Bromund: In Syria, Obama calls on the J.V. team
President Barack Obama meets with members of Congress in the cabinet room of the White House. Credit: Getty Images
This week, Congress voted to give President Barack Obama the authority to arm and train Syrian rebels. But we are not fighting to win. The administration is fighting to avoid looking bad.
The idea of aiding the rebels is hardly new. The administration has been promising aid for more than a year and, as The Wall Street Journal reported in July 2013, its lawyers have been arguing about the legality of assistance since at least 2012.
In June 2013, The Christian Science Monitor reported the United States would deliver light weapons to the rebels to use against the regime of President Bashar Assad "within a few weeks," though Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes notably refused to give an "inventory" of what the United States would provide.
Last September, the Daily Beast reported a similar promise, while recognizing that the previous one had not been fulfilled. In January, Reuters reported that small arms deliveries had at last begun, and that the United States was allowing other nations to supply U.S.-made anti-tank missiles.
In June, the administration requested $500 million for direct U.S. aid. It has now received the necessary congressional authorization, though the rebels are supposed to fight Islamists murderers as well as Assad.
All this proves three points.
First, to a very limited extent, we've been arming the rebels for a while, and we've allowed other nations to arm them more energetically.
Second, we've not been serious about it: If Mr. Obama had wanted to act decisively, he wouldn't have let his lawyers argue for a year.
Third, the administration still doesn't have a strategy in Syria. Administration officials are doing what they've done since 2012, which is to make a lot of promises. The point of spreading all these leaks about aid has never been to prioritize aiding the rebels; it's been to give the appearance of doing something.
That's why, last June, the U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, resigned. He quit because he found it "ever harder to justify our policy," and called on the administration to supply Free Syrian Army with money for salaries and more and better weaponry.
The new plan, by contrast, is to arm and train 5,000 carefully vetted volunteers. That sounds appealing. But just because the United States makes trainers and equipment available does not mean the volunteers actually exist. Moreover, any volunteers we do find and train will still, in military terms, be amateurs.
Mr. Obama does not want to get involved: He has been consistent about that. His administration has, therefore, devised the best-sounding plan it could that avoids a major U.S. commitment. Thus, the central element in the president's plan, as he regularly proclaims, is that it does not involve U.S. ground forces.
Unfortunately, the United States has passed the limit of what can be achieved by strategies that focus on sounding good. Nor is there any new, broad coalition against the Islamists: The 10 nations the administration identified at the NATO summit in Wales are our core European allies, and the 30 nations that gathered in Paris on Thursday have so little in common they didn't even mention Syria.
While the president called the Islamists the junior varsity team in January, it's obvious that they are professionals at murder. I hate to be rude about the Syrian rebels, who are risking their lives. But it's not the Islamists who are the JV squad: it's our guys. That's why they need training.
So the new plan is much the same as the old plan. It relies on others to do the dirty work and promises more than it can deliver. Unfortunately, the motto of the administration's approach to Syria has not changed: If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing poorly.
Ted R. Bromund is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation's Thatcher Center for Freedom.
