Obama administration officials don’t think they have authorization to order U.S. troops to engage Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces even if President Obama was inclined to do so, a White House spokesman said Wednesday.
“It’s unclear to me exactly what sort of legal authority the president would have to do something like that,” Obama spokesman Josh Earnest said about suggestions that the U.S. strike Assad as well as the Islamic State.
“It’s also unclear exactly how that would have a positive impact on our efforts to degrade and ultimately [destroy] ISIL,” Earnest said. “First of all, how do you do that without harming innocent civilians? Second of all, I’m not sure exactly what legal authority the president would rely on to do something like that. And three: It seems like a slippery slope.”
Earnest also said it would be unclear at what point U.S. military engagement would stop.
That the U.S. “somehow stops short of a war against a sovereign nation that is being backed by Russia and Iran in a way that’s unclear to me, how exactly that is going to apply additional pressure against ISIL, which is the extremist organization that we obviously are quite concerned about,” he said.
Obama “is following that military advice, and is showing results,” he said. “Not as fast as we would like; it certainly hasn’t turned Syria into a Jeffersonian democracy that reflects the pluralism and diversity of that country.”
But entering another “ground war in the Middle East focused on removing the leader of a Muslim country — that didn’t turn out very well last time we tried that,” Earnest said, using the rationale the administration has relied on in approaching the Syrian civil war from the beginning.
As to whether Obama will meet with the 51 State Department employees who penned a dissent memo criticizing his handling of the Syrian conflict, Earnest said that is unlikely.
“I’m not aware of any sort of meeting like that,” he said. “I think it’s appropriate for the secretary of state to meet with individuals inside his own agency who have written the memo. But I don’t anticipate at this point that the president would meet with the authors of it.”
Kerry met with some of those State Department employees on Tuesday, but officials declined to give a detailed readout of that meeting.
