Obama risks being pushed into a prolonged military campaign

Syria strikes: Obama risks being pushed into a prolonged military campaign

Rightwingers' long months of frustration at perceived US impotence are in danger of boiling over into violent action

• • Simon Tisdall

What was initially conceived as an American warning slap at Bashar al-Assad could be turning into something significantly more far-reaching as Republican hawks try to push a rudderless Barack Obama into launching a more robust, "strategic", and prolonged military campaign in Syria than previously anticipated.

Few claim to be privy to the White House's inner deliberations, or to know exactly which way Obama will jump. After all, he has spent more than two years resisting any direct involvement in Syria's civil war. The political battle in Washington over the level and degree of US militaryengagement will be intense, forming a key element in the pro- and anti-intervention debate.

But Assad's alleged use of chemical weapons against civilians in Ghouta, near Damascus, on 21 August is no longer the principal casus belli, if it ever was, for an American-led attack. Long months of frustration at perceived US impotence in the Syrian crisis, and the damage it is doing to Washington's regional interests and those of its allies, are in danger ofboiling over into violent action.

Having surrendered the initiative by giving Congress what will effectively be a deciding vote, Obama now needs his hardline opponents' support to avoid a Cameron-style humiliation in the House of Representatives. On one interpretation, this prospect has produced a bellicose shift in White House thinking. Alternatively, Obama may simply be telling the hawks what they want to hear, in order to secure their votes.

Retired US general Jack Keane, speaking to the BBC, claimed to have discerned a harder line. Keane said that Obama on Monday told two leading Republican senators, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, that the aim is no longer simply to "deter" Assad's use of chemical weapons but also to "upgrade" rebel military capabilities and "significantly degrade" the regime's overall military capacity. A previously critical McCain declared himself "encouraged".

If the "degradation" objective is officially endorsed, Syria could face a sustained, weeks- or months-long assault by sea- and air-launched missiles, and maybe by long-range stealth bombers, while the US tries to attain it. This sort of operation might more closely resemble the 1999 Nato campaign in Serbia during the Kosovo crisis than, say, the limited cruise missile strike ordered by Bill Clinton against the al-Shifa factory in Khartoum in 1998, a pharmaceutical plant wrongly identified as a chemical weapons facility.

The Serbian intervention ended with the overthrow of the late Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, who was subsequently put on trial for war crimes at the international criminal court in The Hague. This is a journey the White House, while still denying any overt intention to topple Assad, hopes the Syrian leader will undertake, sooner rather than later.

The implications for Syria and the region of a prolonged American-led campaign, if that is what transpires, would be complex and dangerous. Inside the country, Assad has had plenty of time to prepare for US attacks. Gen Keane suggested mobile missile launchers, used to deploy chemical weapons, and artillery have already been moved closer to civilian areas. If they are targeted, significant civilian casualties may ensue, as happened repeatedly in Iraq in 2003 and Afghanistan after 2001.

What the UN refugee agency has termed this century's worst humanitarian crisis, with 5 million Syrians internally displaced and 2 million already forced to leave the country, could acquire even more catastrophic proportions. Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan are all struggling to cope with the current emergency. A further escalation, and further waves of human misery, could prove permanently destabilising, both politically and in security terms.

Assad has shown again and again since the uprising began that, if pushed, he will push back even harder. And since it may be safely assumed that key intelligence and insider knowledge supporting any American military campaign will be furnished by Israel, it also seems possible that Israel will come into Assad's missile sights, if and when push really comes to shove.

This sort of cross-border escalation, triggered by the existential "degrading" of the regime's power now mooted in Washington, could also draw in the other big regional player, Iran, whose forces – diplomatic, paramilitary and proxy – are already closely engaged, not least via the Shia fighters of Lebanon's Hezbollah.

Tehran hardliners, anxious to shape the greenhorn presidency of the newly-elected Hassan Rouhani, will seize on American action as proof that the "Great Satan" must be confronted, not conciliated. They may push for direct intervention by Iran itself, rather than see their key Arab ally fall. They will certainly be in no mood to talk nuclear compromises with the west.

From anarchic Egypt to schismatic Iraq to restless, repressed Turkey to Yemen, the Arabian peninsula and the smouldering Maghreb, the negative impact and unforeseeable, unwanted repercussions of what might be seen as another "American war" in the Muslim lands would be significant and, in the longer run, potentially contrary to both western interests and the region's desperately needed future development.

Nothing would better serve al-Qaida's warped agenda. Nothing would more quickly increase the threat to every airport or subway train. Nothing would more effectively set at odds and divide, again, the western and Muslim worlds. For as they have proved before, the American rightwingers now pushing Obama towards open-ended warfare have few equals as recruiting sergeants for terror.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/03/syria-obama-risks-pushed-prolonged-military-campaign