We’ve done the polling on this. No one wants to hear that phrase any more than they do “shock and awe” or “mission accomplished.” So my administration simply repeats it robotically on every Sunday morning talk show. This convinces Americans that intervention in Syria means boots on the ground. Then we refer back to polls showing that Americans are leery of intervention in Syria on exactly the false terms we’ve laid out for them, to justify our non-interventionist policy. Please remember the elegance of this political trick the next time someone accuses us of incompetence.
True, this gambit hurt us a bit when we spent a few weeks last fall pretending that we were going to bomb Assad’s military installations, since we forced poor John Kerry to argue against our own propaganda before Congress. But it has served us quite well ever since. Reminding people of the Iraq War is a convenient way of getting them to forget about a humanitarian catastrophe which, absent any US soldiers, has claimed about a third the lives of that conflict in a third the time but not quite as many lives as the war in Congo. And why doesn’t anyone talk about Congo?
This would have been the ideal moment in my speech to mention the triumph of steadfast diplomacy over war. An earlier draft did indeed carry a reference to America’s multilateral effort to rid Syria of its chemical weapons, but since I wrote that draft, I’ve learned that Assad is keeping eight percent of his precursor stocks and that he’s only dismantled five out of 18 chemical weapons productions facilities, which means he can manufacturing toxic gas again someday if he likes. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has been very polite about not declaring this deal to be a dead-letter, but I hear it’s about to announce that Syria will miss its June deadline for the complete elimination of its chemical weapons program, a deadline which had been enshrined in one of two UN Security Council resolutions we managed to pass on Syria albeit with many Russian-built loopholes. Also, there are credible allegations that Assad is now dropping chlorine bombs on people.
History will bear witness to this missed deadline and to these chlorine bombs.
But I think it’s at least worth mentioning that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu counts this disarmament deal a success for Israel. And he hates me.
There were also those who advocated that training and arming Syria’s rebels might have made a difference had we done it earlier and more robustly. Such loose talk from people in offices in New York and Washington and my former cabinet is dangerous. The fact is, these rebels were wholly unknown to us for two years, then they were known to us as farmers and engineers incapable of fighting a conventional army. Now they’re known to us a bit, but not enough to be trusted with the kind of surface-to-air missiles Putin is sending to his rebels in Ukraine. Even a few missiles could stop or deter Assad’s barrel bombs, but it’s important to emphasize in this speech that nothing can stop those bombs because some faraway problems are just too inexorable to do anything about.
Excuses can seem a lot like solemn wisdom when delivered in just the right tone of voice.
That said, I am, as you know, a reasonable pragmatist devoid of the ideological trappings and tunnel vision that afflict my critics on the left and the right. So I’ll tell you what. Let’s compromise. Today I am asking Congress to authorize a $5 billion counterterrorism partnerships fund to help us kill the Al-Qaeda we missed with drones and JSOC teams and military occupations. Syria has quite a lot of Al-Qaeda and since no one wants to see American lives lost there defeating terrorism, we’ll use Syrian lives instead.
I will increase America’s support for the Syrian rebels best capable of fighting terrorists and give them just enough materiel to keep them from defeating the Assad regime. The rebels whom the CIA lethargically trained in Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon will be now lethargically trained by the Pentagon in Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon. They will be America’s newest, but wholly expendable, JSOCs in the Middle East. Everyone else in this country outsources, why can’t the commander-in-chief?
This limited and specific program of support will also ensure that the state institutions of Syria will be maintained because while US-trained rebels are busy fighting terrorists, Assad, Hezbollah, and Iran will consolidate more fallen terrain. They can then thank us later by getting down to the real business of negotiating a political solution to the conflict, which I still maintain is the best way forward for Syria even if both of its chief arbiters, Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi, became quitters. The mullahs will also be more amenable to singing a permanent deal on their nuclear program if we let them control most, but not all, of Syria.
Will a political solution work now that we’ve ironed out all the kinks? I’ll be honest. It’s 50/50. But there have been encouraging signs. The CIA put out feelers to Hezbollah a while back by sharing intelligence with it about radical Sunni groups in Lebanon. Iran’s President Rouhani personally told me just how much that meant to him when we had a brief phone chat in September.
Does this reflect a shift or change in my strategy toward Syria? You will read tomorrow in the Washington Post and the New York Times that I am making a “subtle” but “cautious” policy “adjustment.” I hope that many lazy journalists will point out that this decision I’ve taken is the yield of months of careful deliberation by a president who is not a cowboy but is deeply, almost religiously, wary of US involvement in other people’s civil wars. But it’s still, I hope they say, a sign of progress.
I also sincerely hope that the headlines of the articles that get written about this speech will more brazenly and disingenuously suggest that I’ve finally seen the light and am going to take the worst foreign policy crisis of my presidency seriously. This will buy me time with the annoying Syrian opposition and take the pressure off my friends in liberal think tanks and in the Democratic National Committee who are starting to get nervous.
A long-awaited formula for success? It is for me, and I’m president.
May God bless our men and women in uniform. And may God bless the United States of America!
