The Obama administration’s strategy in Syria has not changed despite reports that officials are seeking a new approach targeting the regime of President Bashar Assad, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Thursday.
“There is no change, and there is no different direction,” he told the House Armed Services Committee.
It’s the second time in two weeks that Hagel has come to President Obama’s rescue amid reports of dissent within the administration on what to do with Assad, whose dictatorial rule sparked the civil war from which the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has emerged as a powerful force.
Though Obama has insisted Assad must be replaced and Congress has authorized the training and equipping of moderate Syrian rebels, administration officials have emphasized a political solution to his rule.
“We are constantly assessing and reassessing and adapting,” Hagel noted Oct. 30, a day after the New York Times reported that he had sent “a sharply critical two-page memo” to National Security Adviser Susan Rice warning that the failure to deal with Assad was hurting the administration’s efforts in Syria.
On Wednesday, CNN reported that the administration’s Syria policy was under review after Obama concluded that the Islamic State cannot be defeated without Assad’s removal.
But Hagel told lawmakers that Iraq remains the focus of U.S. efforts against the Islamic State and echoed other officials in insisting that replacing Assad is a political, rather than a military, process.
“You could change Assad today, and that’s not going to change all the dynamics quickly in Syria,” he said. “But [the Islamic State] is right now. And [the Islamic State] is threatening the country of Iraq and the government of Iraq. And that’s why we’re dealing with that component first.”
Syria has always been an afterthought in the administration’s strategy. Though coalition aircraft have been bombing Islamic State targets inside the country since September, the airstrikes have been aimed at denying the group a safe haven from fighting in Iraq and damaging its ability to make money from selling oil from captured oilfields and refineries.
Turkey and many Arab countries have been pressuring the administration to take a tougher line against Assad, and Syrian rebels say the airstrikes have enabled government forces to gain ground at their expense. Training and equipping rebel groups will take at least 12 to 18 months before they are capable of offsetting the power of either the Islamic State or the Assad government.
But U.S. officials have resisted the pressure, and still see the soon-to-be-trained rebel forces as a political, rather than a military, counterweight to Assad.
“There’s a political process that we believe needs to be reignited to allow for a transition inside of Syria to a new government,” Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters.
“Ultimately, only a political transition is going to stabilize the situation.”
