Syrian dictator Bashar Assad is this century’s preeminent war criminal. The man is a monster, bombing entire cities to smithereens and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process of routing his armed opponents. President Trump wanted to do something about it.
During a television appearance this week, Trump reminisced about how he wanted to send a missile straight on Assad’s forehead. “I would have rather taken him out. I had him all set,” he told Fox News. He added shortly after that his defense secretary at the time didn’t support the assassination attempt. “[James] Mattis didn’t want to do it. Mattis was against most of that stuff.” The entire episode reminds one of the Cold War period, when taking out a leader Washington thought was in the pocket of the Soviets was just another tactic of the CIA.
Normally, one has to take anything Trump says with a grain of salt. Quite frankly, he makes things up or exaggerates them on a regular basis. But the Assad assassination story has come up before. In Bob Woodward’s first book about the Trump presidency, the storied Washington Post reporter writes about an instance when Trump called Mattis on the phone and gave a half-order to drop some lead on Assad’s presidential palace after a particularly lethal chemical weapons attack against civilians. Mattis, according to Woodward’s sources, nodded his head and told the president he would “get right on it,” only to hang up the phone and tell a staffer by his side that there was no way the Defense Department would do anything of the sort. Assassinations are, after all, illegal (the United States is not at war with the Syrian government) and totally contrary to the official U.S. government policy.
In an ideal world, Assad would either be dead or sitting in the docket at the Hague being tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, rarely does the world shake up the way we want it to. Thanks in large part to Iran’s crack militia troops on the ground and Russian pilots in the air, Assad is safely in Damascus. The armed opposition that Washington, Western Europe, and the Gulf Arab States supported for years with funds, weapons, and intelligence is now jammed into the northwestern portion of Syria, essentially surrounded by pro-government troops to the south and the Turkish border to the north. In 2012, Washington insisted it was only a matter of time before Assad went the way of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi. Nearly a decade of brutal fighting later, those projections haven’t come to pass.
Would the world be a more noble place if Assad was killed by a U.S. airstrike? It’s difficult to argue otherwise. Yet, morality is only one dimension of statecraft. If Washington was concerned with morality, it wouldn’t have pumped arms to the Nicaraguan Contras, an armed band of criminals and misfits. Nor would the U.S. be bowing to Saudi royalty at every conceivable opportunity.
Statecraft, rather, is about taking the long game, debating the costs and benefits openly and honestly, and doing what is in the best interests of the U.S. Assassinating Assad may have ridden the world of a despot, but evidence that such an action would have made the civil war in Syria any less bloody is thin. Plus, who exactly would have taken Assad’s place? Assad’s wife, Asma? His brother, Maher? A Syrian army general who is just as depraved as Assad has been?
And let’s say the Syrian government folded like a house of cards after the head of the snake was cut off (an unlikely proposition). What would happen then? Very likely, the war would drag on as armed fighters attempt to make a thrust into Damascus, Aleppo, and every other part of the country the Assad regime had a grip on. Let’s not forget, most of the opposition fighters on the ground right now are extremists, not the flowery democrats-in-waiting some pundits and analysts in the Beltway insist they are.
We should thank Mattis for stopping Trump’s impulse on this specific question. The alternative to today’s reality is hardly any better.
