On Saturday, August 24, international aid group Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reported that three of the hospitals it supports in Syria’s Damascus region “received approximately 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms in less than three hours on the morning of Wednesday, August 21, 2013. Of those patients, 355 reportedly died.”
The report from MSF, a well-reputed organization, has changed the tenor of discussion on Syria as it indicates that someone has employed nerve gas in the country’s civil war. The White House has concluded that there is “very little doubt” that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons against its own people. With President Obama reaching out to British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President François Hollande over the weekend, discussion has shifted to what should or can the United States and its allies do in response.
With use of force now being contemplated, there are several questions that we in the United States should consider as this crisis unfolds. Despite all of the Pentagon’s technologically sophisticated and increasingly unmanned hardware, the president is left to consider whether or not he should dispatch forces into harm’s way in a new country in the Middle East. As informed citizens, we should consider four questions.
1. Does use of nerve agent chemical weapons compel foreign intervention in Syria? The last time a problem of this sort was considered by the international community was after the March 1988 nerve gas attack against Kurds in Iraq during the closing months of the incredibly bloody 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. There is considerable evidence that Iraq employed a variety of chemical agents against Iran, especially in the closing phases of the conflict. The chemical attacks came to a close with the end of the war in August 1988, but the stockpiling of chemical weapons continued in Iraq after the war until its 1991 conflagration with the United States and its massive allied coalition (including the Syrians). U.S. intervention was largely limited to protecting maritime traffic in the Persian Gulf, easing valid economic concerns of interrupted oil supply through strikes on tankers sending oil to markets in Europe, Asia and North America.
Much was made of Iraq’s chemical capacity in the run-up to war with the Hussein regime in 2003. Ultimately, no chemical weapons were found in Iraq after the U.S. invasion. For this reason, military action based upon allegation of chemical weapon use by Syria must meet the greatest degree of scrutiny. Is there a moral imperative in attacking Syria in response to its WMD use? In my career, here at the Baker Institute and elsewhere, I’ve heard everything from Romeo Dallaire’s regret at the international community’s indecisive response on the Rwandan genocide to Edward Luttwak’s determination to “give war a chance” in the shattered former Yugoslavia. Morality and the use of force are incredibly subjective.
Is the United States compelled to act in Syria? Well, it does appear one of those red lines we hear about has been crossed. Such events leave us to wonder what these red lines are for, in particular in seeking consensus among nations.
2. Does international agreement on military action against Syria exist or will it? Although Obama has talked to Cameron and Hollande, the other two gentlemen on the Security Council who can sanction international military action against Syria or veto it are Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping. Relations with both Beijing and Moscow are still chilly. The Snowden affair has taken its toll, more with Russia than China: As a result of Moscow’s unwillingness to hand over the 30-year-old ex-systems administrator, Obama cancelled his one-on-one meeting with Putin while in Russia for the September G20 summit.
So what does the not-so-free Chinese and Russian press say? The Chinese People’s Daily offered a fairly upbeat assessment of Damascus’s cooperation with the UN on its fact-finding mission to the alleged site of the attack. Russia’s state-run Pravda chose to run a story under the headline “Syria: The predictable and false “chemical” attack.” How that lines up for Security Council votes on intervention? I’d say one “abstain” and one “no.” Just to reiterate where the Russians think we are on this, another recent Pravda piece ran with the headline “Islam destroys democracy in France.” The Russians think we’re daft to abandon secular leaders for Islamist successors. Why? Beslan, for starters.
Consensus among the permanent Security Council members is no requirement for action, but it certainly helps. When members of the NATO alliance chose to intervene in Libya, they did so under the authority of UN Security Council Resolution 1973. Ten countries approved the measure in the Security Council, however, five abstained – Germany, Brazil, Russia, India and China. To gain international permission, the U.S., United Kingdom and France would have to avoid outright vetoes from Russia and China. They would also need to win affirmative votes from a set of reliable allies including Australia, Luxembourg and South Korea. Interestingly, Rwanda currently sits on the Security Council through the end of the year.
3. What does intervention in Syria mean to U.S. efforts in its diplomatic engagement with the region and on the Israel-Palestine peace process? The removal of the Morsi government in Egypt was only the latest spasm of upheaval since the revolutionary tide of the 2011 Arab Spring. Across the Middle East–North Africa region there remains a great deal of turmoil. Even the region’s mature democracy, Turkey, has faced the problem of contested state authority and the problem of balancing secular and Islamist views in providing good governance to its 73 million citizens.
What most U.S. allies in the region want is strategic guidance from Washington. Yes, the United States has left Iraq and will eventually leave Afghanistan after an enormous sacrifice of treasure and a not entirely small one of blood as well. What nobody in the region wants is more chaos, which is what a disintegrating Syria will likely produce. Syria with Assad is bad and getting worse, but a post-Assad Syria will also be tough (see Yugoslavia and Iraq).
As to the peace process, I can only hope that Israelis and Palestinians are taking a look around the neighborhood and realizing that in all of this turbulence, it may be a good time to cut a deal. This is a naïve belief, of course, but one can always hope.
4. Amidst all of this complicated diplomacy, what can military intervention potentially accomplish? Last week, news from Washington was that the Pentagon was dusting off its playbooks from the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo. NATO bombed Serbia in the wake of the humanitarian catastrophe fomented by the Milosevic government to empty Kosovo of its Albanian majority. (Russia and China, holding a somewhat weaker political hand, chose to abstain on all Security Council votes regarding Kosovo.)
From March 23 to June 10, 1999, NATO forces subjected Serbia to an extensive bombing campaign. Every bridge across the Danube was dropped, most of the Serbian air force shot down, and not a single NATO serviceman was killed in action. Serbia gave up on its ethnic cleansing ambitions and lost a further chunk of what once was Yugoslavia. Today, 14 years after the last bomb fell, 5,500 troops from 31 countries maintain the peace there.
With this in mind, we need to ask if U.S. bombs, cruise missiles and drones change the calculus on the ground in Syria and will remove Assad from power. Certainly, they can make life much harder for the Syrian leadership. Israeli strikes against Syria have continued through its civil war, but are nothing new. The Israeli Air Force flattened Syria’s nuclear reactor in 2007 and Israel appears to be willing and able to hit Syria at will when it believes its interests to be threatened. It has not gone after leadership targets there, however. Israel is very tactical about how it deals with Syrian military power. It largely goes after the military capabilities that threaten it.
The U.S. has to consider if it seeks to go beyond the tactical aims embraced by Israel. If the goal is regime change, it may be facilitated by decapitation strikes not much different than it wages against Al Qaeda in Pakistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa. It can blast the air defense system, blow up Syria’s air force on the ground or shoot it down should it choose to fly, and sink the Syrian navy in port. These would all make life inconvenient for Assad, but we can’t count on U.S. or NATO bombs making Assad say “uncle.” Worse, they may produce “unintended consequences of armed intervention” stated in India, Germany and Brazil’s abstention on UNSCR 1973.
A final thought. Before Syria’s descent into chaos, I had hoped for reform from Bashar Assad. I hoped that his time in Europe, his British-Syrian wife, and medical training in London would add up to a secular leader ready to manage the sort of change Syria needed. Instead it got a kleptocrat jokingly said to be “the ophthalmologist without any vision.” Assad has clearly missed the chance for reform. Now we likely enter a new phase in which the decision on who rules Syria leaves Syrian hands.
Christopher Bronk is the Baker Institute fellow in information technology policy. He previously served as a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State on assignments in Mexico, overseas and Washington, D.C.