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Contemporary Conservative Thought

Home inSight Where We’ve Been and Why It Matters
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WHERE WE’VE BEEN AND WHY IT MATTERS

Shoshana Bryen • December 9, 2024
SOURCEJewish News Syndicate
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A banner with former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, Syria, in
2023. (Photo: Shutterstock / hanohiki)

The collapse of the Bashar Assad regime in Syria over the weekend sent me back
to the Jewish Policy Center archive.

Incoming President Donald Trump is correct—who governs Damascus and its environs
is not a choice that the United States can or will make. However, the United
States has interests that include working with our allies and ensuring that our
adversaries don’t take advantage of them—or us. While we all cheer the ouster of
a war criminal and the shaking of the Islamic Republic, an appropriate
future-looking policy requires an understanding of American culpability in the
Syrian civil war that began in 2011 and never ended.

CHEMICAL WEAPONS AND OBAMA’S ROLE

Russia and Iran, of course, played large roles in this. But so did the Obama
administration. Determined to get to an “Iran deal,” Washington appeased Iran
directly and vacillated over appropriate policy choices in Syria. The
decision to arm and train Sunni rebels was made, but weapons lagged, and it was
unclear that the administration knew which militias were which.

The issue of chemical weapons is crucial, as the illegitimacy of their use is
one of the few points of international consensus in wartime. The first treaty
against it is more than 120 years old—the Hague Declaration of 1899, which was
followed by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and the 1925 Geneva Protocol. A “red
line” after the use of chemical weapons by Syrian President Bashar Assad
resulted in a bizarre decision by the administration to work with Russia
to neutralize Syrian chemical weapons at sea:

It was a stab in the dark, utilizing equipment never before used under these
circumstances, on a ship not designed for that purpose, using downsized
machinery intended for the stability of land-based operations.

The administration crowed about its success, claiming the destruction of the
Syrian government’s declared chemical weapon stockpile, heralding the
“neutralization of chemical agents … as a watershed moment in the Syrian
conflict.” Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said, “In record time, even
amid a civil war, we removed and have now destroyed the most dangerous chemicals
in the regime’s declared stockpiles.” From an inSIGHT article at the time:

Both acknowledged that it wasn’t quite the whole Syrian stockpile—after all,
OPCW (The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) was relying on a
self-declared Syrian arsenal. But OPCW was willing to swear that the President’s
optimism was warranted. In a remarkably precise statement, Sigrid Kaag, special
coordinator for OPCW-UN, said 96% percent of Syria’s declared chemical weapons
were destroyed. Not 95% or 87% or 43.5%, but 96% on the nose.

It wasn’t true.

Later reports indicated that “the embattled Syrian government is
employing chlorine gas in attacks on civilians; a chemical omitted from the 2013
deal brokered by the U.S. and Russia.” Well, it doesn’t count if it was left out
of the agreement, right?

The history of the CIA and Pentagon programs to aid—and constrain—Sunni rebels
in northern Syria was carried out from 2014 to 2017, when it was ended by
then-President Donald Trump. A review of its roots, efficacy, and
shortcomings is useful, but suffice it to say that the United States never
articulated achievable war aims for its proxies and the proxies never produced
any either.

APPEASING IRAN

What mattered to the administration in those years was the determination to
achieve a nuclear deal—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—between
the United States and Iran. That policy lived through the Obama and Biden
administrations, with U.S. President Joe Biden appeasing Iran up to and after
the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Some highlights:

In February 2021, the administration released to Iran $1 billion in frozen
assets held by South Korea and lifted the terror designation from
Iranian-sponsored Houthi rebels. In 2022 came the “Maritime Border deal” with
Lebanon intended to make Hezbollah a “responsible stakeholder.” In the summer of
2023, the U.S. weighed in publicly on Israel’s civil protests at the same time
the White House bragged that it had given more than $315 million to the
Palestinians in 2023—and nearly a billion dollars since the administration took
office, ignoring Israel and the bipartisan U.S. Taylor Force Act. The apparent
withdrawal of firm American support for Israel, coupled with the suggestion that
the IDF would not be a cohesive fighting force, had an impact on the thinking of
Hamas. And Iran. And October 7.

PRESIDENT TRUMP

But in between the two appeasing administrations—Obama and Biden—was the first
Trump administration, where you can see the clear parameters and limits for
American foreign policy. As well as ending CIA support for Sunni rebel
groups—some of which were clearly jihadist—and keeping an American force in
place to help defeat ISIS and protect our Kurdish allies, he addressed the
ongoing use of chemicals by the Syrian regime against its own population.

He chose punishment as foreign policy: Syria had to be made to pay. Since the
United Nations has no enforcement capabilities (and no one should want it to),
the world’s only superpower had to consider punishing the violator and upholding
the consensus. In 2017, the United States, the United Kingdom and France struck
the Him Shinshar base’s chemical weapons bunker and storage depot, and the
Barzeh “scientific research center.”

Not designed for “regime change” or to end the Syrian civil war, the raid was
intended to punish the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, its
protector Russia and its banker Iran. It was to make it harder to do it again.
It was to uphold one of the few areas of international consensus in warfare—that
CW use is forbidden. That mission was indeed accomplished, but the expected
chorus of naysayers would have you believe that it was: a military failure; a
political failure; or both.

The lesson was clear: The primary goals of American foreign policy are to make
our citizens, friends and allies secure and to make our adversaries think twice.

It is a good mantra for the second Trump administration.

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