President Obama’s fast-fading Syrian red line is raising eyebrows across the Mideast, where he completed a mostly successful visit yesterday.
Was an American line crossed this week? Were chemical weapons used in Syria? Obama says America is still studying it, but for now he seems to trust the case to the United Nations.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says he’ll investigate. Obama, who clearly doesn’t want to get involved in the Syrian bloodbath, is plainly praying the UN will get him off the hook.
On Wednesday, Syria’s UN ambassador, Bashar Jaafari, asked Ban to form a team of experts to investigate if “armed terrorist groups” used chemical weapons in the outskirts of Aleppo a day earlier. The Syrian opposition contends that it was Bashar al-Assad’s army that used the weapons of mass destruction.
Ban has said that he’d send a team as soon as possible. And while he’s moving fast (at least for the UN), no one expects his experts to arrive in Syria very soon. Damascus will hold them off until it can alter the crime scene to “prove” that, as they contend, the rebels used chemicals to provoke outside intervention.
At a Wednesday news conference in Israel, Obama said that we don’t have conclusive evidence of chemical use — but that it would be a “game changer.” This in fact is a bit softened from his past threats, which more clearly hinted at intervention if Assad were to go chemical.
Israeli officials, including Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, said in TV interviews that Israel has evidence of a chemical attack. But later in the week, Washington officials indicated that no chemical weapons were used.
Where’s the confusion?
According to some reports, US intelligence has determined that chlorine indeed was used in Aleppo, but chlorine may not technically be a chemical weapon, like nerve gas or blistering agents.
It depends what the meaning of “is” is.
Let’s look back a bit: Last August Obama first defined his Syrian red line as a point when “we see a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.”
Since then, Syria has moved a lot of chemical weapons. Yes, the Assads claim that they’re only moving the arms to ensure they stay secure — and we chose to believe them. But some analysts believe the tyrant is moving his most dangerous weapons to prepare them for use.
Either way, Obama conspicuously dropped the “moving around” part, redefining the red line as chemical “use.”
But this week the British and French UN ambassadors wrote to Ban: “We wish to bring to your attention allegations of use of chemical weapons in Homs” on Dec. 23. Did the Syrian army, in addition to this week’s suspected incident, use chemical arms as early as three months ago?
Chemical arms, often described as “the poor man’s nuke,” are very effective at mass killing in urban areas. With so many shady players on all sides of the Syrian civil war, the fear is that these toys, amassed by the Assad family for decades, may fall in the hands of the world’s worst terrorists.
But Obama says that it’s a problem “for the entire world,” even as the Security Council remains divided over Syria, and will likely debate Ban’s conclusions (when he finally forms them) forever.
Obama’s Mideast trip was a shiny diplomatic success. Yesterday, he even managed to score a major coup by getting Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Recep Tayyep Erdogan to talk on the phone and renew ties between Israel and Turkey, which broke off three years ago.
But when a well-orchestrated welcome event at Ben Gurion Airport Wednesday called on him to follow a red tape on the ground to a nearby mic, Obama joked, pointing to Netanyahu: “He’s always talking to me about red lines.”
Obama may not like it, but when he repeats, in Israel and Jordan, his promise to the world that America won’t allow Iran to go nuclear and stresses that he never “bluffs,” he draws an American red line.
But the “pinker” his Syrian line gets, the less anyone in the region will trust him on Iran. And as trust fades, all of Obama’s rhetoric and diplomatic skills will fade with it.
Twitter: @bennyavni