On the road to Damascus

Two little-noticed news stories this week raised our eyebrows about the prospects that the Obamas may be floating trial balloons about a changing American role in the Syrian civil war.

The Syria policy vacuum has become an open sore for the White House. Bitter rebel leaders have begun to echo sharp international criticism of American inability to ramp up much support beyond non-lethal aid. So far, the 2 1/2-year-old civil war has resulted in the deaths of some 100,000 Syrians, most of them at the hands of the Syrian Army and President Hafez al-Assad.

But the dust clouds suggest that the Obama White House may be taking another road to Damascus.

The first eye-opener, a bipartisan report co-authored by former Clinton secretary of state Madeleine Albright and Romney foreign-policy adviser Richard Williamson, advocates the so-called "responsibility to protect", known as R2P in diplomatic jargon, a United Nations-sanctioned legal trigger justifying outside intervention to stop genocide or other mass atrocities.

Conceived in response to the Bosnian Army slaughter of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995, R2P influenced the U.S. decision in 2011 to support besieged and outgunned Libyan rebels with the NATO bombing of Muammar al-Qaddafi's forces. One of its guiding lights, Samantha Power, a top aide to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, was approved this week by the Senate as  Obama's ambassador to the United Nations.

Power has resolutely maintained that R2P must take a back seat to Obama's cautious policy of providing non-lethal support to the rebels. She dutifully reiterated to the Times this week that R2P was "less important, I think, than U.S. practice and policy."

Albright maintains, just as its critics contend, that R2P calls for building multilateral coalitions to provide diplomacy and economic leverage to curb atrocities short of military force, though it nowhere rules out military action. She argues that that the "responsibility to protect" principle "would strengthen the hand of the U.S." and Syrian "sovereignty" because it "makes it the duty of the sovereign to protect its people."

Pressure for a ceasefire and stability in Damascus appear to have trumped American and rebel demands that Assad step down as a pre-condition to talks sought by Secretary of State Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Ivanov. The aim appears to be a Syrian accord that would stop the slaughter and seek Assad's departure as part of an American-Russian brokered agreement. Even that outcome, however, runs against the grain of the UN Security Council, where Russia has blocked aggressive measures against Assad.

If R2P would provide a kind of rough framework for a human-rights-based U.S. Syrian intervention, this week Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, under intense pressure from Sen. John McCain, for the first time supplied a detailed outline of the U.S. military muscle the Pentagon can bring to bear in Syria. Under questioning from McCain last week before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Dempsey correctly balked at McCain's questions, demurring that his job was to provide military options and advice to the President.

That provoked McCain to threaten to hold up Dempsey's pending nomination for a second term as joint chiefs chairman. It also generated a letter co-signed by McCain and Democratic committee chairman Carl Levin formally asking for Dempsey's views on Syria. Without so much as asking for a private meeting with senators, standard protocol in military hearings, Dempsey this week spelled out five options proposed by Pentagon for U.S. military action in Syria by return mail.

1. A "train, advise, and assist mission", costing $500 million a year, would not involve U.S. boots on the ground in Syria, would boost the rebels militarily, but risk U.S. weapons falling into the hands of militant Islamic rebels.

2."Limited stand-off strikes" from outside Syria would target high-value Syrian military targets with U.S. bombs and missiles, but cost "in the billions" per year and risk major civilian casualties.

3. Establishing a "no-fly zone" would target Syrian air defenses, involve U.S. flights over Syrian airspace, and cost $500 million in upfront costs and $1 billion a month to maintain, plus put U.S. aircraft at risk.

4. Setting up "buffer zones to protect the borders" of Turkey and Jordan would require "partial no-fly zones" with similar costs and risks.

5. The last option, "controlling chemical weapons", would involve a no-fly zone, air and missile strikes and thousands of troops in Syria, all at a cost of more than $1billion per month.

Dempsey's letter could be construed as just the sort of military freelancing that got Gen. Stanley McChrystal in hot water with Obama and later fired. Such ventilation of opinion by generals is too often used to put political pressure on the White House. But this episode feels different. Dempsey is no McChrystal, and like many in the military, is deeply leery about military intervention in Syria.

There is no more evidence that the Obama White House gave Dempsey the green light to talk out of school than there are tracks of the National Security Council on the Albright/Williamson report. But the timing and confluence of Albright and Williamson's diplomatic proposal with Dempsey's military message raise intriguing questions about the possible formulation of a new U.S. Syria strategy.

The major pieces of the puzzle are present: An essentially humanitarian diplomatic rationale, along R2P lines; the tools of big-power economic and political leverage for a ceasefire; the formation of a multilateral coalition to help provide resources and enforcement; defensive, limited no-fly zones designed to protect a flood of Syrian refugees and the borders of two key regional allies, Turkey and Jordan; and the framework of a Geneva-based peace convention sponsored by Washington and Moscow to bring all interested parties to the table to hammer out some kind of regional stability.

Two things seem clear enough: The close-mouthed Obama administration is playing it's cards close to the vest; and politically speaking, Obama's judiciously restrained instinct on Syria is at the end of its rope.


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