Regime's Survival Seen as Example of America's Inability to Steer Events From a Distance

Regime's Survival Seen as Example of America's Inability to Steer Events From a Distance

Dec. 31, 2013 1:32 p.m. ET

In the early days of the Syrian rebellion, U.S. intelligence agencies made a prediction: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's days were numbered, an assessment repeated publicly by President Barack Obama and top U.S. intelligence officials.

Behind the scenes, though, U.S. intelligence services had already begun to pick up indications that this long-held assumption was wrong.

That winter and early spring, U.S. and Israeli spy agencies received intelligence that Iran and the Assad regime were pressing the reluctant leader of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon to commit to sending his fighters into Syria en masse, current and former U.S. officials said.

The resulting Hezbollah surge to bolster Mr. Assad represented a turning point in the Syria conflict, giving the Syrian leader enough strength to survive, though not enough to prevail.

U.S. intelligence agencies and administration speechwriters quickly dialed back pronouncements about Mr. Assad's impending departure from public remarks.

Now, at the end of 2013, Syria stands as a tale of mismatched commitments, and an example of America's inability to steer events from a distance. In many ways, Syria as it was known before simply doesn't exist any longer, U.S. officials say. Its place has been taken by a shattered state riven into sectarian enclaves, radicalized by war and positioned to send worrisome ripples out across the Middle East for years to come, say current and former officials.

In fact, U.S. officials think the chances of steering the outcome have shrunk dramatically. The intelligence assessments that once showed Mr. Assad on the verge of defeat now say he could remain in power for the foreseeable future in key parts of the country bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean coast. The U.S. doesn't think he will be able to retake the whole country again, U.S. intelligence agencies believe. Areas outside his control are fracturing into warring enclaves along ethnic and sectarian lines, abutting a new al Qaeda-affiliated haven that sweeps from Syria into Iraq.

The civil war could last another decade or more, based on a Central Intelligence Agency analysis of the history of insurgencies that recently departed Deputy Director Michael Morell privately shared with lawmakers, according to congressional officials.

Through it all, U.S. intelligence and military officers watched the evolution with alarm from the sidelines, at least one step behind developments on the ground. The White House was unwilling to commit significant resources to back opposition fighters, wary of getting drawn into another conflict in the region or inadvertently backing violent extremists. Wary U.S. intelligence officials told policy makers that a cohesive, well-organized opposition didn't exist and was unlikely to take shape even if the U.S. made a more substantial investment, officials involved in the deliberations said.

Meanwhile, Mr. Assad's key backers—Iran and Hezbollah—spared no expense to save their ally, U.S. officials say.

Mr. Obama's limited covert engagement in Syria has been part of a deliberate effort to avoid further entanglement in the Middle East and take the U.S. off a war footing, senior U.S. officials say.

Yet Arab leaders have bluntly warned their American counterparts that Syria presents a conundrum in which the U.S. must either pay now or pay even more later, when al Qaeda fully establishes itself in Syria's ungoverned territory.

In 2011 and the first half of 2012, White House officials thought the rebels could score a quick victory, either by killing Mr. Assad or forcing him to flee the country. At the time, senior U.S. officials told visiting Arab delegations that Mr. Assad could be out "within months," according to meeting participants. Some Arab officials who attended the meetings said they scoffed at what they saw as American naiveté about Mr. Assad's survival skills.

The first hints that those long-held assumptions were wrong came in the second half of 2012, when the CIA realized that the Syrian military was starting to change its tactics with help from Iranian advisers, who had cracked the opposition's battlefield communications.

Next came the Hezbollah push.

U.S. intelligence officials misjudged the extent to which Hezbollah was prepared to double down in support of Mr. Assad.

U.S. intelligence initially showed that Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, resisted repeated appeals from Iranian leaders, including the commander of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, for sending Hezbollah fighters in large numbers into Syria to reinforce the Assad regime, current and former U.S. officials say.

U.S. spy agencies believed Hezbollah's leadership at the time was riven by internal debate, worried that intervening in an uprising next door would be "bad for the brand" and spark a backlash at home, according to an official briefed on the intelligence.

Current and former U.S. officials briefed on the intelligence say Mr. Nasrallah only agreed to the deployments after he received a personal appeal from Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who made clear that Tehran expected Hezbollah to act decisively. Iranian and Hezbollah officials had no immediate comment.

Pressure was mounting on Mr. Obama, too.

Mr. Obama had balked at providing arms to the opposition in 2012. But in April, he secretly authorized a small CIA program to provide weapons to hand-picked moderate fighters in limited quantities, a strategy designed to reduce the risk that they could fall into the hands of Islamists.

The objective wasn't so much to help the rebels win as to assuage allies who thought the U.S. wasn't engaged, administration officials privately acknowledge. Mr. Obama's decision to authorize the program was meant to "relieve pressures and buy time," one senior official said.

U.S. military officials, who sought to do more to help the rebels, saw the covert arming plan as flawed because they believed the effort was too small to make a difference. They argued that the cautious approach to arming such small numbers of rebels actually would handicap efforts to stand up a viable opposition.

The program, at the time, was meant to turn out between 50 and 100 new fighters a month. Overwhelmingly outgunned, they would be up against thousands of Hezbollah fighters in Syria, and thousands more trained and equipped by Iran and al Qaeda.

Within the CIA, many analysts, including Mr. Morell, agreed the odds were bad, given the mismatch in commitments, officials said. Mr. Nasrallah had gone all in; the same couldn't be said of the Americans, these officials said.

In Capitol Hill briefings about the program, Mr. Morell's doubts were contagious, according to congressional officials. Lawmakers were split, with some pressing for an all-in strategy and others warning against any provisions of weapons.

When deeply skeptical lawmakers pressed the administration on what their game plan was, Vice President Joe Biden intervened, arguing that the U.S. had to have "skin in the game" in order to have credibility, according to a former U.S. official. Secretary of State John Kerry and other officials argued that the training and arming effort, though limited, was needed because regional partners like Saudi Arabia were about to "walk away from us," another official said.

By mid-summer, U.S. spy agencies had watched the size of Hezbollah's deployments in Syria grow, and concluded that the war's momentum was shifting in favor of the Assad regime, though the U.S. didn't think his forces would be strong enough to retake the country.

Secular rebels wouldn't get U.S. arms for months, and some CIA operatives regularly expressed frustration about what they saw as the meager amount of support provided, U.S. officials said. They had initially pushed to provide weapons to the rebels, but when the White House green-lighted such a small-scale program, some operators in the field didn't understand what the point was. A former U.S. official quoted these operatives as asking, "What the hell are we doing? For what long-term goal?"

The U.S.'s caution didn't sit well with Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi prince and intelligence official who had become the leader of an international effort to aid the rebels.

If Iran and Hezbollah prevailed in shoring up Mr. Assad, the Saudis warned the White House, they would be emboldened to think "they can walk on water," and take actions elsewhere that could jeopardize Saudi security, one diplomat close to the Saudis said.

The tensions grew worse after Mr. Obama prepared for, and then backed away from, a military strike at Syria after its forces mounted what officials say was a large-scale chemical weapons attack on Aug. 21.

The administration's decision to avoid military strikes and subsequent negotiations over ending Syria's chemical weapons program gave Mr. Assad considerable staying power, administration officials say. Mr. Kerry privately acknowledged to allies that the administration's decision to not retaliate militarily for the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack hurt the morale of the opposition, which had anticipated a strike. He called this a "non-strike effect," according to a senior administration official.

Saudi officials fumed at the U.S. for failing to launch strikes against Mr. Assad over the chemical weapons attack, and Prince Bandar threatened to scale back cooperation with the CIA.

The frustration was mutual. In private meetings with U.S. officials, Mr. Kerry singled out Prince Bandar as "the problem," complaining about his conduct, according to meeting participants.

Prince Bandar's exasperation with the U.S. prompted him to "step outside the umbrella" provided by the CIA's arming-and-training program and to work with other opposition groups, according to Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, who recently met with Prince Bandar.

A former senior Obama administration official said Saudi leaders misread U.S. sentiment. The White House, the former official said, had no obligation to come to the rescue "when they picked a fight they couldn't win."

After Mr. Obama's decision not to strike in response to the chemical weapons attack, the U.S. learned that Russian, Iranian, and Chinese officials were discussing how weak the U.S. now looked on the international stage, said one former official briefed on the intelligence.

Now, some senior Obama administration and Pentagon officials say the window of opportunity for strengthening the moderate opposition may have closed. Once Syria's chemical weapons have been fully removed, "the pressure on Assad to leave will be diminished," said one senior administration official.

A longtime American diplomat in the region said that, for now, it looks like Messrs. Assad, Nasrallah and Soleimani have "won".

Though the White House says it still believes the Syrian leader must go, some senior administration officials now privately talk about Mr. Assad staying for the foreseeable future and voice regret about the decision, in August 2011, to call for him to step aside.

Many Syrian opposition leaders blame U.S. inaction for the decline in moderate ranks. "Lack of U.S. military support for the moderates is directly responsible for the rise of the extremists," said moderate opposition leader Burhan Ghaloun.

Some administration officials say, in retrospect, the White House could either have been more supportive of the opposition or more up front about its reluctance to get more involved. "We weren't consciously bluffing," a senior defense official said, "but we weren't committing either."

Write to Adam Entous at adam.entous@wsj.com and Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com