Heading for an attack on Syria

What happened

The U.S. and its allies were gearing up this week for a punishing military strike on Syria, as intelligence agencies said they had proof the regime had launched a devastating chemical-weapons attack on its own people. Videos taken in the aftermath of the poison-gas attack on rebel-held neighborhoods in eastern Damascus—which killed at least 355 people and wounded thousands more—showed men, women, and children convulsing and foaming at the mouth. Secretary of State John Kerry called the attack a “moral obscenity” and said “there must be accountability for those who would use the world’s most heinous weapons.” Administration officials said Obama would not try to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but instead favored a “limited” military action that would see scores of cruise missiles launched from U.S. destroyers in the Mediterranean Sea at military units and installations involved in chemical attacks.

France and the United Kingdom expressed support for the attack, and put their warplanes on standby. In the U.S., polls showed just 9 percent of voters thought Obama should get involved in Syria, while 60 percent want the U.S. to stay out. Assad, who denied using chemical weapons and insisted that rebel groups had staged that attack to fool the West, said America would regret wading into his country’s civil war. “Failure awaits the United States as in all previous wars it has unleashed,” he said.

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What the editorials said

Obama has no choice but to intervene, said USA Today. After drawing a “red line” last year, the president responded indecisively and ineptly to the regime’s subsequent use of poison gas, emboldening Assad to carry out more atrocities. Ignoring this latest outrage would only invite further use of chemical weapons, and would destroy Obama’s credibility in Iran, which continues to pursue nuclear weapons despite repeated U.S. warnings. Still, our response must be carefully targeted, said The New York Times. We should restrict our strikes to military assets involved in past gas attacks. The aim is to deter Assad from using chemical arms, “not to be drawn into another civil war.”

“Lobbing in a few cruise missiles from a standoff distance” would accomplish nothing, said The Wall Street Journal. Assad and his backers in Iran would see such a halfhearted measure for what it is—“a gesture mainly intended to vindicate Obama’s promise that there would be ‘consequences’ to the use of chemical weapons.” The real problem with Syria isn’t the chemical weapons. “It is the leader who has used them, Bashar al-Assad.” And it’s Assad who must be removed from power.

What the columnists said

Removing Assad is not in America’s interests, said Stephen Walt in NYTimes.com. His downfall would leave a power vacuum, and unleash fierce infighting among opposition factions vying for control. “Today the most powerful rebel groups are jihadi extremists, the last people we want in power in Damascus.” And even a “limited” intervention could result in the U.S. being sucked into another Afghanistan or Iraq, said Ryan Costello in HuffingtonPost.com. Once “you’ve helped to break a country, there will be pressure to put it together again.” Should Assad continue to slaughter his people, both liberal humanitarians and right-wing hawks will demand that Obama escalate our intervention.

“We have clearly waited too long to act in Syria,” said David Rothkopf in ForeignPolicy.com.The Obama administration and the entire international community “bear at least some responsibility” for the casualties of the latest gas attack—and for the 100,000 Syrians who’ve died in this civil war. But it’s not too late to act. Assad needs to be shown that slaughtering civilians, especially with chemical weapons, will bring his downfall.

But what’s our long-term strategy? said Jeffrey Goldberg in Bloomberg.com. If Obama wants to stop Syria from turning into a failed state brimming with jihadists, he’ll have to commit to removing Assad and working closely with moderate opposition groups while marginalizing the Islamists. It’s an “obviously precarious” strategy that could fail. “But it isn’t as dangerous as a one-off missile strike that could—by reinforcing the notion that every brutal thing short of Obama’s chemical-weapons red line is permissible—lead to endless death.”