(The Wall Street Journal)- President Barack Obama entered the Oval Office with a promise not to engage the U.S. in protracted and messy conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan. As he leaves, his adherence to that promise is muddying his foreign-policy legacy because of how he handled another Mideast crisis: Syria.
For almost six of Mr. Obama’s eight years in the White House, the conflict in Syria has repeatedly evolved—and the president’s cautious decision-making has appeared one step behind.
Mr. Obama has emphasized the use of diplomacy first, coalition building and assisting local forces on the ground rather than deploying large numbers of U.S. troops. He aimed to avoid putting American troops in harm’s way in potentially open-ended conflicts when he didn’t see a direct threat to U.S. national security.
That was his early assessment of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, and he has maintained it through his last day in office on Friday.
That view—that the conflict wasn’t a direct threat to U.S. national-security interests—led the Obama administration to a series of delays or rejections of policy prescriptions and led the president to repeatedly conclude that military intervention would put America on a trajectory toward another full-scale war in the Middle East.
That view was also the impetus for Mr. Obama’s rejection of a recommendation early in the war from top national security advisers to train and arm rebels fighting the Assad regime.
It dissuaded him from creating a no-fly zone in Syria as some of his advisers and U.S. allies repeatedly urged him to do.
And it helped inform his decisions to seek congressional approval for military strikes in Syria after Mr. Assad crossed the U.S. president’s self-imposed “red line” by using chemical weapons, and—before Congress voted—to pull back from using force and agree to a Russian plan to remove most of the Syrian regime’s stockpile.
As Mr. Obama hands over a metastasized crisis to his successor, the question looms of whether Syria could have turned out differently.
“There are a lot of people that bear responsibility for what happened, and I think the United States included,” said Leon Panetta, who served as Mr. Obama’s defense secretary and director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and was one of the advisers pressing the president to arm the rebels early in the conflict. He pointed to whether Mr. Obama should have authorized a no-fly zone, aided opposition forces earlier in the conflict and enforced his red line with force in 2013.
“That’s the lesson of these last three years: that ultimately the consequences of not taking action are going to represent a threat to our national security,” Mr. Panetta said.
Mr. Obama acknowledges that his Syria policy hasn’t been effective in resolving the conflict. But he also argues it has kept the U.S. out of another protracted conflict in the Middle East that would put tens of thousands of U.S. troops at risk and cost potentially billions more dollars.
“Whenever we went through it, the challenge was that…it was going to be impossible to do this on the cheap,” the president said at a news conference last month.
As Mr. Obama adhered to his approach, Syria evolved from an internal civil war in 2011 to a breeding ground for the Islamic State terrorist group, the source of the largest migrant crisis since World War II and a shift in regional power structures with the increased military role of Russia.
As pressure from Republicans in Congress, U.S. allies in the Middle East and the Washington foreign-policy establishment mounted on Mr. Obama to take stronger military action, aides say the president would sum up his doctrine during meetings in four words: “Don’t do stupid shit.”
Some see in his approach a steadfastness to support a principle.
“It says a lot about his view that he never buckled to the pressure just to ‘do something,’ ” said Philip Gordon, who served as the president’s adviser on Middle East and North Africa in his second term. “That took a real amount of discipline on his part.”
Others contend that there is nowhere that underscores more the limitations of Mr. Obama’s deliberative approach to foreign policy and hesitance to use military force.
“Waiting for the perfect solution often leaves you with worse choices down the road,” said Robert Ford, who resigned as U.S. ambassador to Syria in 2014 over policy disagreements.
“The Obama administration’s approach to Syria has been abysmal,” Mr. Ford said, adding that “there was a penalty to the delay” in making key policy decisions such as arming the Syrian opposition.
Administration officials said they did everything possible short of committing the U.S. to a costly war. “I don’t think anyone here is convinced that there was nothing that could have been done that led to a different outcome,” said a senior administration official.
“Everything was considered,” the official said. But the discussions always led Mr. Obama “to the conclusion that the risks were too high.”
Administration officials also point to the $6 billion in humanitarian aid that the U.S. has contributed since 2011 for people in Syria and neighboring countries affected by the conflict.
More than a year before Mr. Obama was elected, Syria was one of five U.S. adversaries he said he would engage without preconditions if he won the White House. The others were Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela.
He never got traction on establishing a diplomatic channel with Syria. In August 2011—around five months after the beginning of the war—Mr. Obama publicly called for Mr. Assad to step down. The death toll from the conflict was about 4,000 around that time.
The following April, the Pentagon prepared preliminary options for White House staff that included no-fly zones and limited airstrikes, though they weren’t presented to the president.
By that summer, U.S. efforts to facilitate regime change by trying to find cracks in its ranks and incentivize defections had essentially failed. In the fall, Central Intelligence Agency Director David Petraeus, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Mr. Panetta and other top national security officials made the case to Mr. Obama in favor of arming and training Syrian opposition fighters.
At the time, Mr. Obama was skeptical. He had concerns about who exactly the opposition fighters were and wanted to learn more about them.
“It was kind of just left there. It never quite got a clear decision,” Mr. Panetta said. “I think it would have given us a better opportunity to establish the kind of opposition force that could have represented a more effective challenge to Assad.” The White House declined to comment.
After the chemical attacks, Mr. Obama approved the training and arming of Sryian rebels—though U.S. efforts to do so stumbled over the difficulty of finding the right “moderate” forces to back.
Around that time, Mr. Obama drew a red line on Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons, saying if he did “that would change my calculus.”
A year later, in August 2013, the U.S. said sarin attacks by the regime had killed some 1,400 people. Syria denied it.
In response, Mr. Obama settled on military strikes aimed at the Assad regime’s chemical-weapons stockpile. Then he changed his mind and decided to seek approval from Congress—which was itself divided, with supporters of military action still struggling to gather enough votes.
British leader David Cameron also sought legislative approval for action—and lost the vote.
Russia, an ally of Mr. Assad, then offered a deal to remove the majority of the chemical weapons from Syria. Some of Mr. Obama’s aides advised against it, saying it would diminish U.S. credibility if he didn’t enforce his red line. Others were for it.
“We didn’t have a lot of good choices, and when the Russia offer presented itself it was a bail out,” said Mr. Gordon. “That was an easy call.”
The move was the beginning of Russia’s increasing political and military role in the conflict, efforts that have helped prop up the Assad regime. It forced Mr. Obama to try to reassure America’s allies that the U.S. wasn’t withdrawing from the world stage.
Then, in June 2014, the White House was caught off guard when Islamic State rolled into Iraq from Syria and captured the city of Mosul—reopening Iraq as a potential battleground for the U.S.
“It would’ve been nice if the intelligence community could’ve seen around the corner and thought how quick ISIL had metastasized and able to move on Mosul,” Vice President Joe Biden said last week, using a different name for Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
Two months later, Mr. Obama authorized what he said would be limited airstrikes in Iraq to protect a religious minority, the Yazidis, and to block Islamic State from moving into the northern city of Erbil.
He made clear his reluctance, saying there would be no significant military intervention. “American combat troops will not be returning to fight in Iraq because there is no American military solution to the crisis in Iraq,” Mr. Obama said.
Over time, the U.S. tempered its Syrian regime-change agenda—yet each time the White House believed Mr. Assad was close to falling, the Syrian leader held on, and was ultimately rescued by Russian military forces in September 2015.
Russia now is at the helm of talks on a political agreement to end the conflict. The death toll last year rose to some 400,000 people since the war began.
The U.S. continues efforts to support anti-Islamic State forces in Syria and Iraq, and the military has prepared options for the fight to present to the new administration.
Now, Mr. Obama hands over the crisis to Donald Trump, who has suggested a willingness to take steps his predecessor resisted, such as establishing safe zones in Syria—and cutting a deal with Russia that would leave Mr. Assad in power.
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