White House's Syria gaffe offers Obama a chance to climb back from war

Washington's crisis over Syria started with a gaffe. Another gaffe may very well end it.

If the Obama administration's response to Bashar Assad's alleged use of chemical weapons appears erratic, improvised and incoherent, that's because it has been, ever since the president declared the use of chemical weapons to constitute a "red line" that apparently prompted US action. A different improvisation, from his secretary of state on Monday, offered the Obama administration an opportunity to climb back from the brink of a war Obama initially wanted to avoid.

With cruise missile strikes against Assad looming, John Kerry, the secretary of state, fielded a question Monday from a reporter in London about avoiding war by saying Assad could "turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week." Kerry quickly qualified that Assad "isn't about to do it, and it can't be done."

And yet it might be at hand. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov took the remark approvingly, raising the prospect that one of Syria's major foreign patrons was embracing a way to avoid a war that would implicate its own interests.

"We will immediately start working with Damascus," Lavrov said Monday.

Suddenly, the Obama administration faced yet another unexpected challenge over Syria: whether it can take yes for an answer, and avoid a war that the Obama administration has never wanted in the first place – but over the last few weeks the White House has felt little choice but to embrace.

That dizzying maneuver is only the latest in a Syria policy defined primarily by improvisation.

Last summer, with the Syrian civil war already over a year old, and tens of thousands dead, Obama issued an impromptu warning that Assad needed to keep his stockpiles of chemical weapons firmly out of the conflict.

Obama, fielding questions during an August 2012 press conference, described the use of those chemicals as a "red line" for the US.

The threat reportedly surprised White House advisers who had intended simply to put pressure on Assad behind the scenes rather than box Washington into a corner, but the off-the-cuff use of the phrase "red line" came to define US foreign policy.

"The idea was to put a chill into the Assad regime without actually trapping the president into any predetermined action," a senior official told the New York Times, but "what the president said in August was unscripted."

The White House's desire for flexibility over Syria stemmed from its deep reluctance to be enmeshed in yet another volatile Middle Eastern civil war.

On one side is the Iranian client Assad, a lynchpin of Iranian influence in the Arab world, whose air defenses have been supplied by Russia, which maintains military bases and ports in Syria.

On another side is al-Qaida, considered a formidable fighting force in a fractious Syrian opposition. Caught in the middle are tens of thousands of dead civilians and millions more refugees.

And after 12 years of debilitating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military and the White House wishes to avoid another one – particularly a proxy fight that involves Iran, Russia and al-Qaida.

So over the next several months, the Obama administration talked as if the red line did not actually constitute a red line.

General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said in a January 2013 press conference that Obama's "messaging" on Syria itself would deter Assad from using the weapons. Other administration spokesmen batted away reporters' questions by saying Obama would not be locked into any particular course of action.

Meanwhile, Obama stated that the official policy of the US government was for Assad to relinquish power and give way to a government that would respect human rights. Yet he would not take military action to ensure it, resisting calls from his former State Department policy planning director Anne-Marie Slaughter to enforce a "no-kill zone" abutting Turkey and from GOP Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham to establish a no-fly zone, which entails attacking Syrian air defenses and patrolling its skies with US warplanes.

It took the Obama administration until February, two years into the Syrian civil war, to agree to provide the Syrian opposition with non-lethal aid in the form of food and medicine. All this has come as a major frustration to America's Sunni Arab allies, chiefly the Saudis, Qataris and the Emiratis, who are operating a weapons pipeline to the Syrian rebels and are largely unconcerned with their proxies' connections to Islamist extremism.

Throughout 2013, each online and social-media-driven rumor of a chemical attack led reporters to pepper the Obama administration with questions about breaches of the red line.

That escalated into a major embarrassment for the administration this spring. Dead bodies in Aleppo in March tested positive for the nerve agent sarin. Yet Obama took no action in reprisal, arguing that a fact-finding mission needed to establish whether the toxin was in fact used. The president, fearful of being boxed into a war, even shifted the red line to the "systematic" use of chemical weapons, confusing many.

Ultimately, Obama took no action, except to give weapons to the Syrian opposition – although not the heavy weapons the opposition desired.

The August 21 attack in the suburbs of Damascus prompted Obama to abandon some of his ambiguity about involvement in the war. His red line undeniably crossed, Obama and his chief aides – Kerry foremost among them – now argue that Assad's chemical attack risks eviscerating the longstanding international norm against the use of poison gas as a battlefield weapon. They have taken to portraying a military reprisal as in the interests of the entire world, and one that is vital to the fundamental credibility of US foreign policy.

"By allowing Assad to act with impunity, everything else becomes even harder – from countering terrorism to defending human rights, from promoting peace to ensuring our energy security and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction," Susan Rice, Obama's national security adviser, said Monday.

Yet the caution about involvement in the Syrian civil war remains. The Obama administration insists that punishing Assad for his chemical weapons use will be "limited" and is unrelated to the broader US goal of ousting him. Assad, the administration has clarified, will remain in power the day after the "limited" strikes. It is also insisting that it will not get enmeshed any further in the Syrian civil war.

"We do not assess limited military strikes will unleash a spiral of unintended escalatory reactions in the region," Rice said.

Rice's optimistic statement reflects the administration insisting to a domestic audience that it ought not to fear any greater war emerging from the "limited" strikes; and to a foreign audience that Assad has crossed a basic threshold of civilized governance. It has combined maximal claims about the enormity of Assad's abuses with minimal claims about what to do about them, prompting confusion amongst both adversaries and allies about what the US actually intends to do the day after its "limited" strikes in Syria.

All the more ironically, the Obama administration answers its critics in Congress by saying Obama does not "intend" any deeper war, as if Obama's intentions have been a bulwark against a year of policy drift on Syria.

Many in the US military harbor skepticism about the firmness of that bulwark. In the Washington Post this weekend, a retired army major general, Robert Scales, vented the frustrations of a war-weary Pentagon about "the amateurism of the Obama administration's attempts to craft a plan that makes strategic sense."

Many in military circles have trouble understanding how Obama can leave Assad in power if the president launches a strike, fearing Obama's "intent" will not stop him from being drawn deeper into Syria by degree or risk a humiliating acquiescence to the next atrocity from Assad.

With the US public massively opposed to the Syrian strikes and Congress nearing a vote on authorizing them, yet another improvisation may have provided the Obama team with a face-saving way of avoiding war, at least for the time being.

Kerry's proposal for Assad to give international monitors control of Syrian chemicals appears intended to show that the US truly had no choice but to attack Assad. The State Department even said shortly after Kerry spoke in London that the secretary was making a merely rhetorical argument.

But a key legislative ally, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee who has been supportive of proposed strikes, said in a statement that "I would welcome such a move."

Now that Russia has responded positively to the idea of shifting Assad's chemicals to international control, it is unclear if administration views the approach as a way out of the conflict.

In an interview Monday with CNN, Obama called it a "potentially positive development," but he warned he would not accept a "stalling or delaying tactic."

"Can we arrive at something enforceable and serious?" Obama said, without definitively answering his own question. "If we can accomplish this limited goal without taking military action, that would be my preference." But Obama added that he needed to maintain "pressure" on Assad.

Furthermore, even if Obama signs on to this new push to avoid the strikes he proposed, it will not resolve the persistent ambiguity about the depth of the US investment in ending the Syrian conflict. During congressional testimony last week, Kerry vowed that additional US aid to the "vetted" Syrian opposition is forthcoming.

True to form, the White House is portraying the latest improvisation as entirely consistent with a well-crafted strategy Obama has put in place from the start.

"It is very important to note that this discussion that has taken hold today about potential international control over Syria's stockpiles only could take place in the context of a credible military threat by the United States to keep pressure on the Syrian Government as well as those supporting Syria, like Russia," said Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state whom Obama overruled on firmly backing Assad's opposition and possible 2016 presidential candidate.

Put differently, Obama's fortunes in avoiding yet another Middle Eastern war may live and die by the gaffe.

Additional reporting by Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington