The lack of a coherent Syria policy has come back to bite the Obama administration in the form of hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring into Europe, putting pressure on Western countries to resettle them.
The United States is not immune to the pressure. The widely published image of a drowned Syrian toddler lying face-down on a Turkish beach has prompted administration officials to say they’ll look for ways to take more refugees from that country in spite of a tough vetting process that has so far allowed only about 1,500 to come to the United States.
But even the administration, which has been criticized for its approach to Syria’s civil war, admits that the best way to solve the refugee problem is to solve the political problem causing it.
“Our primary goal when speaking about Syrian refugees is to get them home again,” a senior State Department official told reporters on Wednesday.
But achieving that goal is hampered by the fact that neither the United States nor its European allies are willing to confront the major source of violence that has displaced more than half of Syria’s 18 million people: the regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad. Meanwhile, the U.S.-led coalition’s efforts against the Islamic State have focused on Iraq, leaving the extremist group free to gain ground in Syria.
President Obama has been calling for Assad to go for four years, but also has repeatedly insisted that there’s no military solution to Syria’s problems. And his administration’s efforts at a peaceful solution have relied heavily on the goodwill of two countries seen as the main forces fueling the problem: Russia and Iran.
“He has a huge blind spot about Syria,” Benjamin Weinthal, a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said of Obama. “It’s also a great source of embarrassment for his administration.” Syria is widely seen as having been sacrificed to Obama’s goal of achieving a nuclear deal with Iran. Tehran is Assad’s main patron, and administration officials have been reluctant to pick a fight over his fate during the two years of talks that culminated in the July 14 agreement. Now that a deal has been reached, the concern is that Iran will be financially bolstered by sanctions relief and emboldened by the administration’s desire not to threaten its implementation.
Even the president’s former advisers on Syria have criticized this approach. One of them, Frederic Hof, called it a “pantomime of outrage” in a widely-quoted Aug. 21 essay in Foreign Policy magazine.
In a Sept. 8 essay in the same magazine, Hof wrote that “those ‘damned pictures’ might oblige [the U.S.] to offer real protection to defenseless Syrian civilians — even if it does so furtively, fearfully, and grudgingly.
“Having decided to leave millions of Syrians subject to barrel bombs, starvation sieges, mass terrorism, and collective punishment so as not to offend Iran, the administration (or more precisely, Europe) now reaps the whirlwind of hundreds of thousands of refugees. Yet instead of changing course, it whines about how much worse things would have been had other decisions been taken,” wrote Hof, now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
But the intense pressure has not swayed the White House into changing its basic policy on Syria. Though Secretary of State John Kerry met last week with members of Congress to discuss ways the United States could take more of the hundreds of thousands of refugees straining European resources, the administration has no plans to change its basic approach to Syria.
“Our view is that we need a diplomatic solution in Syria, and that if those advocating for sending more troops on the ground into that country — that’s just not a position the president holds,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz told reporters on Wednesday.
But many Syrians want to see Washington take some kind of military action against Assad, if only to establish a “safe zone” within Syria so displaced people need not flee the country.
“I think the top concern of the Syrian-American community and diaspora … is protecting civilians from barrel bombs,” Omar Hossino, spokesman for the Syrian American Council, told the Washington Examiner.
Syrian rebel groups also forcefully oppose the administration’s desire to give Tehran a role in solving their country’s political crisis, given the fact that Iran’s support for Assad has been the main element keeping the conflict alive.
Weinthal, who has spoken extensively with Syrians displaced by the conflict, says “the refugees know who to blame” for their plight.
Nicole Duran contributed to this report.
This article appears in the Sept. 14 edition of the Washington Examiner magazine.
