Foreign-policy and national-security experts say the deluge of Obama-administration leaks about the impending Syrian strike is tipping the United States’ hand before the first missile is fired.
Sources identified as anonymous “administration officials” have told reporters what kind of targets will be hit, which weapons will be used, and that the strike will be limited to two or three days.
“It serves the president incredibly poorly to be broadcasting these details,” said Kori Schake, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
“It’s telling the Syrians what we are not going to do,” she said.
It also unnecessarily reveals the duration of the US-led effort to punish Bashar al-Assad’s regime, said Elliott Abrams, senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The leaks “assured Assad that if he holds on” the strike will be over in a day or two, Abrams said.
In Washington, Sen. John McCain blasted leaks about “when strikes are going to take place, what’s going to be used.
“If I were Bashar Assad, I think I would declare tomorrow a snow day and keep everybody from work,” he said. “These leaks are just crazy.”
Abrams, a senior diplomat in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, said the leaks appeared designed to reassure possible critics who feared a more ambitious war plan.
“The administration, I guess, thought it more important to try to gain public and international support, and the only way to do that was to announce how little it plans to do,” he said.