Bashar al-Assad’s security forces have brazenly slaughtered more than 10,000 Syrian civilians, and injured or detained tens of thousands more, since the anti-regime protests began in March 2011. Despite these facts, America’s policy towards Syria—a terror-sponsoring government that is Iran’s closest ally in the Arab World, a possessor of weapons of mass destruction, and a supporter of foreign fighters that killed American troops in Iraq—remains incoherent and ineffectual.
Indeed, President Obama still refuses to forcefully back up his August 2011 demand that Assad step down. Consider his high-profile speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum last week: He rightly condemned Assad’s mass murders, but showed only enough resolve to announce more sanctions against Syrian officials and the formation of a new “Atrocities Prevention Board.” The fecklessness of the announcement surely was not lost on Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, who critically said in his introduction of the president, “So in this place we may ask: Have we learned anything from [the atrocities of the Holocaust]? If so, how is it that Assad is still in power?”
