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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Drone Wars: Obama's Critics Missed the Boat

With cameras rolling and hand slicing the air, John McCain took to the Senate floor to blast the Obama administration for leaking the president's personal use of "kill lists" to select targets in the U.S. drone war against al Qaeda, decrying the President's brazen exploitation of "classified" information to burnish his tough-guy political credentials in an election year.

Senate and House intelligence committee members, for their part, called for a bipartisan investigation of the Obama disclosures on national security grounds, claiming they're "putting American lives at risk."

Left-leaning pundits excoriated Obama's hands-on hawkery as commander-in-chief (reported here, here, and here) as the egregious presidential abuse of war powers plucked from the rightful hands of Congress. Oped venues of the liberal media resounded with syncopated calls for investigation of the secret Tuesday targeting meetings where the President personally has ordered the foreign assassination of American citizens. 

Screeds from the blogosphere likened the sycophantic reporting of the Obama White House operation to the travesties Judith Miller enabled George W. Bush & Co. to perform on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

All these charges have an element of truth to them. But only an element. Obama critics left and right know all too well the President is likely, as a Democrat, to come out of this controversy politically untouched and even strengthened. But that is not why the chattering classes across the political spectrum ought to be exercised about how Obama and a handful of aides are so aggressively micromanaging the nation's counterterrorism brief. 

Polls will almost certainly continue to show that most Americans approve of Obama's handling of terrorism and the drone war against terrorists. What surveys will not show -- and what most of the President's critics have entirely missed -- is the tectonic shift that seems to have taken place in what former Bush counsel and Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith calls "wartime presidential accountability". 

It is precisely these changing standards, together with the changing nature of international warfare, Goldsmith believes, that President Obama and his administration are struggling with, and his critics are groping to understand.

Forget about media conspiracies and witch-hunts. There is no question that Obama's aides have supplied members of the press with inside accounts that make their man look good. You don't have to read carefully to know who in the White House, the Pentagon, or the intelligence agencies is talking to reporters -- whose work, by the way, is as clean as a whistle.

Nor is there evidence that the White House has deployed secrecy, deceit, or duplicity to get the word out about Obama's engagement in counterterrorist operations. The Obama White House has, in fact, arguably performed a public service by opening up some usually darkened corners of the military/intelligence world for public scrutiny. 

The "kill list" controversy is not about abuse of power or a runaway presidency. It is about an administration trying to cope with changing concepts of warfare and struggling to settle on the legal and moral principles to fight it. 

Goldsmith, an unapologetic conservative, believes a new and unconventional set of checks and balances has grown up over time, vetted and legitimized largely by the judicial branch of government, that now regulate the President's management of hostilities against stateless terrorist enemies. A similar surge of lawyering-up now monitors and protects every Army brigade on the battleground. 

Lawyers and the courts, Goldsmith argues, have gradually come to replace Congressional oversight in providing functional checks and balances on the president. Some lawyers and legal scholars are leery of what they see as a dangerous evolution of power toward the executive and judicial branches of government that Obama has inherited from the Bush administration.

As a former constitutional law professor, Obama is more aware than most of how changing tactical and strategic circumstances on the ground affect constitutional definitions of warfare, and is not hesitant about parsing new legal precedents and testing new standards for guidance. Obama, Goldsmith argues, has adopted many of Bush’s special wartime powers, from keeping Guantanamo open to backing away from civilian trials for terrorist combatants, because he understands their utility and legitimacy. 

At issue, as Yale law professor John Fabian Witt writes, is that "the foundation of laws of armed conflict that have been evolving for three centuries" are in a state of collapse. Our fight against well-organized and well-financed stateless terrorists has eroded the once-sharp distinctions between war and peace, soldiering and criminality, wartime innocence and guilt. 

Obama is in an entirely new zone of on-the-job training and uncertainty. So far he has played his hand better than might have been expected. But one senses that Goldsmith's new edifice of evolutionary constitutional principle to guide warfare is far from a finished construct. 

Is it, for example, an act of war to attack a sovereign nation with pilotless drones if that nation is Pakistan and the targets are insurgent sanctuaries? And if that nation is the U.S. and the targets are military bases or government buildings?

It will only get harder from here.

Gideon Rose's grand metaphor

Gideon Rose, the new editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and author of How Wars End (Simon & Schuster, 2010), deploys a stunningly ungainly but accurate metaphor of counterinsurgency warfare in his recent book to describe American grand strategy in its foreign entanglements of the past century.

Playing on the shorthand description of COIN theory, Rose rolls out the phrase "clear, hold, and build" to describe the strategic policy aims of United States in Europe (World Wars I and II, Bosnia and Kosovo), East Asia (Korea and Vietnam), and most recently, the Middle East (Iraq and Afghanistan). In counterinsurgency terms, he writes, the outcome of individual wars have varied wildly in the 'clearing', and 'holding' stages, with some positive, but more often checkered results in the third stage, 'building' stable nations in America's image.

For any real policymaker to spout such talk would be "ridiculous and unattractive", admits Rose. Yet his brief is unswervingly that "the United States has been engaged in nothing less than an ongoing campaign of global pacification -- clearing, holding, and building in region after region around the world", from well before Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama.

Without quite saying so, Rose's grand metaphor not-so-subtly fashions the United States as a deeply imperial power driven by its sense of its own exceptionalism, great wealth, and a strong instinct to use military power to deter 'insurgent' foreign threats. It's almost, but not quite, American history in the image of the Vietnam War. Rose's point, however, is less contentious: U.S. political leaders, too often adept at starting wars, are not very good at thinking through how those wars should end, or of imagining sustainable and desireable postwar political conditions, before conflicts begin.

He's no doubt right. However elusive such exquisite rational and clairvoyant planning may prove, Rose's quirky rendering of grand American strategy accurately describes a 20th century worldview shared by successive presidents that presupposes rising U.S. economic power, unchallenged American hegemony, and the backing of a far-flung, world-class professional military. No president thus far, including Obama, has shown any real inclination to back away from this script.

Rose's grand strategy metaphor thus places him in the company of military historians like Andrew Bacevich and other critics of Washington's imperial reach and militarization of U.S. foreign policy.

The metaphor itself, however, has limited staying power. Rose flicks at the existence of an alternative strategic outlook with "as distinguished a pedigree" -- "that it's somebody else's job to clear, and somebody else's job to hold, and somebody else's job to build" -- but fails to elaborate. A new approach would seem to embrace Washington's stepping back to leave Libya to the British and French, and leaving terrorist threats in Afghanistan to the Afghan army and national police, measures guaranteed to conjure images of American irresoluteness.

It also leaves the coining of a new grand strategy metaphor to a new generation of anti-isolationist foreign policy realists. I would nominate Harvard's Stephen Walt, who stakes out fundamental strategic assumptions that include 1.) compromised U.S. economic prospects; 2.) the rise of China as a superpower, 3.) withdrawal from Afghanistan-style overcommitment, and 4.) selective future military engagement based on regional balance-of-power politics.

Such a policy may well ring in "the end of the American Century", as one Washington pundit put it. But surely it describes what we are witnessing. That's not altogether a bad thing, and recognizing it is arguably long overdue. Rose's contribution is to encourage a sophisticated approach to the calibration of military and political restraint. He leaves it to others to suggest that dumping the global counterinsurgency strategy just might lead to new era of enhanced American power and influence, rather than the inevitable decline the Cassandras of the right and left so confidently predict.