Obama’s Syria choices go from bad to worse By Philip Stephens

Obama’s Syria choices go from bad to worse

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Philip Stephens

Barack Obama is too much the lawyer and too little the leader. Leon Panetta, the former US defence secretary, has a memoir to sell, but in truth, his critique of the president treads familiar ground. Administration officials, serving and retired, have long muttered about an excess of caution in the Obama White House. For what it is worth, America’s allies voice the same gripe. They often have a point. So does the president.

At first glance, the siege of the Syrian border town of Kobani by the self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate has handed ammunition to the critics. Only a couple of weeks ago Mr Obama declared, albeit after protracted hesitations, that a US-led coalition would degrade and ultimately destroy the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or Isis. Now the Sunni extremists are threatening to seize control of a swath of territory on the Syrian-Turkish border.

The US is getting no help from its nominal ally Turkey. Ankara is at best ambivalent about the fate of the Kurds in Kobani. Recep Tayyip Erdogan points to their close association with the Kurdistan Workers’ party, or PKK. In his eyes, that makes them terrorists. He seems content to see them encircled by Sunni jihadis.

Mr Erdogan’s broader strategic objective is to use the plight of Kobani as a lever to draw US forces into the Syrian civil war: Ankara’s support for the coalition against Isis has been made conditional on Mr Obama’s agreement to deploy American forces against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus. Thus Turkey will take on Isis only if the US promises to fight Mr Assad. The supposed “third” force in Syria – the moderate opposition – lives on only as a figment of hopeful western imaginations.

So the US is being asked to fight on both sides of Syria’s civil war. Even by the outlandish standards of the Middle East this looks a bizarre proposition.

An increasingly complicated armed conflict is pitting rebel groups not only against the regime and its allies, but also against each other

Mr Erdogan’s stance is egregiously cynical, but the region now broadly divides between those the US counts as adversaries and those it can consider unreliable (and duplicitous) allies. Support for Washington’s objectives even within the formal coalition assembled against Isis is limited and conditional. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies are willing to constrain the Sunni extremists they have previously nurtured only in so far as this does not empower Iran’s Shia allies in Iraq and Syria.

Washington is everyone’s excuse. Hauling the US into the fight allows its supposed allies to avoid shouldering their own responsibilities for the region and to obscure multiple contradictions and hypocracies. Get Mr Obama to put boots on the ground and just about everyone will soon enough blame the US for the violent chaos that has become the story of the Middle East

Some, of course, say Mr Obama has himself to blame. The fatal hesitation came when he baulked at using military might to topple Mr Assad. By drawing, and then retreating from a red line over the use of chemical weapons, the president undercut decisively the US capacity to shape events.

Well, maybe. It is possible, just, that had Mr Assad been removed, Syria would have fallen into the hands of those now invisible moderates. It is at least as plausible, however, that the jihadis of Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra would have led the march to Damascus. No doubt that in turn would have brought calls for Mr Obama to redeploy in Syria the forces he withdrew from Iraq.

The president’s caution is in part a reaction to his predecessor’s mistakes. Whatever one thought at the time of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of the more obvious lessons of the conflicts was that initial military success is not a substitute for a strategy. What George W Bush, the former US president, had planned as a shock and awe demonstration of US power served in the end to present a painful lesson about its limits.

Mr Obama has taken an intelligent view of America’s place in the world. Perhaps there was a moment – during that brief interlude when the French railed against the “hyperpuissance” and commentators counted the US navy’s aircraft carriers – when the US could do what it pleased. If so, the kaleidoscope has since turned. The indispensable has become the insufficient power – and nowhere more than in the Middle East.
This is not to say that the cerebral president has played his hand well. Oddly, the world’s most powerful leader does have a blind spot about the exercise of power. Analysis has too often been the handmaid of paralysis. The critique that sticks is the one that says the US has been badly hobbled by Mr Obama’ s defensive deferral to the political advisers who fill the corridors of the White House. Mr Obama has disdained those in the foreign policy establishment who could have told him that inaction can impose a higher cost than action. He has failed to grasp the importance of perceptions. Foreign policy is not just about what this or that power could do, but whether others think it would actually do it.

It is much easier, though, to say the US approach to the Middle East lacks coherence than to set out what an effective strategy would look like. The cauldron of territorial and confessional rivalries and competing and overlapping allegiances does not allow for neat grand strategies.

 

Unless, that is, the west wants to start thinking about a Middle East in which Shia Iran rather than the Sunni autocracies of the Arab world provides the essential source of stability.