Opinion

Will O finally lead?

Better late than never? President Obama’s new tune on Syria policy is still marked by tones of equivocation.

With almost everyone agreed that the Damascus despot Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons against the Syrian people, it was hard for Obama to cling to one of his stalling routines: He now admits that Assad has crossed the “red line” Washington fixed two years ago. Obama has also promised to join a dozen other nations, including Britain and France, in arming anti-Assad rebels.

Yet he’s still telling us more about what he won’t do than about what he will. Arming the rebels is being “studied,” we’re told, a process that could take as long as one wants. We’re also told that the arms that may be supplied won’t be of a nature to dramatically alter the balance of power between Assad and his foes, and that the United States won’t provide training for rebels in the use of whatever weapons may (or may not) be supplied.

Obama’s admission that Assad has used chemical weapons is welcome, but he still has a long way to go before developing a credible policy on what is arguably the most critical international crisis at the moment.

A credible policy begins with the reassertion of US leadership as the key ingredient of a military-diplomatic solution to the problem. With Washington refusing to provide leadership, efforts by Arab and European nations to create a coalition of the willing to save the Syrian people have failed. Obama should show that he is now fully on board and prepared to throw America’s full weight behind an international initiative to end Assad’s reign.

Obama and his team should stop pretending that, in any international crisis, the United States faces only two options: full-scale invasion, à la Iraq in 2003, or doing nothing.

That claim is intellectually flawed and morally dishonest.

There is no need for a full-scale invasion of Syria by US troops. The anti-Assad camp in the civil war can field all the manpower needed. In fact, it is Assad who needs foreign troops, as illustrated by the presence of some 6,000 Hezbollah fighters and hundreds of Iranian “advisers.”

Right now, Assad has two key advantages:

First, Russia is ready to keep supplying him with all the weapons he needs, with Iran signing the checks. In contrast, arms supplies to rebels is sporadic at best.

Second is his monopoly on air power. He uses his air force, including helicopter gunships, to carpet-bomb rebel-held areas before his troops, now joined by Hezbollah fighters, appear on the battlefield.

The most effective way to help the rebels is to supply them with light, shoulder-held, surface-to-air missiles and to set up at least one no-fly zone where they could create a safe haven for themselves and some of the estimated 4 million people displaced inside Syria.

Yet this is precisely what the Obama administration says it won’t do.

The parrot-like reference to Iraq, especially by Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, is in bad taste if only because both men voted for US intervention in 2003. Worse still, the so-called Iraq syndrome is used to justify a dangerous abdication of US leadership across the board.

Tying one’s hands in advance is also bad politics. If the adversary knows that whatever you do won’t alter the balance of power in his disfavor, he has no incentive to change course. Why should Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Iran’s Ali Khamenei tell Assad that his time up, when Obama reassures them in advance that the United States is unwilling to do exactly the things that could change the course of the war?

At next week’s G-8 summit in Ulster, Obama has the chance to show that America is not practicing a pretend-and-dodge diplomacy. He should demand that the war in Syria be included in the summit agenda; this would force Putin to offer something more than diplomatic pirouettes, like the international conference that he sold to Kerry last month.

Today, the Syrian war is an international war: Russia, Iran and the part of the Lebanese government controlled by Hezbollah are directly involved in support of the regime. On the other side, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar are indirectly involved by sheltering, arming and financing the rebels.

Unless the United States takes sides and offers leadership, the latest moves from the Obama administration could prove too little too late.