As pressure builds on the Trump administration to articulate a clear strategy for U.S. involvement in Syria, White House officials have attempted to straddle the line between supporting Syrian President Bashar Assad’s removal and opposing the commitment of American military forces to his ouster.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, Defense Secretary James Mattis, White House press secretary Sean Spicer and other administration officials have each tried their hand at explaining the new U.S. posture toward Syria in the four days since President Trump ordered a missile strike on an airfield controlled by the Assad regime.
Some have struggled to justify Trump’s newly aggressive footing in the context of his past insistence that the U.S. should not wander into other countries’ conflicts in general, and should avoid the Syrian civil war in particular. The occasionally tongue-tied Spicer opened up a fresh wound for the White House when he invoked Adolf Hitler’s use of chemical agents in Nazi concentration camps during an unsuccessful attempt to explain the thinking behind Trump’s response to the Assad regime’s chemical attack.
The president himself sought to end the confusion Tuesday evening when he told the New York Post that he had no plans to enter Syria militarily, despite the distressing nature of Assad’s chemical attack on civilians.
“We’re not going into Syria,” he said. “Our policy is the same — it hasn’t changed. We’re not going into Syria.”
Administration officials have consistently argued that Assad does not have a future as the ruler of Syria. But they have expressed vague and sometimes conflicting views on whether the U.S. should play a direct role in his removal and whether regime change has supplanted defeating the Islamic State as America’s primary goal in Syria.
“We will continue to push for a political process through which Syrians decide their future,” a White House official told the Washington Examiner when asked Tuesday to clarify whether the administration sees military intervention as Assad’s path out of power. “We strongly support the talks among Syrians convened by United Nations Special Envoy Staffan DeMistura in Geneva.”
The official said counterterrorism efforts would continue to dominate American activity in Syria.
“Our immediate priority and focus will be to defeat ISIS and to deny them and other terrorist groups safe havens from which they can plan and carry out attacks against us and our allies,” the official said.
Trump’s options in Syria echo those available to previous presidents who found themselves facing questions about far-away conflicts.
For example, Bill Clinton signed the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act when he confronted a belligerent Saddam Hussein during his second term, codifying the U.S. policy of supporting regime change in Iraq. But the legislation provided only for American support of groups within Iraq that wanted to oust Hussein on their own, and by the end of Clinton’s presidency, his official policy of regime change had done nothing to bring new leadership to Baghdad.
George W. Bush sought to bring regime change militarily in 2003 when he invaded Iraq with a coalition that quickly captured the Iraqi capital and drove Hussein from power. But his forceful response to the Iraqi government’s possession of chemical and other weapons proved costly, as it marred the U.S. in nearly a decade of conflict and destabilized the country. The Islamic State eventually cultivated major gains in the chaos.
Barack Obama attempted what amounted to a middle ground between those two approaches when he dabbled in the Libyan civil conflict in 2011. Facing what his administration described as a humanitarian crisis at the hands of Moammar Gadhafi, Obama secured UN backing to establish a no-fly zone and conduct airstrikes in Libya alongside a coalition but did not deploy the kind of conventional ground forces that comprised Bush’s regime change efforts. The result left Gadhafi dead and Libya ostensibly free after several months, and the Obama administration touted it as a victory.
However, the Libya intervention is now widely regarded as an abject failure due to the depths of chaos and violence into which the country descended shortly after the U.S. ended its military activity there. Without a sustained American presence, such as the one that characterized the years that followed the Iraq invasion, Libya grew into a failed state and terrorist safe haven after the U.S. intervention was over.
Trump protested his predecessors’ support for regime change during the presidential campaign, and his promise to spare Americans from another protracted conflict was appealing to Republicans who had grown disillusioned with the Bush doctrine.
His administration’s military strike against the Assad regime and frequent talk of Assad’s ouster has raised suspicions that he won’t heed the lessons of Clinton, Bush and Obama when it comes to Syria. And while his team has tried to thread the needle on a policy that somehow supports neither Assad nor his forced removal, Trump will soon face more questions about how he plans to avoid the mistakes that stained his predecessors’ legacies.
