President Obama also confronts doubts among his own public about the need and risks of military strikes, especially without UN authorisation. In his weekly radio broadcast on Saturday, he sought to reassure a sceptical public that the action he envisaged would not be “another Iraq or Afghanistan”.
In a nationwide address planned for Tuesday (today) he will again press the case for military strikes. He will do this against a backdrop of opinion polls that have indicated that more people in the US are against rather than for a military attack on Syria. A Pew poll showed only 29 percent approved of military action. An ABC-Washington Post survey found that 59 percent opposed strikes.
Opinion against unilateral military intervention is of course even stronger across the rest of the world. Last week’s summit meeting of the Group of 20 demonstrated that the weight of opinion among this grouping of developed and developing countries was firmly against any military solution to the Syrian issue. Around the grand table at the palatial venue in St Petersburg, more world leaders were opposed to military action than in favour of Washington’s position.
This made President Obama look diplomatically isolated and he left the summit with his hand weakened, not strengthened. If he was hoping to win endorsement for his plan to bomb Syria this wasn't forthcoming – except from France, Canada, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. To drive home this point at his press conference, President Vladimir Putin named the countries that, like Russia, rejected military action.
Hours of informal discussion at the summit failed to shift the balance of opinion on Syria and proved a setback for the advocates of war. In his message to the conference the Pope joined the international chorus of warnings that a “military solution” would be a “futile pursuit”. The UN secretary general reiterated his call for a ‘political’ solution. As did the EU representative, who also emphasised the importance of the UN process.
Where the G-20 summit proved a lost opportunity was in its failure to bridge the divide and slow the momentum for military action by providing impetus to the stalled diplomatic process for a UN-sponsored peace conference in Geneva. Any expectation that energy could be injected to that process to encourage the US to desist from the military option did not materalise. This of course was not surprising against the background of longstanding complaints voiced by UN officials about the lack of will shown by the warring sides and their patrons to pursue a negotiated settlement – an attitude that has prevented the peace conference from convening.
The predominant international sentiment against the use of military force rests on the illegality of such action without UN authorisation and concerns about a repeat of the Iraq blunder that was undertaken on the basis of false intelligence about Saddam Hussain’s never-to-be-found weapons of mass destruction. What has also weighed in with countries that oppose military action is that military strikes would be the prelude and trigger for escalation into a wider conflict that could engulf an already unsettled region.
The argument of US officials that “narrow and limited” airstrikes will be carefully calibrated has few takers among the international community. “Precision strikes” to “degrade” Syria’s military capabilities will not make them legal any more than they will obviate the risk of a wider conflagration. The dubious assumption that underpins confidence about managing the highly uncertain aftermath is that those bombed will silently suffer the ‘punishment’, not retaliate and will also not be helped by their neighbouring allies through reprisal attacks.
The fallout could go beyond these destabilising strategic consequences. As China’s deputy finance minister, Zhu Guangyao, warned at a briefing on the eve of the G-20 summit: “military action could have a negative impact on the global economy” by pushing up oil prices and fuelling an economic downturn. Therefore, economic repercussions could be as consequential for global stability as political ones.
But these considerations were brushed aside or played down by America’s national security team when they presented the case for punitive military action to members of Congress. Faced with a grilling from those senators wanting answers to what-after-the-airstrike questions, administration officials were hard pressed to offer a convincing response. What really mattered, they argued, was action to “enforce the norm” on the use of chemical weapons, banned under international conventions.
The issue of US credibility was placed at the centre of this argument: if the US did not act after their president said it should, American credibility would suffer a grievous blow. This seemed to suggest that ‘preserving credibility’ was a good enough reason to bomb another country and justify the bloodshed and violence that would inescapably be caused by any airstrike.
In fact US leaders have ended up presenting themselves and others with a false choice: that the only option to military action was to wring hands and do nothing. They have argued in other words that the only response is a military one. This is far from true. The choice is not between paralysis and war. There is a range of non-military options available to press the norm on chemical weapons, once it has been conclusively proven that Bashar al-Assad’s government did in fact use them. Tough economic and diplomatic sanctions, an arms embargo, Security Council condemnation, setting up a special tribunal for Syria, referring the violation to the International Criminal Court and a travel ban on the Syrian regime’s top figures are among several punitive measures that can be considered. To take such actions it is, however, necessary to work through the UN, where mechanisms for accountability are available provided incontrovertible evidence is forthcoming. So the choice that has to be made is between force and diplomacy.
Regrettably the Obama administration already seems to have made that choice and is just waiting for Congressional approval to implement its decision to resort to force. But the majority of the international community has preferred to stick to the principles of international law and the UN charter that commit countries to abjure the use of military force except when authorised by the Security Council or in self-defence. As the G-20 summit demonstrated, the majority of its member nations, like the rest of the global community, are unwilling to endorse the violation of international law, which unilateral US military action would constitute.
An American analyst recently wrote that the Syria debate has forced into focus “a new distance between Washington and America”. The rest of this week and the next will see President Obama strive to close this gap. Whether or not he succeeds in that effort, it is apparent that the distance between Washington and much of the rest of the world will widen even more if President Obama takes the grave step of ordering a military attack on another Muslim country.
The writer is special adviser to the Jang Group/Geo and a former envoy to the US and the UK.
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