President Obama, in a wide-ranging interview for the cover of the Atlantic magazine, said he is “very proud” of his decision not to follow through with his red-line threat in Syria, what he calls the moment he broke with the “Washington playbook.”
“I’m very proud of this moment,” he told the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. “The overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom and the machinery of our national security apparatus had gone fairly far.”
At that moment, all the forces of Washington and international pressure were bearing down on him to launch airstrikes, he said. Instead of giving in, he said he hit the “pause button,” a decision he knew would cost him politically but one he believed was in the country’s best interest.
“The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America’s credibility was at stake. And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would cost me politically,” he said. “And the fact that I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America’s interest, not only with respect to Syria but also with respect to our democracy, was as tough a decision as I’ve made — and I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make.”
The Atlantic piece chronicles all the internal pressures the president was facing at the moment, that both Secretary of State John Kerry and the current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power had spent months trying to convince him to do more to intervene in Syria. Power, one of the most interventionist-minded advisers in his kitchen cabinet who was serving as a senior national security adviser at the time, had spent months urging him to arm Syria’s rebels.
Power was the author of the 2002 book A Problem From Hell, which excoriated a succession of U.S. presidents for their failures to prevent genocide.
But Obama was able to resist the internal and external pressure, and in doing so, developed his own more isolationist doctrine: that he shouldn’t put American troops at great risk in order to prevent humanitarian disasters unless those disasters pose a direct security threat to the United States, according to the article.
He once even snapped at Power who sometimes argued with him in front of other National Security Council officials.
“Samantha, enough, I’ve already read your book,” he reportedly said during one particularly intense exchange.
When it comes to deciding against launching airstrikes in Syria, Obama’s doubts had been growing along with the public and international pressure as intelligence reports came in confirming that President Bashar Assad had used chemical weapons against his own people, an undeniable crossing of his red-line threat.
As was reported in the weeks following the decision against bombing Syrian regime targets, late on a Friday afternoon, Obama asked Chief of Staff Denis McDonough to take a walk with him on the South Lawn of the White House. McDonough was his aide who was most averse to U.S. military intervention, and someone who “thinks in terms of traps,” according to the article.
During their hour-long conversation, Obama told McDonough he was worried that Assad would place civilians as “human shields” around obvious targets. He also feared that the mission was misguided, that U.S. bombs would not target the chemical-weapons depots because that would send poisonous gas into the air, but would instead strike military units that had delivered the weapons.
More broadly he was tired of Washington’s tendency to “drift” toward war in Muslim countries and he still felt “jammed” by the Pentagon for convincing him to ramp up troops in Afghanistan four years earlier, according to the article.
When he and McDonough got back from their walk, Obama told the rest of his national security team to stand down, that he planned to refer the matter to Congress for a vote. Aides, including National Security Adviser Susan Rice, were shocked and expressed concern about long-term damage to America’s credibility.
But Obama calmly stood by the decision. Along with several other factors, the president said he simply felt that executive power, when it comes to national security issues, needed some checks and balances.
“This falls in the category of something that I had been brooding on for some time,” he said. “I had come into office with the strong belief that the scope of executive power in national security issues is very broad, but not limitless.”
