The Politics of Doing Nothing versus Doing Something: Domestic Political Competition and Risk Taking over the Syrian Civil War

Why is U.S. policy towards the Syrian Civil War suddenly shifting from nonintervention to intervention? Was it really just the chemical attack outside of Damascus last week that was ostensibly conducted by Assad’s security forces? After all, what’s the difference between the Assad regime killing 100,000 people with conventional weapons—small arms, tanks, artillery, bombs, mortars, and even tactical ballistic missiles—and killing about 1,500 people using chemical weapons? From a strategic perspective, Steve Walt is right that a change in weaponry should have little to no impact on U.S. policy towards Syria. However, the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime has shifted U.S. policy on its head over the last week. Suddenly the Obama administration is poised to launch a military attack on Syria in the coming days (I’ll bet this coming Sunday or Monday). I think the real impetus for the change in Obama’s policy towards Syria rests in how the recent chemical attacks reverberated within U.S. domestic politics.

While Obama is now well into his second term in office that does not mean he has nothing left to run for. So long as the House is under Republican control, he has no avenue to advance his domestic priorities or even a specific major policy he can pass that would serve as the capstone of his second administration. Until the 2014 midterms, the next fifteen months in Washington will likely consist of budget and debt ceiling battles between Congressional Republicans and the White House. While Obama in the past has repeatedly outmaneuvered the Republicans in these fights, such wins have been short-term tactical victories. Obama’s last chance for a significant legislative achievement during his remaining time in office rests on the prospect that the Democrats can take the back the House and at least hold their ground in the Senate in the midterm elections in November 2014. Once he has a Democratic-controlled Congress, Obama then would have a short window to pass the kind of major legislation that presidencies are actually remembered for (Remember Obama said he wanted to be a transformational president and not just some guy in a round office). I think that Obama has likely weighed his approach and options regarding Syria (and other foreign and domestic policy areas) on each move’s potential impact and risks to his party’s prospects for success in the midterms.

I think Obama has previously decided not to take action in Syria because he saw lots of potential political risk and little to no upside. Furthermore, his opponents were unable to effectively inflict costs on him to significantly change his policy. Just a few weeks ago, Obama’s policy of non-direct intervention but providing low levels of support to the rebels was under increasing criticism from Republican and Democratic hawks in light of several battlefield victories by the Assad regime. Most accounts of Obama’s approach on Syria usually fell somewhere along the range of criticism between being adrift or directionless to inadequate or ineffective or all the way to being a catastrophic blunder or an outright failure. To correct his footing, Obama made a minor low risk concession to the hawks and begrudgingly announced the United States would start sending light weapons to the rebels (which apparently still have not arrived). All in all, Obama protected his political position fairly well and remained in the center between doves and hawks from both parties.

Then last week Obama’s centrist position on Syria was undermined after Assad’s security forces launched a chemical attack around Damascus in the early hours of August 21^st that killed about 1,500 people. The attack occurred almost a year to the day when Obama made a somewhat off-the-cuff remark during the presidential campaign that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a “red line.” At the time, he seemed to be setting the bar for U.S. intervention in Syria quite high. After last week’s chemical attack, however, continuing to do nothing on Syria —i.e. maintaining the status quo—began to carry with it some political costs. The hawks could easily paint Obama as weak and cowardly. If the regime escalated with even further attacks over the next year, the hawks would have a decent argument that Obama was weak on Syria and so on.  This in turn would probably hurt Obama again and again heading into the midterms. It is important not to exaggerate the extent of the political damage, which would hardly be terminal, but Obama would have a bleeding wound that the hawks would reopen every time Assad used chemical weapons and could tie in with other issues like Iran where Obama set a red line on nuclear weapons.  For Obama, the risks of doing nothing (i.e. not using force) in Syria suddenly became higher than the risk of doing something (i.e. using force). To avoid the costs of inaction, Obama has spent the last week looking for something low-risk to do which would put him on a sound political footing but also divide and weaken his hawkish opponents in the future.

Obama will probably be take a miniscule risk of using limited force in Syria to shore up his domestic political flank against Republican and Democratic hawks clamoring for action after Assad’s forces violated the chemical weapons “red line.” A limited strike could change Obama’s domestic alignment stuck between the losing doves who have argued Obama should do nothing in Syria and the winning hawks who have argued Obama must do something in Syria but are often vague or divided over what that should entail. If Obama uses limited force he can forge a new alignment with the hawks who want to use just a little bit of force (like a low-risk onetime cruise missile strike that would not change the situation on the ground) and the hawks who want a more substantial use of force (like a riskier large-scale sustained bombing campaign against the regime’s military which would likely eventually topple the regime but create a power vacuum in Syria and leave the civil war raging). With a limited strike, Obama can drive a wedge through the hawks and shore up his political flank on Syria. He can also strengthen his position by trying to bring some of the doves from both parties on board by painting the strike as a humanitarian operation and playing up rhetoric about America’s moral responsibility to protect innocent civilians from crazy dictators with chemical weapons and so on. He could frame his actions as measured and pragmatic since he did not engulf the country in yet another large war in the Middle East (the key here would be to use the terms “Bush” and “Iraq” as often as possible when speaking to the doves).

So Obama will probably use force in Syria to regain the political center and splinter the Republican and Democratic hawks. But what is the strategic impact of a limited U.S. strike against Syria? As any military analyst would point out, lobbing a few cruise missiles at fixed regime targets will have no effect on the military balance of power between the Assad regime and the rebels. Further, I strongly doubt a limited strike would have much of a deterrent effect on the future use of chemical weapons either, since effective deterrence relies on the adversary perceiving the threat as credible and the action being deterred as becoming more costly than the alternatives. Assad is in the midst of waging a bloody civil war entering its third year. He is not only fighting for the political survival of his regime but probably his personal safety from a Qaddafi-style execution at the hands of the rebels. Furthermore, his Alawite commanders and soldiers know they and their families face the very possibility of being slaughtered by the rebel Sunnis if they lose—after all, they’ve slaughtered lots of Sunni fighters and their families too. How do you seriously expect to deter someone who has that much at stake when a few cruise missiles amount to the punishment?  Finally, over the past few days, the White House has told Congressional doves and others worried about direct U.S. military involvement in Syria not to fret because Obama has no intention of getting involved in a huge military operation there. To appease domestic doves, the White House essentially told Assad that the threat of future attacks or escalating punishments if he does not comply is fairly negligible. 

Interestingly, the hawks who want a U.S. intervention to be strategically effective are correct that a cruise missile strike against Syria would be pretty much useless and to achieve any change the United States would need to impose a no-fly zone and commit to a sustained bombing campaign against the regime’s ground forces. Meanwhile, the United States and its allies would also provide a considerably higher level of support and resources to the rebels to affect the military balance on the ground. All of this would take a very long time, but could be accomplished from a military perspective. But for what gain to Obama? 

Suppose after a six or ten month U.S. bombing campaign that Assad flees to Iran or is killed, Damascus falls to the rebels and the regime’s security forces disintegrate. A post-Assad Syria would very likely remain extremely violent and chaotic as the Sunni rebels and remnants of the Alawite forces continue to vie for power since the opposition is not unified at all and there is really no hope for a transitional government to step in overnight. The Sunnis will continue fighting the Alawites and other minority groups in addition to themselves (particularly the jihadist groups associated with al-Qaeda will fight the moderate Sunnis). Lebanon would certainly become less stable as violence from Syria spills over its borders and agitates the delicate peace among its rival political groups that are similarly divided along ethnic and sectarian lines as Syria's. Israel will be facing well-armed Shia and Sunni militant groups—which mutually despise Israels existence—fighting it out along its northern borders with heavy weaponry, and of course there is the issue of the chemical weapons possessed by the former Assad regime. Iraq, which is already reaching levels of violence not seen since the full-scale civil war was underway there from 2006-2008, will likely get worse as Iran’s Shia proxy groups and the Sunni insurgents (who are likely backed covertly by the Saudis and the Gulf States) go at each others jugular as the Iraqi government teeters. Jordan and Turkey will be further flooded with refugees and threatened by insecurity. Who knows what the Kurds in Syria (and Iraq) will do. Oh, and don’t forget Iran will still be getting closer to developing a nuclear weapon, which Obama has also said is a red line. The outcome in Syria is surrounded by uncertainty. There is a very high potential for wider regional conflicts to emerge and escalate. So far as I can tell, winning in Syria carries enormous political risks for Obama and nearly no upside.

In this sort of environment, Obama’s domestic allies and opponents who supported the intervention in Syria would then jump ship—just like many Democrats who supported Bush before the invasion of Iraq did after that endeavor went sideways. They can claim they backed the concept of intervening to prevent Assad from gassing his own people but the administration had bungled this or that and must shoulder the responsibility for the calamity. Basically everyone but Obama would get to say, “I didn’t sign up for this.” At that point, Obama could be looking at overlapping conflicts stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf which encompasses all of the region’s major states. For once there would actually be loose weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East that could fall into terrorists’ hands in addition to a tattered U.S.-Israel-Arab security umbrella and probably spiraling global oil prices that could hurt the economic recovery and piss off voters. That would certainly not bode well for Obama’s political standing at home and the prospects for a Democratic victory on November 4, 2014.

When examining Obama’s Syria policy, the questions we need to ask are how does each alternative policy course effect Obama’s chances in the 2014 midterms and is Obama helped or hurt by removing Assad and his regime from power before then? The answer I reach is that Obama needs to do something to regain his domestic political footing on the issue, but he cannot risk doing so much that the United States actually succeeds and topples Assad and he gets blamed for the chaos that ensues—at least before the midterms.