Syria is a bloody mess. Its cities lie in ruins. Its antiquities have been destroyed. And the Syrian leader continues to kill his own people. The death toll may be as high as a half million people. Some 10 million Syrians have been displaced. Reporters working there have described it as “hell on earth” and the images they’ve provided support their portrayal.
It’s hard to imagine how things could be ghastlier. And yet, if not for a stealth nighttime attack a decade ago, the situation today would almost certainly have been worse. Syria might well have been a young nuclear power.
On Sept. 6, 2007, Israeli fighter jets screamed through the skies of western Syria to drop their payloads on the al-Kibar nuclear facility and end, at least temporarily, the secret nuclear program of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. The buildings that housed Syria’s budding nuclear efforts, unknown to the world, had been the focus of a mad, behind-the-scenes diplomatic scramble for several months, as the Israelis tried to enlist U.S. support for the pre-emptive strike.
George W. Bush’s national security team was divided. Vice President Dick Cheney urged the president to send U.S. fighters to join their Israeli counterparts. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates held something close to the opposite view. He not only warned against the U.S. joining its key ally for the attack, he urged the president to threaten a public denunciation of Israel, and the inevitable fracturing of the alliance, if the planned strikes were carried out. The likely outcome, Gates argued, would be a regional war. The CIA weighed in, confirming Israeli assessments about the nature of the facility. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice echoed the skepticism from Gates, worried that U.S. participation in the attack—even merely backing it—could imperil sensitive diplomatic talks on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and another top priority, engagement with North Korea on its own nuclear program.
Why would a strike in Syria threaten the six-party talks meant to rein in North Korean nuclear activity? Israeli intelligence assessed that North Korea had helped Syria build the facility—a crucial finding later confirmed by U.S. intelligence agencies. It resembled the nuclear weapons facilities at Yongbyon, and North Korean scientists were photographed at the building in Syria. Rice and her team wanted to continue diplomacy with North Korea—a reward for Pyongyang in itself—despite an understanding that the DPRK was engaged in proliferation activities that violated the terms of all previous agreements.
Bush found a middle ground. The United States wouldn’t oppose the Israeli strikes but it wouldn’t help, either. The buildings were demolished and the Syrian regime quietly cleaned up evidence from the site. Nonetheless, the IAEA later concluded that al-Kibar was “very likely” a nuclear facility. Assad’s government accused Israel of demolishing an empty military warehouse; the Israelis to this day have never confirmed their role in eliminating the facility.
The New York Times broke the news of the attack and the nature of the facility six weeks after it took place. And five years after that, The New Yorker published an extraordinary report by David Makovsky.
At the time of the attack, it was widely seen as an effort to send a message to Iran, signaling that the Israelis wouldn’t hesitate to launch pre-emptive strikes against rogue state nuclear efforts. Such analysis, while accurate, overshadowed the practical effects of the attack on al-Kibar. While the facility was in the early stages of construction, there was little dispute among experts about the reason for its existence. A CIA “red team” analysis concluded, “If it’s not a nuclear reactor, then it’s a fake nuclear reactor,” according to one U.S. official who described the findings to Makovsky. It wasn’t a fake nuclear reactor.
The strikes on al-Kibar haven’t gotten much attention in the debates about Syria policy over the past decade. That’s understandable as it relates to the Bush administration. There wasn’t much Syrian policymaking in the final year of the Bush presidency, and the details of the attacks remained secret. Beyond that, Gates was wrong about his predicted regional wars, and Rice was still pursuing diplomacy on the peace process with North Korea.
The Obama administration swept into office determined to give Assad a fresh look. Barack Obama re-established diplomatic ties with Syria that Bush had suspended after the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, sending an ambassador to Damascus for the first time in years. Ambassador Robert Ford presented his papers to Assad on Jan. 27, 2011, just as Assad was beginning to put down protests in the streets. Months into Assad’s brutal campaign of repression, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held out hope that the Syrian dictator could be a reasonable and responsible actor. “Many members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer,” Clinton said on March 27, 2011. Her comments badly undercut the moderate Syrian opposition and gave a boost to Assad.
Assad’s massacres eventually became too much for Obama administration officials to ignore and the world was treated to an endless series of meaningless threats and expressions of “grave concerns.” Obama would not act in Syria because he believed that doing so would jeopardize the top foreign policy priority of his presidency, the Iran nuclear deal.
In his perspicacious look at the fraught relationship between the U.S. and Iran, The Iran Wars, Jay Solomon reports that the Obama administration passed on military action to punish Assad’s crossing Obama’s “red line” on chemical weapons because doing so might threaten negotiations with Iran. “At the eleventh hour, the administration inexplicably made a U-turn and used the Syrian conflict to increase its engagement with Iran and Russia, Assad’s principal backers,” Solomon writes. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry started talks with Vladimir Putin on a deal that would get rid of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles, an agreement that would provide “Assad a new lease on life.” Solomon continued: “Iranian officials briefed on talks with the United States in the summer of 2013 said Tehran made it clear to the American delegation that the nuclear negotiations would be halted if the United States went ahead with its attack on Assad.”
Susan Rice is one of many Obama administration officials who have touted both deals, boasting that the administration accomplished these things without turning to the military option. Rice has promised that the Iranians will not produce nuclear weapons and she boasted earlier this year that the Obama administration was “able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile.”
Said Rice: “We were able to find a solution that didn’t necessitate the use of force that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria, in a way that the use of force would never have accomplished.”
Never?
I suspect in 20 years, we’ll understand that the attack on al-Kibar did more to thwart the WMD efforts of a state than any of the Obama administration’s diplomacy.
