Secretary of State John Kerry has been lobbying President Obama throughout the past year to bomb the Syrian government.
Kerry has asked the President to attack “specific regime targets, under cover of night, ‘to send a message’ to the regime” of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, according to The Altantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.
The purpose of the sorties would be “not to overthrow Assad but to encourage him, and Iran and Russia, to negotiate peace.”
Kerry also said that Washington “wouldn’t have to claim credit for the attacks,” in Goldberg’s words, “but Assad would sure know the missiles’ return address.”
President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have shot down the proposals one-by-one with regularity. At one point, Biden reportedly said to Kerry, in private: “John, remember Vietnam? Remember how that started?” (Kerry served in the Navy for more than three years during the Vietnam war).
Obama responded to the lobbying effort in December by forbidding anyone on his National Security Council (NSC) but Defense Secretary Ash Carter from tendering to him “proposals for military action.”
“Pentagon officials understood Obama’s announcement to be a brushback pitch directed at Kerry,” Goldberg wrote.
Carter has repeatedly appeared before Congress throughout the past year to defend the administration’s decision to not advocate for humanitarian intervention in Syria. He has described calls to shoot down Syrian government aircraft—via the establishment of a No-Fly Zone—as ineffective and risky. Carter has similarly rejected calls by lawmakers for the US military to create a humanitarian corridor in Syria, noting additionally, at one point, that the “safe zone” could see Syrian refugees abroad forcibly repatriated into a warzone.
Kerry is not by himself in his lobbying campaign. Goldberg noted that US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power has joined in the effort, arguing, as she did in her 2002 book, that the US should intervene militarily to stop a government from massacring its own citizens.
At one point, President Obama reportedly rebuked Power at a NSC meeting, saying: “Samantha, enough, I’ve already read your book.”
In recent weeks, the administration’s Syria policy has yielded limited success. Warring parties and their foreign enablers–including the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran—have agreed to a fragile ceasefire. The two-week-cessation of hostilities is currently slated to last until midnight on Friday, Damascus time.
On Wednesday, UN Special Envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura said he hoped the armistice would go past the weekend.
“From the UN point of view…there was an open-ended concept regarding the cessation of the hostilities,” he said. De Mistura spoke to reporters in Geneva, where UN-brokered negotiations are scheduled to resume later in the week.
The High Negotiations Committee, an organization representing the opposition had opposed extending the peace deal beyond two weeks, but The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that it could drop this position.
“If it saves more lives, let it continue,” committee representative Salem Al-Meslet told the newspaper.
