ALL ROAD TO DAMACUS
WASHINGTON — Despite Americans’ exhaustion with 11 years
of foreign conflict, the victor in Tuesday’s presidential race may find it
all but impossible to keep the United States from becoming more deeply
entangled in the unfolding calamity of Syria’s sectarian civil war.
Pressure for Washington to play a greater role comes from a variety of
factors: soaring casualty tolls, hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding
into neighboring countries, wholesale destruction of Syria’s infrastructure,
the growing presence of al-Qaida-linked fighters, fears that violence will
spill over into adjacent nations, and the danger that the Assad regime will
collapse, leaving Syria’s chemical weapons open to theft.
“The longer this continues, the more sectarian violence is going to take
place,” warned F. Stephen Larrabee, an analyst with the RAND Corp., a policy
institute. “Sooner or later, the U.S. will arrive at a tipping point where
it will have to decide if it will watch from the sidelines as the situation
deteriorates or has to take some sort of action.”
Moreover, experts said, having committed themselves to Syrian President
Bashar Assad’s ouster, President Barack Obama and Republican hopeful Mitt
Romney would have to do more to make certain that goal is achieved.
Otherwise, they risk appearing
weak and feckless, leaving the U.S. little leverage to shape a post-Assad
regime and less influence in the oil-rich region. Such an outcome also could
embolden al-Qaida and allied groups.
“Our Arab allies have shown some willingness and sensitivity toward the U.S.
administration’s reluctance to get involved because of the election,” said
Randa Slim of the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based research center.
“But after the election, we will see the Gulf (Arab) allies increase
pressure on the U.S. to do more. I think we will see the same from the
Turks.”
Obama and Romney both have ruled out U.S. military intervention. So the next
president will have limited options to contain the mayhem. Those could
include more robust efforts to force feuding opposition leaders to agree on
the makeup of an alternative government and to identify moderate rebels to
whom to channel heavy weapons. The U.S. and Turkey also could deploy
anti-aircraft batteries along Turkey’s side of the border to protect
civilians and rebels across a swath of northern Syria in a “safe zone” that
wouldn’t require U.N. approval, experts said.
Such a zone “is going to change the balance of power. The only way Assad can
project power in northern Syria today is by bombing with airplanes and
helicopters,” said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of
Oklahoma. “If you take that out … then you are getting closer to a …
situation where the rebels can set up camp and welcome (Syrian army)
defectors in a safe environment. They could train and recruit.”
Such options also could end up sucking the U.S. even deeper into the
maelstrom pitting rebels mostly from Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority — backed
by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Islamists from across the region —
against regime forces led by Assad’s Alawite minority, a Shiite Muslim
offshoot, backed by Iran’s Shiite rulers and Hezbollah, the Shiite movement
that dominates Lebanon’s government. The Shiite-led government of Iraq might
also side with the Assad allies.
“The danger is that you have a wide chessboard and lots of moving pieces,”
said a senior Arab diplomat who requested anonymity in order to speak
freely. “The situation is very serious and fast-moving.”
The crisis could easily reach a point “where the downside risks of doing
nothing begin to outweigh the risks of doing something,” Larrabee said.
A re-elected President Obama could develop a new strategy faster than a
newly elected Romney, who’d need months to seat his full national security
team and conduct a policy review, the senior Arab diplomat noted.
Neither Obama nor Romney has spent much time during the campaign discussing
the bloodiest of the Arab uprisings that have upended the Middle East. But
both largely espouse the same approach: oust Assad and stop Syria from
becoming an Islamist haven by using the CIA to steer Saudi- and
Qatari-supplied arms to moderate rebels while trying to unify disparate
opposition leaders with the credibility to be a government-in-waiting that
would participate in a U.N.-led peace effort.
Obama has sent a U.S. military task force to Jordan’s border with Syria to
help Jordan forge contingency plans in case of a spillover of serious
violence, and he has slapped sanctions on the regime to strangle its arms
buying. The United States also has provided more than $132 million for
assistance to hundreds of thousands of refugees — estimates place the number
between 360,000 and perhaps 700,000 — outside Syria and the millions of
people — somewhere between 1 million and 10 million — who’ve been forced
from their homes by the fighting and are now scrambling to find food,
shelter and medical care.
The U.S., however, has rejected calls to impose a no-fly zone to ground
Assad’s airpower and refuses to supply heavy weapons, including
shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, to the rebels, fearing the weapons
would end up in the hands of al Qaida-linked Islamists.
The bloodletting — estimates of the dead are nearing 40,000 and may be much
higher — also is having a corrosive effect on U.S. relations in the region,
experts said. Both Turkey and its Arab allies, frustrated by what they
consider a standoffish U.S. role, are outrunning current policy.
“The U.S. has lost a lot of leverage and it’s coming into this particular
game too late,” said Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian dissident and fellow at the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a center-right policy institute
in Washington.
Still, he and other experts said, the U.S. can’t stop exploring its options,
especially with the war heating up sectarian tensions in Lebanon, where
there have been gunfights between Alawites and Sunnis and an Oct. 19
car-bomb assassination in Beirut of a senior Sunni police official that many
blamed on Syria and Hezbollah.
The war also is infecting Iraq, threatening to upend the tenuous stability
that the U.S. fought for nine years to secure. Iraqi Sunni militants are
siding with Syrian rebels, Shiite extremists are fighting for Assad, and the
Shiite-run Baghdad government is reportedly allowing Iran to send arms to
Damascus across its territory and airspace, stoking frictions with Saudi
Arabia and other Sunni Arab regimes.
Turkey, meanwhile, has made clear that it won’t tolerate Syria’s minority
Kurds setting up an independent enclave in northeast Syria that is run by
the Syrian wing of Turkey’s Kurdish rebels and that could enflame Kurdish
separatism in Iraq and Iran. In recent days, Syrian Kurdish militia have
clashed openly with anti-Assad rebels near Aleppo.
“There are no good choices in Syria,” said Landis of the University of
Oklahoma. “It’s a minefield. Whoever is president after Nov. 6 is going to
have to tiptoe through this minefield. We have to take this one step at a
time and figure out who is who on the ground.”