The book, A Problem From Hell, published in 2002, drew Obama to Power while he was in the U.S. presidents for their failures to prevent genocide. Power, who during this period served on the National Security Council staff, is the author of a celebrated book excoriating a succession of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, who is the most dispositionally interventionist among Obama’s senior advisers, had argued early for arming Syria’s rebels. After several months of deliberation, he authorized the CIA to train and fund Syrian rebels, but he also shared the outlook of his former defense secretary, Robert Gates, who had routinely asked in meetings, “Shouldn’t we finish up the two wars we have before we look for another?” But as Assad clung to power, Obama’s resistance to direct intervention only grew. “He thought Assad would go the way Mubarak went,” Dennis Ross, a former Middle East adviser to Obama, told me, referring to the quick departure of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in early 2011, a moment that represented the acme of the Arab Spring.
intelligence, that Assad would fall without his help. He resisted demands to act in part because he assumed, based on the analysis of U.S. “For the sake of the Syrian people,” Obama said, “the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” But Obama initially did little to bring about Assad’s end. Late in the summer of 2011, he had called for Assad’s departure. That would change my equation.”ĭespite this threat, Obama seemed to many critics to be coldly detached from the suffering of innocent Syrians. A year earlier, when the administration suspected that the Assad regime was contemplating the use of chemical weapons, Obama had declared: “We have been very clear to the Assad regime … that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. Kerry counted President Obama among those leaders.
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“History is full of leaders who have warned against inaction, indifference, and especially against silence when it mattered most.” “As previous storms in history have gathered, when unspeakable crimes were within our power to stop them, we have been warned against the temptations of looking the other way,” Kerry said in his speech. John Kerry argued vociferously for action. In Situation Room meetings that followed the attack on Ghouta, only the White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, cautioned explicitly about the perils of intervention. The strong sentiment inside the Obama administration was that Assad had earned dire punishment. In the Damascus suburb of Ghouta nine days earlier, Assad’s army had murdered more than 1,400 civilians with sarin gas.
Kerry, like Obama himself, was horrified by the sins committed by the Syrian regime in its attempt to put down a two-year-old rebellion. “If you were to say, for instance, that we’re going to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and build a prosperous democracy instead, the president is aware that someone, seven years later, is going to hold you to that promise,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, and his foreign-policy amanuensis, told me not long ago.īut Kerry’s rousing remarks on that August day, which had been drafted in part by Rhodes, were threaded with righteous anger and bold promises, including the barely concealed threat of imminent attack. And he was particularly mindful of promising victory in conflicts he believed to be unwinnable. Obama entered the White House bent on getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan he was not seeking new dragons to slay. The president believes that Churchillian rhetoric and, more to the point, Churchillian habits of thought, helped bring his predecessor, George W. But he also thinks rhetoric should be weaponized sparingly, if at all, in today’s more ambiguous and complicated international arena.
Obama believes that the Manichaeanism, and eloquently rendered bellicosity, commonly associated with Churchill were justified by Hitler’s rise, and were at times defensible in the struggle against the Soviet Union. Obama, in whose Cabinet Kerry serves faithfully, but with some exasperation, is himself given to vaulting oratory, but not usually of the martial sort associated with Churchill. Why ISIS isn’t an existential threat, but climate change is.How France and Great Britain contributed to the mess in Libya.Why Saudi Arabia should share the Middle East with Iran.Resisting John Kerry’s requests to attack Syrian-regime targets.Why Ukraine will always be vulnerable to Russian domination.The necessity of pivoting from the Middle East to Asia and other regions.Why he’s proud of not striking Assad in 2013.
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