https://www.jns.org/where-weve-been-and-why-it-matters/
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.
