Finalist: The Washington Post, by Jackson Diehl
For his passionate editorials on the civil conflict in Syria, arguing for greater engagement by the United States to help stop bloodshed in a strategic Arab nation.
Nominated Work
March 8, 2012
The Obama administration must recognize more assertive action is unavoidable.
Testimony by senior U.S. officials to Congress this week about Syria has made one thing clear: The Obama administration has yet to face up to its own assessment of what is happening in that strategic Arab country.
For months President Obama has been declaring that the fall of dictator Bashar al-Assad is “inevitable” or “a question of when,” as he put it Tuesday. But Marine Gen. James Mattis, the head of U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee the same day that Mr. Assad is “gaining physical momentum” in his assault on his rebellious population. “He’s going to be there for some time because I think he will continue to employ heavier and heavier weapons,” Gen. Mattis said. “It will get worse before it gets better.”
Mr. Obama also derided suggestions that the United States should intervene militarily. Among other things, he said “we’ve got to think through . . . what’s critical for U.S. security interests.” But Gen. Mattis said that if the Assad regime were to collapse, “it’ll be the biggest strategic setback for Iran in 20 years.”
Testifying to the same committee on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta agreed with that judgment. He also said,“I don’t think there’s any question that we’re experiencing mass atrocities” in Syria. That came after Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) cited Mr. Obama’s presidential directive, which says that “the prevention of mass atrocities is a core national security interest of the United States.”
To sum up: According to the administration, it is a vital U.S. interest to prevent crimes against humanity like those underway in Homs and other Syrian cities; the fall of Mr. Assad would be a major blow to the greatest strategic adversary of the United States in the Middle East; and, at least for the moment, the regime is winning rather than losing its war to stay in power. Yet the U.S. response remains limited to diplomatic and humanitarian measures that are unlikely to stop further massacres.
By the administration’s own logic, more assertive action is unavoidable. At Wednesday’s hearing, Mr. Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey were pressed by Mr. McCain and Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who have joined in calling for the creation of a coalition to carry out airstrikes on the Assad forces. The senators, and some governments in the region, favor creating a protected zone inside Syria where refugees could gather and opposition forces could organize.
Mr. Panetta said that military options could be considered by NATO. But Gen. Dempsey warned that taking out Syrian air defenses would take “an extended period of time and a great number of aircraft”; he questioned whether the opposition was coherent enough to be helped. Mr. Panetta echoed Mr. Obama in protesting that “we have to build a multilateral coalition” before taking stronger action.
These are not frivolous objections. But Gen. Dempsey also reported that the military mission of stopping the Assad forces could be accomplished. And the best way to ensure that extremists do not hijack the Syrian opposition is for the United States and its allies to identify and support more moderate elements.
As for building an international coalition for more forceful action, that historically has been the responsibility of the United States and its president. If Mr. Obama does not lead on Syria, there will be no international consensus — and an outcome that meets U.S. interests will be anything but inevitable.
March 23, 2012
AFTER THE U.N. Security Council endorsed a six-point diplomatic plan for Syria by former secretary general Kofi Annan on Wednesday, U.S. ambassador Susan Rice sounded almost jubilant. “Annan’s proposal,” she said, “is the best way to put an end to the violence, facilitate much-needed humanitarian assistance and advance a Syrian-led political transition.” We can only hope that the envoy does not take her own words too seriously.
In fact, there is virtually no possibility that the new initiative will accomplish any of those aims — as the Obama administration should know by now. Instead, it will likely provide time and cover for the regime of Bashar al-Assad to continue using tanks and artillery to assault Syrian cities and indiscriminately kill civilians. That’s exactly what the regime was doing Thursday — pounding the city of Hama, where at least 20 people have been reported killed in army attacks in the past two days.
The Annan plan won’t work because, like the Arab League plan before it, it calls for the Assad government to take steps that would lead to its swift collapse — and the regime has no intention of capitulating. It says that Syrian forces should stop using heavy weapons in cities, begin a pullback of troops, permit a daily “humanitarian pause” for the delivery of aid and accept a U.N.-supervised cease-fire, while allowing freedom of assembly and the free circulation of journalists. To buy time last year, the regime accepted nearly identical demands by the Arab League, admitted its monitors — and then proceeded to ignore its obligations completely.
The resolution does provide for Mr. Annan to report back on his progress and for the Security Council to “consider further steps as appropriate.” But thanks to Russia — Mr. Assad’s still-faithful ally — there is no enforcement mechanism. The resolution contains, as Syria’s official news agency pointed out, “no warnings or signals.” Nor does it explicitly call for Mr. Assad’s departure from office. Instead it proposes dialogue between the Syrian government and opposition — something that both sides have repeatedly rejected.
For Russia and China, the Security Council statement offered a face-saving way out of the embarrassing position of appearing to be unconditionally backing Mr. Assad. It gives Moscow hope of achieving the outcome it hopes for: a U.N.-brokered “peace” that leaves the regime in power. For the Obama administration, Mr. Annan’s mission allows the illusion that its diplomatic strategy is producing results — and that more decisive measures, such as arming the opposition or creating a protected zone inside Syria, are unnecessary.
What the Annan mission does not offer is “the best way to put an end to the violence.” It is just the opposite: a guarantee that the bloodshed will continue, and probably worsen. The fighting in Syria will end only when Mr. Assad is forced to stop — or he succeeds in killing his way to victory.
April 22, 2012
The longer the Obama administration backs feckless diplomacy, the more Syrians will die.
THE ONLY good news about Syria since the Obama administration’s embrace of an unworkable United Nations peace plan is the hints that it is beginning to consider alternatives. Adopted a month ago by the Security Council, the six-point “Annan plan” has not been observed in any respect by the regime of Bashar al-Assad — an outcome that was entirely predictable, and that has led to the deaths of more than 1,000 more people.
Mr. Assad will never be induced by diplomacy to end his assaults on Syrian cities, allow peaceful demonstrations or release political prisoners, because he is unwilling to leave power or allow his regime to collapse. Good-faith efforts by U.N. envoys, like those of the Arab League and Turkey before them, merely provide cover for his brutality.
The challenge for the administration is to recognize these realities and embrace options that actually can advance its stated goal of ending Mr. Assad’s rule.
So far that’s not happening. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told a meeting of foreign ministers Thursday that she remained “hopeful that, despite the evidence thus far, the mission of Kofi Annan can begin to take root.” On Saturday the United States voted to support the Security Council’s next step in that initiative — the dispatch of 300 unarmed monitors to “observe” a nonexistent “cease-fire.”
The United States and its NATO allies ought to know from the Arab League’s disastrous monitoring mission in Syria last year that observers will not stop the regime’s violence. They will be hindered and intimidated; the leader of an advance mission has already declared that it will not work on Fridays, when the largest demonstrations take place. By focusing diplomacy and attention on monitoring, Western governments will simply provide Mr. Assad with more time to kill.
Encouragingly, Ms. Clinton said Thursday that “we have to do more to take tougher actions against the Assad regime.” But her principal idea — a Security Council resolution imposing more sanctions and an arms embargo, is another non-starter. More sanctions won’t stop Mr. Assad, and an arms embargo would only lock in the regime’s advantage over the opposition Free Syrian Army. What’s more, as Ms. Clinton acknowledged, any such resolution “is still likely to be vetoed” by Russia. Even a Western attempt to refer to possible future sanctions in Saturday’s resolution was blocked by Moscow.
The measures most likely to be effective in Syria remain near the bottom of the administration’s list. Ms. Clinton mentioned the possibility that Turkey, a NATO member, would invoke the alliance’s Article 4, which requires consultation when the territory or security of a member is threatened. Syrian forces have fired across the Turkish border, where thousands of refugees have gathered. Any resulting consultations should focus on proposals, floated by both Turkey and France, for the creation of a safe zone or humanitarian corridor on Syrian territory — a step that could be accomplished with a modest military force and could cause the regime to collapse.
Ms. Clinton also mentioned greater support for the opposition, including the creation with Turkey of an “assistance hub.” This would be useful, as promised supplies so far have mostly failed to reach opposition groups. Mr. Assad will fall only when his attacks are blocked and countered; it follows that U.S. policy should aim at that.
April 26, 2012
The deadly consequences of the Security Council’s mission in Syria
So far, a U.N. monitoring mission in Syria has had one tangible effect: It has gotten people killed. On Sunday and Monday, monitors toured neighborhoods in the city of Homs and in the Damascus suburbs of Doura and Zabadani. When they left, the areas they visited were shelled, and security forces carried out sweeps in which civilians suspected of speaking to the monitors were taken from their homes and shot or had their houses burned down.
“We have credible reports that . . . these people who approach the observers may be approached by security forces or Syrian army and harassed or arrested or even worse, perhaps killed,” Ahmad Fawzi, a spokesman for U.N. envoy Kofi Annan, confirmed to U.N. television.
How did Mr. Annan and the U.N. Security Council react to these horrific reports? By urging the deployment of more monitors. “There is a chance to expand and consolidate the cessation of violence,” Mr. Annan told a closed session of the Security Council, according to reporting by The Post’s Colum Lynch. “Observers not only see what is going on, but their presence has the potential to change the political dynamics.”
Those words well captured the delusion of Mr. Annan and those who support his diplomacy. There has been no “cessation of violence”; numerous Syrians have been killed every day since the supposed U.N. cease-fire went into effect April 1. Thirty people were reported killed on Tuesday alone. The observers are not “changing dynamics” but providing cover and even targets for the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Yet even when faced with stark facts like the reprisal killings in Homs, the ambassadors sound unfazed: “Targeting by Syrian regime of those speaking w/UN monitors outrageous but not unexpected,” tweeted the Obama administration’s U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice. This raises two questions: If such atrocities were predictable, why did the United States vote to send the U.N. monitors to Syria? And why does it support their continued deployment?
The evident answer is that the Obama administration, like its “partners” on the Security Council, wishes to be seen as doing something to stop the bloodshed in Syria without having to commit resources or exert leadership. Sadly, this is far from the first such failure. In a blog at Foreign Policy’s Web site, Michael Dobbs has been documenting the eerie resemblances between the United Nations’ handling of Syria and its history in Bosnia — where an attempt to stop attacks on civilians by dispatching lightly armed peacekeepers in the 1990s led to the worst massacre in postwar European history.
As Mr. Dobbs reported, a 1999 report signed by Mr. Annan himself concluded that the Bosnia mission was “at best, a half measure” and a poor substitute for “more decisive and forceful action to prevent the unfolding horror.” Said that Annan report: “We tried to keep the peace and apply the rules of peacekeeping when there was no peace to keep.”
It’s bad enough that the Obama administration refuses to learn the lessons of previous failures. More galling is its claim that it has made the prevention of atrocities a priority — as Mr. Obama did Monday in announcing the creation of an “atrocities prevention board.” “We see the Syrian people subjected to unspeakable violence, simply for demanding their universal rights,” he said. “And we have to do everything we can.”
Is sending unarmed monitors to besieged cities and shrugging when the people they visit are murdered everything the United States can do? Even in an election year, the answer has to be no.
May 11, 2012
Mr. Obama’s passivity carries risks beyond the continuing loss of innocent life.
THE OBAMA administration has reached an ignominious impasse on Syria. Administration spokesmen now publicly recognize that the United Nations diplomatic initiative it has backed for the past seven weeks has been a failure. They acknowledge — as they should have long ago — that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has no intention of ending violence against his opposition, or meeting any other condition of the “Annan plan.”
Yet President Obama refuses to embrace other options. His administration’s strategy is one of militant passivity: Officials say they are waiting for U.N. envoy Kofi Annan to agree with them that his diplomacy has failed, and to say so to the U.N. Security Council. They are waiting for the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin, which has been pummeling its own pro-democracy movement in the streets of Moscow, to be shamed into abandoning its support for the Assad dictatorship. And they are waiting for the Syrian opposition — which is either in exile or under relentless assault from tanks and artillery — to metamorphose into a coherent alternative with detailed plans for governance.
This strategy will allow Mr. Assad to go on killing indefinitely. Mr. Annan, after all, describes his plan as the only alternative to a Syrian civil war, so he is unlikely to abandon it any time soon. The Russians don’t sound at all shamed: “Things are moving in a positive direction,” Moscow’s U.N. ambassador Vitaly Churkin chirped Tuesday. The Syrian opposition, like any beleaguered resistance to a murderous dictatorship, can be counted on not to reach the high bar set by disdainful desk officers at the State Department.
More than 1,000 men, women and children have died since Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, declared the Annan plan “the best way to end the violence.” But the consequences of U.S. passivity go beyond loss of innocent Syrian life. The prolongation of the conflict poses serious threats to U.S. interests and allies.
Three nascent or foreseeable developments stand out. One is that what began as a secular, peaceful and pro-democracy movement in Syria will degenerate into a sectarian war in which the majority Sunni community targets Mr. Assad’s minority Alawites, while Kurds, Christians and other minorities are caught in the middle. In several parts of the country, including the cities of Homs and Hama, that already has happened.
A second danger is that al-Qaeda and other Sunni extremist movements will take advantage of the chaos. As The Post’s Liz Sly recently reported, jihadists have flowed into Syria from Iraq and Jordan, and operatives linked to al-Qaeda are believed to have carried out a series of bombings in the last five months. A double-suicide bombing in Damascus on Thursday was the worst yet.
The third and most grave threat is that sectarian war in Syria will jump across borders. Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey all have the same divides among Shiite and Sunni sects; Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has said Syria’s fighting could spread “like a house on fire.” Once that happens, outside intervention by the United States would be impossible and the damage uncontainable.
The administration’s experts on Syria recognize the danger. Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey D. Feltman told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “it’s one of the reasons why I said our policy is to try to accelerate the arrival of that tipping point” at which Mr. Assad falls. “The longer this goes on, the higher the risks of long-term sectarian conflict, the higher the risk of extremism. So we want to see this happen earlier,” Mr. Feltman said.
That testimony was delivered on March 1.
May 30, 2012
The observers dispatched by the U.N. Security Council to monitor an illusory “cease fire” in Syria have been reduced to adding up the bodies of massacred civilians. In Houla, a collection of impoverished villages near the city of Homs, they counted 108 after a rampage Friday by a government-backed militia. The dead included 34 women and 49 children.
Fewer than 20 in Houla died from shelling by government tanks and artillery, a U.N. spokesman said Tuesday. The rest were shot at close range and frequently mutilated, their throats cut and their eyes poked out. “Entire families were shot in their houses,” the Associated Press quoted the spokesman, Rupert Colville, as saying.
Horrific as it was, the Houla massacre is not unique, just better documented than the crimes perpetrated by the regime of Bashar al-Assad in towns and cities across Syria. More than 1,000 people have died since the Security Council, with the enthusiastic support of the Obama administration, charged envoy Kofi Annan with implementing a six-point peace plan in late March.
Mr. Annan’s mission has become one of the most costly diplomatic failures in U.N. history. It has allowed the Syrian regime to go on slaughtering civilians and pushed the country down the path to a full-scale sectarian war. But Mr. Annan persists: On Tuesday, he met Mr. Assad in Damascus to renew feckless appeals for steps that the dictator will never take.
The Obama administration persists, too, in declining to exercise the U.S. leadership that would be required to stop the massacres. For the past two months it hid behind Mr. Annan. Now that his plan has become an embarrassment, it is floating a new idea: a Syrian political transition modeled after that of Yemen, where a strongman was pressured into stepping down. The “Yemensky variant” is called that because the key to the new White House figment is none other than Vladimir Putin — the Russian strongman who has been struggling to squelch pro-democracy protesters in his own country.
According to a report in Sunday’s New York Times, President Obama hopes to persuade Mr. Putin in a meeting next month that Russia should press Mr. Assad to step down, leaving in power a successor who could negotiate a democratic transition with the opposition.
The odds that Mr. Putin will make this happen are little better than those for Mr. Annan. It’s not likely that the Russian leader wants democracy in Syria, which would lead to the empowerment of leaders disinclined to maintain the current regime’s alliances. Even if Mr. Putin could be persuaded, he probably lacks the means to force out Mr. Assad and his clan. Mr. Obama’s apparent faith that Mr. Putin is ready to do business with him is at odds with the strongman’s recent behavior — including his abrupt cancellation of a planned visit to Camp David.
The reality is that the killing in Syria will continue, and the threat to vital U.S. interests across the Middle East will grow, until Mr. Obama stops counting on the likes of Kofi Annan and Vladimir Putin to spare him from the responsibility that should be shouldered by a U.S. president. The longer he waits, the greater the cost — in children’s lives, among other things.
June 1, 2012
In its eagerness to avoid exercising U.S. leadership on Syria, the Obama administration is offering a grim and deterministic analysis of the situation there. “There are only three outcomes,” the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice, said Wednesday.
One, she told MSNBC, is that the U.N. diplomatic initiative of Kofi Annan will succeed, “but that is not the most likely scenario.”
The second is for Russia to support greater U.N. pressure against the regime of Bashar al-Assad — but that, too, Ms. Rice conceded, is not happening.
That leaves what the U.S. ambassador called, in another press appearance, “the most probable” outcome: “The violence escalates, the conflict spreads and intensifies, it reaches a higher degree of severity, it involves countries in the region, it takes on increasingly sectarian forms and we have a major crisis not only in Syria but the region.”
Unhappily, we believe that Ms. Rice is absolutely right on that last point: We have been saying for months that the conflagration she describes is the most likely result of the Obama administration’s strategy of relying on the feckless diplomacy of Mr. Annan or an unlikely rescue from autocratic Russia.
But why are there only three possible outcomes? What’s conspicuous about Ms. Rice’s statement — as well as a similar one Thursday by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — is that it excludes any scenario that involves action by the United States. The Obama administration portrays itself as helpless, at the mercy of Mr. Assad and Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. If the former declines to stop slaughtering his people and the latter refuses to stop supporting him, well then — what Ms. Rice calls “a hot regional war in one of the world’s most sensitive areas” is unavoidable.
That’s where we differ. In fact there are steps the United States and its allies could take to head off the conflagration Ms. Rice describes — or at least to temper it. They are not guaranteed to succeed, but they are more likely to bring about the demise of the Assad regime, to prevent sectarian conflict and to stop a regional war. They also will do more to protect vital U.S. interests than a policy of passivity.
The first of these would be to recruit a coalition to create safe zones along and eventually inside Syria’s borders with Turkey and perhaps Jordan, close U.S. allies that already harbor tens of thousands of Syrian refugees. These areas could be defended by air power or by a modest force of Turkish troops; the Turkish government has expressed support for safe zones. With only a handful of loyal military units, the Assad regime would be hard-pressed to challenge the zones while maintaining control over the rest of the country. They could become an area where opposition forces could organize and train, with the help and influence of Western governments. Some experts believe that their very creation could cause the regime to crumble; at a minimum, many civilian lives could be saved.
A lesser option would be for the United States to begin supplying opposition forces of its choosing with weapons and intelligence. The administration argues that this would intensify the fighting — but it is already predicting that the fighting will escalate in any case. If that is to happen, better that pro-democracy forces — which, as White House press secretary Jay Carney correctly noted, compose “the vast majority of the Syrian opposition” — look to the United States for help rather than to Saudi Arabia and other Arab sponsors with sectarian and Islamist agendas.
Pursuing these options would require President Obama to abandon his passivity, to spend political and diplomatic capital, and to set aside his campaign boast that “the tide of war is receding” in the Middle East. But if he does not do so, that tide will swell — and the cost of stemming it will steadily grow.
July 1, 2012
Can Russia be blamed for the failure to stop the bloodshed?
IT WAS just a week ago that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton cheerfully reported that Russia was ready to “lean” on the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad as part of a new United Nations plan for a transitional government. “They have told me that,” she assured one interviewer following a June 30 conference in Geneva. “They’ve decided to get on one horse, and it’s the horse that would back a transition plan that Kofi Annan would be empowered to implement,” she told another.
Oops. It immediately became clear that Moscow had no such intention. In the past week, the official Ms. Clinton cited as her source — Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov — has said repeatedly that his government will not pressure Mr. Assad to leave power. “This is either an unscrupulous attempt to mislead serious people who shape foreign policy or simply a misunderstanding of what is going on,” Mr. Lavrov said Thursday. Western policy, he added, “is most likely to exacerbate the situation, lead to further violence and ultimately a very big war.”
At yet another conference on Syria, in Paris on Friday, Ms. Clinton had changed her tune. Now she is accusing Russia and China of “blockading” progress on Syria, insisting that is “no longer tolerable” and warning that they “will pay a price.” She pleaded with participating governments to lobby Vladimir Putin to change course. This raises an interesting question: Was Ms. Clinton taken in by Mr. Lavrov? Or did she know all along that the new U.N. plan she has been promoting was stillborn?
Either way, the Obama administration’s Syria diplomacy is making it look foolish as well as feckless. U.S. officials, apart perhaps from Ms. Clinton, appear to have no faith in their own policy. Conceding that the plan to appoint a transitional government is going nowhere, while Syrians die by the score every day, they resort to blaming Russia — as if they are shocked to discover that the Kremlin doesn’t want to support a pro-Western, pro-democracy agenda.
In fact Mr. Putin’s intransigence was entirely predictable. Apart from the fact that the Assad regime is a longtime Russian client and arms purchaser, the KGB-trained strongman seethes at the notion of Western intervention to support a popular revolution against a dictator. Blocking such action — and being seen to do so — is his overriding priority. The more Ms. Clinton blames him for “blockading,” the more Mr. Putin preens.
The administration does have reason to pretend that Russia is cooperating or can be induced to do so. Were it to acknowledge that that cause is hopeless — and that action at the United Nations is therefore impossible — it might come under pressure to consider other measures. One would be the protection of an rebel safe zone in northern Syria, which could help turn the military tide against the regime. The Turkish government reportedly proposed — again — at a NATO meeting last week that preparations for such a step be made. According to the Hurriyet newspaper, the idea was rejected by the United States, among others.
So which government is preventing effective action on Syria, and which will pay the price? Ms. Clinton’s attempt to pin the blame on Russia looks like a diversion.
August 9, 2012
Without Western intervention, the bloodshed is likely to go on and on.
HE DEFECTION of Syria’s prime minister to Jordan on Monday prompted yet another White House declaration that the regime of Bashar al-Assad is “crumbling.” While we hope that this is the case, it seems more likely that the administration’s prediction will prove as premature as its previous announcements of Mr. Assad’s imminent downfall, dating back a year. The grim reality is that the regime and the brutal war it is waging in Syria’s cities is likely to go on and on — unless the United States abandons its policy of passivity.
Experts on Syria say that Mr. Assad’s power structure is not so much crumbling as fragmenting along ethnic lines. What remains is a hard core of military units and their leaders, drawn from the minority Alawite sect. The defecting prime minister, like almost all of the 40 other senior government and military officials who have switched sides, is from the majority Sunni population. Other ethnic groups in Syria are going their own ways: The Kurds in the northeast of the country have taken over their own territory and hope to establish an autonomous region like that in Iraq.
What remains of the regime is still able to mount formidable military operations, like the current assault on opposition-held districts in the city of Aleppo. Its scorched-earth strategy leaves no room for compromise. As a new report from the International Crisis Group grimly notes that “the regime has essentially been stripped down to a broadly cohesive, hardcore faction fighting an increasingly bitter, fierce and naked struggle for collective survival. It is mutating in ways that make it impervious to political and military setbacks, indifferent to pressure and unable to negotiate.”
The report also notes that opposition forces had become increasingly anti-Alawite and that fundamentalist Islamic ideology was on the rise, as was a “loss of faith in the West.” Other sources report that hundreds of fighters from al-Qaeda have infiltrated the country and are steadily raising their profile.
All this underlines a point made five months ago by some of the State Department’s own Syria experts: The longer the fighting in the country goes on, the more it evolves toward open sectarian war, promotes extremist ideology and undermines the possibility of an eventual settlement based on pluralism and democratic principles. That’s why the Obama administration was foolish to waste the intervening months backing a feckless U.N. diplomatic initiative and why its current attempts to promote a “managed transition” from the Assad regime are equally misguided.
The only workable policy in Syria is one that aims at ending the civil war as quickly as possible with a victory for the opposition. A coup by regime elements that removes Mr. Assad may still be possible, but only if generals perceive that the war is lost. That means supplying the rebels with the arms they need to stop the tanks and planes of the Assad forces. To protect civilians, safe zones can be established along Syria’s borders with Turkey and Jordan, with help from Turkey or NATO.
Taking such steps would help the United States establish relations and exert influence over those forces that will likely be the next leaders of Syria — the commanders of the Free Syrian Army. A major effort should be made to persuade them to plan for a postwar order in which Alawite and other minorities are protected and a transition to democracy is organized with international assistance. Though U.S. diplomats have been pushing that agenda, they have focused mainly on exiled opposition leaders, rather than those doing the fighting. As veteran diplomat James Dobbins, who helped guide U.S. interventions in the Balkans and Afghanistan, noted in congressional testimony last week, “American influence and ability to advance such goals will tend to be in direct proportion to the help the United States provides the opposition in their fight to overthrow the regime.”
By refusing to step in, the Obama administration is merely ensuring that Syria’s future leaders will be more resistant to the West and perhaps more open to groups such as al-Qaeda. It is also giving the enduring hard core of the Assad regime the space and the opportunity to fight on.
December 30, 2012
As 2012 comes to a close, Syria is headed toward a bloody and chaotic end to what began as a peaceful uprising against an autocratic regime. This would be a catastrophe that could destabilize much of the Middle East, provide al-Qaeda with a new base of operations, and lead to the transfer or even use of chemical weapons.
Above all, the crisis is the result of the brutality and ruthlessness of ruler Bashar al-Assad and the family clique around him, and their supporters in Iran and Russia. But it is also reflects a massive failure of Western — and particularly American — leadership, the worst since the Rwandan genocide two decades ago.
The appalling consequences of nonintervention by leading nations in Rwanda
led, after much soul-searching, to the adoption by the United Nations of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, which provides for the international community to take action to stop crimes against humanity. Some of its leading proponents are senior officials in the Obama administration. But with the U.N. Security Council blocked from action by Russia and China, the administration has utterly failed to take or organize steps that might end the carnage in Syria. Instead, close allies of the United States, including Britain, France and Turkey, have watched with growing dismay as the White House has concocted excuse after excuse for passivity, most recently a claim that direct U.S. aid to Syrian rebel forces — or even to civilian organizations — would be illegal.
For much of the year, the administration embraced the feckless diplomacy of U.N. mediator Kofi Annan, along with the far-fetched prospect that Russia would support a negotiated transition that would replace the Assad regime with a coalition government. Mr. Annan eventually resigned, and now a new envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, is pursuing the same scheme. Though some reports suggest that Moscow is finally ready to support the plan, the chances it will move forward are virtually nil. Rebel forces, which have been slowly but steadily gaining the upper hand on the battlefield with help from an al-Qaeda splinter group, are in no mood to negotiate with the regime. Mr. Assad himself appears prepared to fight to the death, and it’s doubtful that Russia could sway him even
if it tried.
The most likely scenario is that rebel forces will, in a matter of weeks or months, win the war — or at least cause the Assad clique to retreat to its ethnic stronghold on the Mediterranean coast. If the world is lucky, this will happen relatively quickly, or an internal coup will remove Mr. Assad. If not, the bitter endgame could see tens or thousands more deaths and the use by the regime of its chemical weapons. Either way, the postwar scene in Damascus will likely be chaotic, with the Western-backed rebel coalition jockeying with al-Qaeda and remnants of the regime.
If that happens, the United States may find itself with little influence. Most rebel
leaders, and average Syrians, are furious at Washington for withholding meaningful aid. They may be disinclined to listen to calls for dismantling the extremist groups that helped win the war. One way or another, Syria will haunt President Obama’s second term — and, based on the record so far, it will be recorded as one of his greatest failures.
December 31, 2012
December 31, 2012
To the Judges:
Since the conflict in Syria began in March 2011, Jackson Diehl has written about it in editorials that have been prescient, passionate, practical – and 100 percent correct.
Diehl warned early in 2012 that the Obama administration’s diplomatic initiatives were certain to fail. He explained why. He was proved right.
At the same time, he warned what the consequences of failure would be: increasing sectarianism, increasing influence for jihadists, increasing carnage. Sadly, he was proved right again. In releasing a report on Syrian deaths at the start of this year, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay faulted the international community for having “fiddled around the edges while Syria burns” – echoing the conclusion of a Diehl editorial, “As Syria burns,” published seven months earlier.
Throughout a grinding war that is almost impossible to cover from the scene, Diehl has provided a voice for the voiceless, prodded the conscience of a nation and exposed the hypocrisy of an administration that wanted neither to take action nor to acknowledge its passivity.
Diehl’s editorials offered concrete arguments for U.S. engagement based on hardheaded analysis of America’s national interests. And they offered pragmatic, achievable proposals for U.S. action that were far more modest and less risky than the full military intervention that Diehl believed would be unwise – and that the administration tried to present as the only alternative to its inertia.
It is true that the administration has yet to accept Diehl’s advice, even as it has had to admit, one by one, that its counterarguments and alternative proposals were as flawed as he had predicted. During an election year in which President Obama promised that “the tide of war is receding,” it was always a long shot that U.S. policy would change. With the election over, we may see movement, in which case Diehl’s editorials will have provided a rationale and a road map.
Even if that does not happen – in one sense, especially if it does not happen – the editorials are worthy of recognition. Faced by long odds, one choice for an editorial writer is to choose another topic. Another is to damn the odds. Women and children are being slaughtered; some 60,000 people have died so far. The United States has the means to lessen the slaughter but it is standing by, as it vowed after the Rwandan genocide never to do again. Someone ought at least to say so. Jackson Diehl did.
Sincerely,
Fred Hiatt
Biography
Jackson Diehl has been Deputy Editorial Page Editor at The Washington Post since November, 2000.
Winners
Prize Winner in Editorial Writing in 2013:
Tim Nickens and Daniel Ruth
For their diligent campaign that helped reverse a decision to end fluoridation of the water supply for the 700,000 residents of the newspaper's home county
Editorial Writing
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in Editorial Writing in 2013:
Staff
For its editorials in the chaotic wake of Hurricane Sandy, providing a voice of reason, hope and indignation as recovery began and the future challenge of limiting shoreline devastation emerged.
The Jury
The Jury
Michael Pride(Chair )
editor emeritus
Susan Albright
co-managing editor
Bruce Dold
editorial page editor
Ruben Navarrette Jr.
syndicated columnist
Robert Robb
columnist
Winners in Editorial Writing
No award
No award
Joseph Rago
For his well crafted, against-the-grain editorials challenging the health care reform advocated by President Obama.
Tod Robberson, Colleen McCain Nelson and William McKenzie
For their relentless editorials deploring the stark social and economic disparity between the city's better-off northern half and distressed southern half.
Mark Mahoney
For his relentless, down-to-earth editorials on the perils of local government secrecy, effectively admonishing citizens to uphold their right to know.
2013 Prize Winners
Adam Johnson
An exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart.
Ayad Akhtar
A moving play that depicts a successful corporate lawyer painfully forced to consider why he has for so long camouflaged his Pakistani Muslim heritage.
Sharon Olds
A book of unflinching poems on the author's divorce that examine love, sorrow and the limits of self-knowledge.
Caroline Shaw
A highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects (New Amsterdam Records).