Syria - Ask For Permission or Beg Forgiveness?

There’s a saying we had in the Air Force – “it’s better to beg forgiveness than to ask for permission.”  Here lies the difference between Barack Obama and Donald Trump.  On August 21, 2013, Bashar Assad gassed his own people in Ghouta, Syria.  Approximately 3,600 people were killed or injured.  A year earlier [August 20, 2012], Mr. Obama had this to say about Assad using chemical weapons on his own people:

“We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”

When the attack happened, Mr. Obama said this: 

“Good afternoon, everybody. Ten days ago, the world watched in horror as men, women and children were massacred in Syria in the worst chemical weapons attack of the 21^st century.  Yesterday the United States presented a powerful case that the Syrian government was responsible for this attack on its own people.  Our intelligence shows the Assad regime and its forces preparing to use chemical weapons, launching rockets in the highly populated suburbs of Damascus, and acknowledging that a chemical weapons attack took place.  And all of this corroborates what the world can plainly see – hospitals overflowing with victims, terrible images of the dead.  All told, well over 1,000 people were murdered.  Several hundred of them were children – young girls and boys gassed to death by their own government.

This attack is an assault on human dignity.  It also presents a serious danger to our national security.  It risks making a mockery of global prohibition on the use of chemical weapons.  It endangers our friends and our partners along Syria’s borders, including Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq.  It could lead to escalating use of chemical weapons, or their proliferation to terrorist groups who would do our people harm.  In a world with many dangers, this menace must be confronted. 

Now, after careful deliberation, I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets.  This would not be an open-ended intervention.  We would not put boots on the ground.  Instead, our action would be limited in duration and scope.  But I’m confident we can hold the Assad regime accountable for their use of chemical weapons, deter this kind of behavior, and degrade their capacity to carry it out.” 

Ok, so far, so good.  I won’t fault the ten days it took to respond to the attack since it takes a while for the intelligence community to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.  However, there is also this from the same statement:

“Over the last several days, we’ve heard from members of Congress who want their voices to be heard.  I absolutely agree.  So this morning, I spoke with all four congressional leaders, and they’ve agreed to schedule a debate and then vote as soon as Congress comes back into session…Yet, while I believe I have the authority to carry out this military action without specific congressional authorization, I know that the country will be stronger if we take this course, and our actions will be even more effective.  We should have this debate, because the issues are too big for business as usual.”  But this was “business as usual”.  The Constitution [of which Mr. Obama was an instructor before he got into politics] authorizes the President to call special sessions of Congress while they are away on recess.  When Mr. Obama made these remarks, Congress was on its annual August recess.  If there was indeed a sense of urgency to get this done, that is not evident from neither Mr. Obama’s words nor his actions.  He let the Congressional recess continue uninterrupted – in other words, “business as usual”.  Congress didn’t return from recess until September 9^th.  In contrast, by the time Mr. Obama made these remarks, the British House of Commons had already debated the issue, and rejected authorizing military force.  The British demonstrated a sense of urgency – we did not.

What did Barack Obama want to do to Syria?  On August 29, 2013 he spoke with Judy Woodruff and Gwen Ifill [RIP] about his thinking on Syria:

“There is a reason why there is an international norm against chemical weapons. There’s a reason why consistently, you know, the rules of war have suggested that the use of chemical weapons violates Geneva Protocols. So they’re different, and we want to make sure that they are not loose in a way that ultimately, could affect our security.

And if, in fact, we can take limited, tailored approaches, not getting drawn into a long conflict, not a repetition of, you know, Iraq, which I know a lot of people are worried about but if we are saying in a clear and decisive but very limited way, we send a shot across the bow saying, stop doing this, that can have a positive impact on our national security over the long term, and may have a positive impact in the sense that chemical weapons are not used again on innocent civilians.”

But there was no US military strike on Syria.    Mr. Obama’s national security team had a tall order to sell military strikes to Congress.  John Kerry didn’t help his case by characterizing the impending strikes as “unbelievably small”.  Question – why go to so much effort to get Congress on board for something that they themselves portray as trivial?  Wouldn’t you save the arm-twisting for much bigger things?  But I digress… When asked what it would take for something that for Syria to avoid a US strike, John Kerry offhandedly said “give up your chemical weapons”.  The Russians saw their shot and they took it.  Vladimir Putin offered Barack Obama a way out.  In exchange for not striking on Syrian targets, the Russians would “convince” the Syrians to give up their chemical weapons.  Did that work?  Last week’s attack answered this question with an emphatic “No!”

   

Contrast Mr. Obama’s actions with those of Donald Trump.  On April 4, 2017, somebody [presumably the Assad regime] conducted a sarin attack on Khan Sheikoun, in the rebel-held Idlib province.  Seventy people were killed and hundreds more were injured.  On April 6^th Mr. Trump said the latest chemical attack “crosses many lines, beyond a red line, many many lines…”  The New York Times reported it took 63 hours from the time of the latest attack until the Navy launched cruise missiles at Syria.  Also according to the Times, Mr. Trump had been so shaken by the pictures shown to him [more graphic than those made public] that he needed little convincing to strike at Syria.  He didn’t ask for Congressional approval – he just did it.  There haven’t been any further attacks on Syria.  This is the “shot across the bow” that Mr. Obama described four years ago.   The effect of Mr. Trump’s action with regard to chemical weapons is unknown, but what we do know is it got Vladimir Putin’s attention.  This time it was his turn to be surprised.  According to an anonymous Obama staffer, “our administration never would have gotten this done in 48 hours.”  In his recent article for The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote Trump “reached for the same playbook that his predecessor resisted opening.”  But having taken action in Syria, where do we go from here?

There is quite a bit of political back and forth about the efficacy of Mr. Obama’s [or Mr. Trump's] Syria policy.  In the interest of staying apolitical, I won’t address those thoughts here.  But I leave with this quote from Barack Obama:

“Here's my question for every member of Congress and every member of the global community:  What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price?”  We’ll never know because Assad never paid a price for the August 2013 attack.  Last week’s chemical attack in Khan Sheikoun clearly demonstrated Assad didn’t pay a price, and didn’t give up all of his weapons in 2013.  Last week an airfield was knocked out of action for a little while.  Now what?