the Fourth Division to retake a single neighborhood, and it sure did try: "Instead, the division lost at least seven tanks in the Damascus neighborhood of Harasta alone. A rebel video provides an insight into the lack of personnel among the elite division: Two crew members flee a burning tank -- but they are wearing no uniforms, no helmets and no radio gear. Shabiha militia members have apparently been forced to fill the gaps in the ranks of the army."
This shows yet again another fatal weakness in Assad's campaign: not only is he running out of viable regular soldiers -- the bulk of whom he's never trusted, and many of whom have either been killed by rebels, confined to barracks, or shot while trying to desert or defect -- but he is relying more and more on guerrilla militias to do his fighting for him. Not all of these are acting directly on orders from Damascus High Command. The Syrian Arab Army, in other words, is losing its command and control capability and becoming more and more like... the Free Syrian Army.
If for no other reason, then, now would be an excellent time for Washington to try and turn the latter into an alternative military. Who knows? It just might come in handy someday.