In which Obama rhetorically contains the Islamic State

Remember the brouhaha late last summer over Obama's rapidly evolving language with respect to the aim of military action against the Islamic State? Was the plan that we did not entirely have yet merely to contain the rapidly expanding monstrosity, or rather to "degrade and destroy" it? Over the course of a frenetic couple of weeks, the messaging settled on an implicit extended timeline, in which the administration vowed to "degrade and ultimately destroy" IS. 

The qualifier "ultimately," I noted at the time, became Obama's linguistic tool of choice to bridge the chasm required to build or buy some kind of viable ally or basis for a political solution in Syria -- a process not yet begun. Remember "we don't have a strategy yet"? That was Obama's maladroit way of signaling that U.S. military action in Syria would be limited for want of a viable ally.

In an interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep on Dec. 29, in an almost throwaway subordinated clause, Obama rang a new variation on that formula with the same key qualifier:

And on the international front, you know, even as we're managing ISIL and trying to roll them back and ultimately defeat them...

...and the sentence moved on to Afghanistan. Thus was the problem rhetorically contained in a roundup sentence. But Inskeep, to his credit, didn't leave it there: he returned to the repressed at the very end of the interview. And there Obama bid at once to give the danger its due and, so to speak, contain it within the country's broader to-do list.

Two questions about Obama's thinking about ISIS

Peter Baker has a purported insider's view of Obama's thinking about the ISIS crisis™, based on interviews with 10 people present at two recent dinners the president held with foreign policy experts and journalists. Like most such exercises, it's not particularly revealing (with one exception noted at bottom), as the president is putting best foot forward with his guests and the guests assess him through a partisan prism (Richard Haas is respectfully negative, Jane Harman equivocally positive).  

I was struck, though, by two questions Obama's not-so-private exegesis left unanswered. I don't doubt that he has considered these questions in depth, but he has not seen fit to address them directly.

The first concerns his decision to ramp up aid to "moderate" Syrian rebels and support them with air strikes as appropriate.

No, Obama is not plunging neck-deep in the Big Muddy

"We don't have a strategy yet." Those words of Obama's in an Aug. 28 press conference so flipped out the foreign policy establishment and media that no one heard heard what Obama was saying.

A translation: The conditions are not yet in place for significant U.S. military action against ISIS in Syria. Our efforts now are concentrated on beginning to create such conditions.

Those who fear that Obama is poised to plunge neck-deep in the Syrian muddy (here's to you, Mr. Sullivan) might look again at how he has elaborated this point repeatedly  -- in press conferences on Sept. 3 and Sept. 5, and in his Meet the Press interview with Chuck Todd that aired Sept. 7.

Here's how he put it on Aug. 28:

Contain, degrade, destroy ISIS? It's a timeline

[Update 9/5, 12:15 p.m. ET: in a press conference in Wales that just ended, Obama added "ultimately" at least thrice to the phrase "degrade and ultimately destroy" and variants, reinforcing the 'timeline' theme below.]

I'm not qualified to assess the efficacy of Obama's past or current conduct of policy with respect to Syria and Iraq. But I am well attuned to Obama's rhetoric and the thinking it reflects. On that basis, I can tell you that the media angst over whether he's signaled intent to contain, degrade or destroy ISIS is a lot of hooey.

Current U.S. policy, as Obama has described it and to the extent it can be disclosed, is pretty straightforward. U.S. air power will contain ISIS, and begin to degrade its warmaking capacity, while regional actors get their act together, with the help of U.S. prodding and incentives. To the extent that they do so, efforts will escalate to destroy ISIS.

Contain, degrade and destroy are stages in a process, timeline uncertain and dependent on strategic goals such as winning Sunni Iraqi buy-in to the new government and getting Gulf states to act in concert in finding viable Syrian opposition to back (while also, I would guess, working to leverage and to some extent covertly coordinate with warfare against ISIS conducted by Iran and Syria).

It's true that Obama's rhetoric has served to temper more overheated pronouncements by Biden, Kerry and others. And there was a real division between Powers' denunciation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Obama's refusal to call it that. But his own rhetoric with respect to Iraq, Syria and ISIS can be cast as  inconsistent or conflicted only if you break apart the implicit and contingent timeline he's outlined with the help of various verbs.

"We don't have a strategy yet" is a strategy

Regardless of whether Obama's assertion that "we don't have a strategy yet" for confronting ISIS in Syria and potentially beyond (as opposed to in Iraq) was well advised, it was not a gaffe in the sense of an inconvenient truth that slipped out.

It couldn't have just slipped out, because Obama reiterated the point and elaborated it at length. His reasons for describing the strategy as in progress and TBA were multiple: 1) to reassure that he was not beginning a large-scale military operation without consulting Congress; 2) to pressure prospective coalition partners to play their parts and emphasize that US action depends in large part on their cooperation; and 3) to differentiate between immediate, limited military action and a more sustained, multilateral, slower-building and Congressionally authorized effort.  That's all in his second iteration of the strategy-to-be:

Just what is the United States retreating from?

I have a problem with the way Mark Landler frames recent Obama administration diplomatic activity -- the scheduling of a Syrian peace conference as well as the interim agreeement with Iran:

At one level, the flurry of diplomatic activity reflects the definitive end of the post-Sept. 11 world, dominated by two major wars and a battle against Islamic terrorism that drew the United States into Afghanistan and still keeps its Predator drones flying over Pakistan and Yemen. 

But it also reflects a broader scaling-back of the use of American muscle, not least in the Middle East, as well as a willingness to deal with foreign governments as they are rather than to push for new leaders that better embody American values. “Regime change,” in Iran or even Syria, is out; cutting deals with former adversaries is in.

To call these initiatives "a broader scaling-back of the use of American muscle" seems to me a distortion of historical US foreign policy norms. Regarding Iran: when has the U.S. ever imposed military muscle to halt another country's (professedly peaceful) nuclear program?  It is only the bluster of the neocons -- the crew who blundered into Baghdad -- and of a Congress always eager to show fealty to Netanyahu that makes a preemptive strike at Iran seem like a kind of default response to that country's nuclear program.

In which Lavrov disavows the language of the Security Council resolution his country just agreed to

The U.N. Security Council has agreed on a resolution compelling Syria to give up its chemical weapons for destruction.

The headline is that there is no preauthorization for the use of force if Syria violates the agreement, e.g., by not allowing access to its weapons, or by moving them, or, of course, by using them. But that is no surprise. The reported language with respect to enforcement is in line with that in the Framework Agreement the U.S. and Russia struck on September 14. In fact it is less equivocal than the Framework. The draft resolution

Decides, in the event of non-compliance with this resolution, including unauthorized transfer of chemical weapons, or any use of chemical weapons by anyone in the Syrian Arab Republic, to impose measures under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.

Cf. the Framework Agreement:

Wired for War

It is doubtless hard for most Americans, and for most people who have not had extended experience of war, to fathom the experience, values, motives and emotions of a lethal and brutally effective military leader like Qassem Suleimani, head of Iran's Quds Force, profiled in this week's New Yorker by Dexter Filkins. The Quds force spearheads Iran's overseas military adventures, and Suleimani helped build up Hezbollah, choreographed and equipped Shiite militias' killings of Americans in Iraq, probably helped orchestrate Hezbollah's terrorist bombings of Jews in Argentina, and is directing Iran's military intervention on behalf of Assad in Syria. He cut his teeth in eight years of brutal combat in the Iran-Iraq war.

Filkins cites Ryan Crocker asserting that Suleimani is not motivated primarily by religion: "Religion doesn’t drive him. Nationalism drives him, and the love of the fight.”  But Suleimani has a certain mysticism of his own.  "When I see the children of the martyrs, I want to smell that scent, and I lose myself," he recently said in an interview in Iran. Stranger yet is his response to eight years of World War I-like horror in the Iran-Iraq war:

Okay, now he can't move them

Assad, that is. His chemical weapons. Because he's signed the Chemical Weapons Convention and declared them.  In the LA Times, Shashank Bengali reports:

Syrian President Bashar Assad has disclosed the locations of dozens of poison gas production and storage sites to international inspectors, according to Western officials.

Officials familiar with Assad's disclosure — the first step in complying with an ambitious U.S.-Russian plan to seize and remove or destroy his arsenal of chemical weapons by mid-2014 — described it Tuesday as "a serious document" that comprises scores of pages and is surprisingly thorough.'

Information in the closely guarded document roughly tracks with U.S. intelligence estimates that Syria has about 45 sites used to produce or store illicit blister agents or neurotoxins...Syria submitted the declaration over the weekend to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the implementation and compliance arm of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

The OPCW administers the Chemical Weapons Convention. The Convention stipulates (Article IV, paragraph 4) that once such a declaration is made,

But Greg Sargent, "handling and manipulation of process and theatrics" matter

Greg Sargent has quite rightly called out a bevy of reporters who have slammed Obama for the process by which he arrived at his Syria policy (and other policies) "without taking a stand on the substance of the policy debates underlying them. It's true that criticizing presidential process can be a dodge, shielding the writer from grappling with the policy merits of, say, a missile strike on Syria. But Sargent overstates the case, I think, by suggesting that process can be cleanly separated from policy.  Holding up Dylan Byers as Exhibit A, Sargent criticizes a

genre of criticism of Obama..largely focused on the President’s handling and manipulation of process and theatrics, and the consequences that allegedly has had for the president and the country. Into this category fall the arguments, mentioned by Byers above, that Obama’s changes of course during the Syria crisis have been “confusing and contradictory,” that this has made him “appear weak on the international stage,” and that he has failed to muscle a progressive agenda through Congress.

So, Congress, how 'bout that AUMF?

Remember the alternative AUMF proposed by Senators Manchin and Heitkampf?

The Manchin-Heitkamp resolution* calls for two primary things. First, it gives the administration 45 days to secure from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad a commitment to join those nations who have signed and agreed to the Chemical Weapons Convention. If Assad fails to comply, then the Senate gives full authorization to the president to use whatever means possible to respond to the regime's apparent August 21 use of chemical weapons.

So now, thanks to the U.S.-Russian agreement on a Framework for the Elimination of Syrian Chemical Weapons, Assad  has already acceded to the Chemical Weapons Convention. And he will be required to provide an inventory of Syria's CW arsenal within seven days of ratification by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons of a draft decision to be provided by the U.S. and Russia "within a few days." Once that inventory is provided, the Chemical Weapons Convention forbids moving any weapons, "except to a chemical weapons destruction facility" (Article IV, paragraph 4). Inspections are to begin in November, and the framework, as the FT puts it, "is structured around a series of deadlines which will allow the world to judge whether it is being adhered to or not." The framework also stipulates enforcement under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, which authorizes the Security Council to use both non-military and military means.

What the agreement (already famously) does not do is effectively pre-authorize military action in the event that Syria violates the agreement.  Whether this kind of agreement could be so structured, I don't know, but the Russians have made it clear that they will block any future call for a Security Council resolution authorizing force.

America's "inward turn" is moderate and proportionate

It's hard to deny, as Roger Cohen charges, that Obama and his surrogates have whipsawed the world with mixed signals in the wake of the Syrian government's chemical weapons attack on August 21. But Cohen overstates the case and its consequences when claiming that Obama's "dithering"

marked a moment when America signaled an inward turn that leaves the world anchorless.

The president has reflected the mood in America. Almost two-thirds of people surveyed think the United States should not take a leading role in trying to solve foreign conflicts, according to a recent New York Times/CBS news poll. Principle backed by credible force made the United States the anchor of global security since 1945 and set hundreds of millions of people free. Obama has deferred to a growing isolationism. His wavering has looked like acquiescence to a global power shift.

The Times/CBS poll result cited raised my eyebrows too. Specifically, 62% said that the U.S. should not "take the leading role among all other countries in the world in trying to solves international conflicts," while just 34% said that the U.S. should do so. Perhaps even more striking, when asked,  "should the United States try to change a dictatorship to a democracy where it can, OR should the United States stay out of other countries' affairs?" 15% said "try to change," while 72% said "stay out."

So U.S. "isolationism" is "growing." But growing from what?  The Times/CBS pollsters have been asking the first question since September 2002, when the Bush administration was selling its prospective war in Iraq and was pretty fresh off an apparent quick victory in Afghanistan. You could say that the U.S. was at the peak of post-9/11 triumphalism.  At that point, 45% said that the U.S. should "take the leading role," while 49% said it should not.  A drop from 45% to 34% is significant, no doubt. But it strikes me as quite moderate in light of the decade of disastrous war that followed.

Beyond disputin', an element of truth

The author of the words below might ask Americans, as the malign plutocrat banker Potter asked George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life after sketching out his life and prospects, "Do I paint too grim a picture? Or do I exaggerate?"

It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.” 

But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes.

That's Vladimir Putin in the New York Times. Yes, he does paint too grim a picture, and exaggerate. The Libya intervention was authorized by the Security Council, e.g., by Russia under Medvedev   And Obama's proposed strike on Syria has little in common with Bush's invasion of Iraq. But the broad question -- have American military interventions post-9/11 done more good than harm? --is hard to answer in the affirmative.

 Again, below, does Putin paint too grim a picture?

Why did Putin do it?

Like almost anyone watching, I would be delighted if a U.S. strike against Syria could be averted by an agreement to place Syrian chemical weapons under international control.

At the same time: A world in which Vladimir Putin defuses a crisis by proposing and following through on an executable plan to reduce violence is not the world I thought we live in.  I can't help but at least half-expect yesterday's hope to go up in a puff of smoke, perhaps as Assad simply denies that his regime has any chemical weapons (Syrian buy-in thus far has been voiced by foreign minister Walid al-Moualem). Yet events are rushing forward. France has proposed a Security Council resolution calling on Syria to empower the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to destroy its chemical weapons and require Syria to join the OPCW, the implementing authority for the Chemical Weapons Convention. It's hard to see Russia blocking some kind of Security Council resolution to execute its proposal, if not France's current draft per se, and China too has indicated support. So even if action to secure Syrian CW does not materialize quickly, the Russian proposal seems to be on course at least to break the Security Council logjam and hence defuse the impetus for near-unilateral U.S. action. 

Why did Putin do it? The authorization for military action against Syria that the administration has sought seemed headed for near-certain defeat.  Almost two thirds of Americans are opposed to a strike.  Regarding international conflict, Americans don't want the country to lead, whether from in front or behind. According to the latest New York Times/CBS poll, released today, 62 percent say the U.S. should not take the lead among all other countries in the world in trying to resolve international conflicts, and 61 percent oppose air strikes against Syria. Those numbers are trending the wrong way for the administration.  So why would Putin move to avert a military strike that pretty clearly was not going to happen, at least not until further atrocities hit the headlines? Four possibilities come to mind:

Syrian site-setting in the Senate

Just what -- or who -- are the likely targets of a strike in Syria? This exchange in the Senate Foreign Services Committee hearing transcript made me pick my head up:

SEN. DURBIN: General Dempsey, we saw these photographs earlier -- these heartbreaking photographs. Page three of The Washington Post this morning, an ad by a group supporting the president's effort has a photograph that's riveted in my mind, as a father and grandfather, of the children on the floor in shrouds, victims of this chemical agent gas attack.

What the administration is asking us for is military authority to launch additional attacks. What have you been charged with in terms of the issue of collateral damage from those attacks as it would affect innocent people and civilians in the nation of Syria?

Does Obama really need to choose whether he's a liberal or realist in Syria?

Dan Dresner thinks so.  In his view, a leak to the effect that Obama does not want the contemplated punitive strike to topple the Assad regime (in keeping with his slow-walked support of "moderate" rebel groups) clashes with intimations that Obama aims ultimately to push Assad out, as well as with his stated desire to uphold the international norm against chemical weapons.  Dresner's conclusion:

There are a lot of areas of foreign policy where different paradigms can offer the same policy recommendation, and there are a lot of foreign policy issue areas where presidents can just claim "pragmatism" and not worry about which international relations theory is guiding their actions.  I'm increasingly of the view, however, that Syria is one of those areas where Obama is gonna actually have to make a decision about what matters more -- his realist desire to not get too deeply involved, or his liberal desire to punish the violation of a norm.  If he doesn't decide, if he tries to half-ass his way through this muddle, I fear he'll arrive at a policy that would actually be worse than either a straightforward realist or a straight liberal approach. 

Busy work day ahead, so I will keep this short and maybe flesh out later, but I see a balancing act rather than a contradiction.

Did Nancy Pelosi (and Kerry) read Max Fisher?

Kind of looks like it:

Ms. Pelosi said..that she was hopeful the American people “will be persuaded of” military action. 

“President Obama did not write the red line,” she said. “History wrote the red line decades ago.”

[UPDATE: guess that's the party line: Kerry echoed it in his testimony this afternoon:

Now, some have tried to suggest that the debate we're having today is about President Obama's red line. I could not more forcefully state that is just plain and simply wrong. This debate is about the world's red line. It's about humanity's red line. And it's a red line that anyone with a conscience ought to draw. ][9/5: Obama said the same in Sweden.]

Compare Fisher:

The U.S. decision to move toward possible strikes appears, rightly or wrongly, wisely or unwisely, to be all about reinforcing international norms. It’s not about us; it’s not about “because Obama said so.” It’s about “because international norms say so.”

Worth reading on Syria

As a Labor Day labor, I thought it might be useful to share some of the strongest analyses I've read about Syria, some of which are at odds with each other. The choices below address three interrelated questions: what should any U.S. response to the Assad regime's chemical weapons attack seek to achieve? How, if at all, does U.S. (and Obama's) "credibility" factor into the equation? And how, if at all, should we engage with adversaries other than Syria with a stake in the conflict?

1. How narrow a mission?

The Washington Post's Max Fisher argues that the "red line" is not about Obama, it's about a hundred year-old international norm. A strike narrowly focused on upholding the international taboo against chemical weapons use makes sense:

What's the rush?

So James Fallows asked the president. Why strike Syria  isolated from almost all sources of potential support, domestic as well as foreign? Why not make the case with more deliberation and build more support, foreign and domestic? Surprise! Obama, who boasted of doing just that in Libya, now appears to be on the same page.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious: his statement this afternoon announcing that he would seek Congressional authorization for a strike was pitched to an international audience as well. He's seeking more than Congressional support. My italics:

Here’s my question for every member of Congress and every member of the global community: What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price?

What’s the purpose of the international system that we’ve built if a prohibition on the use of chemical weapons that has been agreed to by the governments of 98 percent of the world’s people and approved overwhelmingly by the Congress of the United States is not enforced?

Diplomatic fantasy hour

Cooling down from a run, I caught myself at the tail end of a little diplomatic fantasy: the Obama administration furnishes strong proof that the Assad regime carried out the chemical weapons attack -- and wins a Russian agreement to cut off the arms flow for long enough to equal the estimated damage of a contemplated U.S. missile strike. Or an Iranian agreement.

I know, I know....

UPDATE, 9/1/13:

1. Laura Rozen ‏@lrozen 25m

   IAEA or P5? RT @MeirJa: Head of #Iran AEOI Salehi says next round of #Iran - P5+1 talks scheduled for 27Sept http://ow.ly/osrjk 

   Expand
2. xpostfactoid ‏@xpostfactoid1 23m

   @lrozen @MeirJa Should mesh interestingly w/ possible strike on Syria. Deal? You cut off arms to Syria for 3 months; we won't bomb.

   
   

   Laura Rozen ‏@lrozen 18m  there are an awful lot of moving parts, some potentially pushing US & Iran to an understanding, incl. on Syria CW @xpostfactoid1 @ 
   
   Laura Rozen ‏@lrozen 9m
   

   ...steady stream of messages from Iran suggesting tacitly may accept US assessment re: Syria CW @Ali_Gharib: @thekarami @yjtorbati

Update 9/3: Barbara Slavin reports on signs that the U.S. may be opening the door to Iranian inclusion in Syrian peace talks.

Update 9/9: Today we learn that I didn't let my imagination go far enough:

Asked at a news conference in London if there were steps the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, could take to avoid an American-led attack, Mr. Kerry said, “Sure, he could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week — turn it over, all of it, without delay and allow the full and total accounting.” He immediately dismissed the possibility that Mr. Assad would or could comply, saying, “But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done.”

However, in Moscow, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, who was meeting with Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, said in response that Russia would join any effort to put Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons under international control and ultimately destroy them. 

Mr. Lavrov appeared at a previously unscheduled briefing only hours after Mr. Kerry made his statement in London, taking Mr. Kerry’s comments as a way to suggest a possible compromise. 

“We don’t know whether Syria will agree with this, but if the establishment of international control over chemical weapons in the country will prevent attacks, then we will immediately begin work with Damascus,” Mr. Lavrov said at the Foreign Ministry. “And we call on the Syrian leadership to not only agree to setting the chemical weapons storage sites under international control, but also to their subsequent destruction.” 

Mr. Moallem said later in a statement that his government welcomed the Russian proposal, Russia’s Interfax News Agency reported, in what appeared to be the first acknowledgment by the Syrian government that it even possessed chemical weapons. The Syrian government has historically neither confirmed nor denied possessing such weapons.

This has that too-good-to-be-true feeling, like the prospect in 2009 that Iran would send its highly enriched nuclear fuel to Russia or Turkey for safekeeping. But for a diplomatic moment I'll indulge sweet hope.