Obama was president during the bulk of the Syrian civil war, and his legacy as commander in chief will be shaped in part by what he chose to do there — and what he chose to avoid.
One of those things was to refuse to endorse any kind of large-scale effort aimed at toppling Assad — repeatedly overruling members of his administration, like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and CIA Director David Petraeus, who wanted to provide more advanced weaponry to the rebels. Parallel CIA and Pentagon efforts to recruit, train, and arm Syrian rebels did little to shape the course of the conflict; in 2015, the Defense Department had to concede that its $250 million effort had trained a grand total of 60 fighters (that’s more than
$4 million per trainee).
Perhaps the defining moment came on August 21, 2013, when Assad's forces launched sarin gas — a horrifying and deadly chemical weapon — into the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, killing up to
1,423 people. Most of the dead were civilians.
Prior to the attack, President Obama had declared chemical weapons use to be a
"red line": If Assad used them, it would trigger an American military response. But after Ghouta, Obama didn't seem to want to follow through. He submitted a plan for punitive airstrikes in Syria to Congress, where lawmakers from both parties
signaled that it was likely to fail.
Russia offered Obama a way out of his self-made dilemma. It brokered a deal with Assad where he would agree to give up his chemical weapons and submit to international inspections if the United States agreed not to attack Assad.
The Obama team
accepted this as a lifeline. As they saw it, the critical issue was never the Syrian civil war, which the president had decided was too risky to intervene in. Rather, it was the use of chemical weapons — a particularly heinous act prohibited by international law. If the threat of American military force got Assad to back down from chemical use, that would make chemical weapons use less likely in Syria
and in other conflicts without putting American troops in harm’s way or risking a wider conflagration.
“I’m very proud of this moment,” Obama told
the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. ““The overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom and the machinery of our national-security apparatus had gone fairly far. The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America’s credibility was at stake. And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would cost me politically [but] I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make.”
...
There was one major exception to Obama’s hands-off policy in Syria: the war on ISIS. But it was carefully limited, in ways that show why Trump’s strike was such a major shift.
After the militant group swept across northern Iraq in June 2014, and came to control a swath of territory in Syria and Iraq roughly the size of
Great Britain, the scale of the terrorist threat became impossible to deny. This, together with the videotaped beheadings of
two American journalists, prompted Obama to declare a plan to "degrade and ultimately destroy" ISIS on September 10.
The linchpin of the plan was a series of American airstrikes, both in Syria and in Iraq, supporting forces on the ground that were fighting ISIS. In Iraq, that meant the official Iraqi army as well as tribal leaders and Shia militias. But it wasn’t clear, initially, who that would be in Syria.
Most rebel groups were preoccupied fighting Assad, and had no ability to really refocus on the Islamic State. The same was true, in reverse, for Assad; he had long maintained a sort of de facto ceasefire with ISIS so he could focus on fighting the moderate rebels whom he saw as a bigger threat.
The US ended up settling on fighters from the Kurdish ethnic group, based in northern Syria near the Turkish border, as their key allies. These Kurds were mostly uninvolved in the main civil war, as their chief objective was carving out a Kurdish state in majority-Kurdish areas rather than toppling Assad’s regime in Damascus. Moreover, ISIS had invaded their territory, and was besieging a Kurdish city named Kobane at the time of the US intervention.
So the thousands of missions flown by American warplanes, and hundreds of US special forces deployed to Syria, were supposed to accomplish two things: cut ISIS’s supply lines between Syria and Iraq, and back Kurdish forces in their fight against ISIS.
On this metric, they’ve more or less succeeded. American airstrikes helped break the siege of Kobane and allowed Kurdish forces to launch a counteroffensive that swept over ISIS’s holdings in north central Syria. Today, a joint Kurdish-Arab military group called the Syrian Democratic Forces is camped out within miles of ISIS’s capital city, Raqqa — and are
preparing to attack the city itself, with
major backing from US troops.
But note the delicacy of this strategy when it came to the main conflict in Syria.
The United States was fanatical about limiting the scope of this counter-ISIS campaign — in particular, making sure it never became a counter-Assad campaign. When the Pentagon sent weapons to some Syrian rebels whom they wanted to fight ISIS, it made them promise not to use those weapons against Assad. (The tiny number of rebels who took the US up on this weak offer were swiftly slaughtered by al-Qaeda forces.)
