So, President Obama has farmed out his Syria policy to Russia and the United Nations. How’s that likely to go?
Ambassadors of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council met Wednesday behind closed doors. Moscow reportedly gave Washington a super-secret detailed plan to oversee a “voluntary” Syrian abandonment of its vast cache of chemical weapons.
Moscow had already nixed the French plan for rapid Syrian disclosure and swift, verified destruction of the weapons — with a failure to cooperate resulting in punitive measures, including military action.
Of course, Russia’s spent the 2½ war years protecting and arming the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. It’s not about to forsake him now. (Indeed, it’s bolstering Syria’s air defenses as you read this, just in case airstrikes come back on the table.)
And the whole initiative to disarm Syria by diplomatic means is essentially Moscow’s gambit, so naturally Russia is going to insist on calling the tune.
Indeed, the first hurdle, which could easily derail the whole thing, is Vladimir Putin’s demand that the West promise to take any military option off the table before Syria does a thing.
For now, Team Obama’s looking to finesse that deal-breaker. The president has sent Secretary of State John Kerry to Geneva to meet the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, today. They’ll attempt to balance Moscow’s tendency to “trust” Assad with Western demands to “verify.” Talks will last until Saturday at least.
Moscow’s cold-calculated interests (keeping Assad in power) may coincide with Washington’s politics (trending against a Syria strike), so a compromise formula may be found. Or not.
But even if Lavrov and Kerry succeed, they’ll next need to go to the UN Security Council to translate their principled agreement to a binding resolution. Haggling there will take weeks, or even months; it always does.
By then, any remaining trace of American enthusiasm for striking Assad will likely dissipate.
Still, assume the magic formula for a credible arms dismantling is eventually found — what then?
The track record of UN-supervised dismantling of weapons of mass destruction is at best mixed, even when backed by strong Security Council mandate (which is unlikely in this case.)
For years, North Korea kept getting busted for cheating on UN and International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. It finally decided to bolt out, and continue its nuclear and missile programs without supervision. Now it has a whole arsenal to make trouble with.
Similarly, Iran continues to play bait and switch with IAEA inspectors; it’s now perhaps months away from being “nuclear capable.”
Yes, a Libyan dictator gave up his WMDs, but you can see why Assad might ask himself: Where is Col. Khadafy now?
After Iraq’s defeat in the 1991 Kuwait war, the Security Council set up complex inspection mechanisms to supervise the dismantling of Saddam’s WMDs (Yes, he had them, and he’d used them.)
But Iraqi obfuscation and endless friction between Saddam and UN inspectors raised so much tension that the West eventually resorted to war, ending the inspection stalemate after a dozen agonizing years. (True, Saddam had evidently gotten rid of his WMDs after all — even as he bluffed still having them to deter attacks from enemies like Iran.)
Obama could avoid such a diplomatic slippery slope. Give the Russians some UN playing time — days, not weeks — and then declare the diplomatic solution dead. Then change the “calculus,” as Obama vowed he would if Assad crossed his red line, and launch a military strike that inflicts real pain.
Remember, the big game is still ahead of us. Assad’s ally, Iran, is watching very carefully. If Obama’s Syrian red line, already painfully pink, winds up watered down to nothing, Tehran will assume that it has nothing to worry about in its nuke pursuit.
Also, US failure to stop Assad would all but force Israel — which remains determined to prevent Iran from reaching nuclear capability — to act on its own.
Ending Syria’s chemical threat without having to fire a shot is a nice little day-dream. But America needs to wake up, because the end game here isn’t merely being bogged in endless diplomacy, compromising the ideals Obama so eloquently talked about Tuesday night. If not cut short, this sideshow could well lead us to a much uglier and wider Mideast war.