U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley was hopping mad in the U.N. Security Council chamber last week. Addressing her colleagues on the topic of Syria and the ongoing Assad government bombardment of the Eastern Ghouta enclave, she pointed the finger at Russia for failing to enforce a 30-day humanitarian cease-fire that Moscow had voted for weeks earlier. She concluded with an ominous message: “When the international community consistently fails to act,” Haley remarked, “there are times when states are compelled to take their own action.” In case one believed Haley was an outlier, Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo shares a similarly hawkish inclination on the Assad problem, having lobbied for a more extensive air campaign against the Syrian regime in 2013.
While the ambassador did not specify what she meant by “action,” the use of military force against the Syrian government is likely at the top of her list. This is beyond unfortunate, because U.S. military action would be both an unconstitutional use of force and a military operation guided by a humanitarian impulse rather than a sober analysis of U.S. interests. And it ignores the reality on the ground, which is far more intractable than interventionists make it out to be.
Outside of an imminent attack on the United States conducted by the Assad regime — an unlikely scenario — only Congress can authorize military force against Syrian government targets. None of the currently used Authorizations for the Use of Military Force can be stretched further to include attacks on the Assad regime. The Syrian government is neither a state sponsor of al Qaeda or in any way connected to the seminal event that spurred the 2001 AUMF in the first place: the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. And it certainly is not a direct national security threat to the United States.
The only way the Trump administration could execute an intervention, as Haley threatened, is if the American people’s elected representatives in Congress debate the matter and vote in the affirmative. The decision on whether to take the U.S. into a war is for the legislative branch to decide, not the president, and certainly not the U.S. ambassador or any Cabinet member.
Putting the important legal question aside, there are critical strategic and operational reasons for Washington to refrain from further intervening in Syria.
Advocates of such an approach would like all of us to believe that a hypothetical military intervention against Assad would be similar to, if not nearly identical to, the 1995 NATO bombing of Serbian forces in Bosnia, another case of then-President Bill Clinton trying to do good rather than employing military power to secure vital U.S. interests. The logic goes something like this: Just like U.S. and NATO aircraft targeted Bosnian Serb units to break the siege of Sarajevo and compel Slobodan Milosevic to negotiate, Washington could force Bashar Assad to not only suspend his five-year campaign of collective punishment in Ghouta, but also scare him into negotiating his own removal from power.
What these same proponents conveniently fail to mention is that this is a best case scenario. And best-case scenario’s rarely come to pass in the real world. War plans drawn up in the inner corridors of the Pentagon are largely irrelevant after the first shots are fired and the first mishap or unanticipated challenge occurs. It is very easy for armchair analysts inside the Beltway to put forth antiseptic recommendations and talk as if the U.S. can employ tomahawk missiles and airstrikes to force through regime change. Yet as the last 16 years should have taught us already, it is not at all simple to implement those recommendations in real time. Indeed, in most cases, the very strategy they rely is faulty at its core, guided more by an urge to do something in the moment rather than by what is smart policy over the long-term.
Syria is a much more complicated battlespace than Bosnia ever was. Because Russian and Iranian troops are on the ground in support of the Assad regime and are stationed on many of the same bases, any U.S. military action on Syria’s military facilities, ammo dumps, checkpoints, or command-and-control nodes have a decent chance of killing Russians and Iranians as well. Moscow and Tehran, who have invested a tremendous amount of financial, military, and diplomatic support into Assad’s preservation since the civil war began seven years ago, are unlikely to respond to the deaths of their personnel in ways beneficial for the United States. Washington didn’t have to worry about such contingencies in Bosnia, where Milosevic was derided as a pariah. Assad, too, is a pariah, but a pariah with foreign sponsors who have shown in words and deeds that the Syrian regime’s survival is a critical national security interest to both.
Do the benefits of preventing Ghouta from being recaptured by the Syrian army outweigh the costs of a great power crisis between the U.S. and Russia over a destroyed and bankrupt piece of real estate in the Arab world?
The American public does not seem to think so. And it is not difficult to see why: They rightly look at Syria as a highly combustible mix of ethnically-based armed factions, al Qaeda affiliated fighters, Iranian-sponsored Shiite paramilitary forces, and foreign troops from Turkey, Iran, Russia competing over the remnants of a broken state. Conducting a humanitarian intervention in Ghouta as Haley has threatened would deepen Washington’s involvement in precisely that conflict, diverting the U.S. military’s unlimited resources away from rising powers like China, more strategically important to the United States than anything at stake in Syria.
We’re living in an increasingly competitive world. Washington is still the superpower atop the pyramid, but other countries are no longer meekly following our lead. Nations like Russia, who are still relatively weak and poor, are now more engaged in playing spoiler to Washington’s overly ambitious social engineering military campaigns to defend what they regard as their vital interests. One hopes that Pompeo will get with the program.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a fellow at Defense Priorities.
