ANALYSIS
“The United States, they play with us, and they lie to us,” Mohammad Gohoul said this February as he sat on the floor of an apartment in Gaziantep, Turkey, where he now lives as a refuge after fleeing Syria and the tortures he endured there.
Gohoul took part in the demonstrations against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad that broke out in 2011. He says he wanted Syrians to live in a democracy. “We would go to Western embassies and leave flowers there,” he says, a gesture of admiration and a request for support.
Assad met these protests with deadly force. Gohoul was arrested. In his Gaziantep apartment, he showed how he was blindfolded and his hands were bound while he was beaten and shocked with electricity. “For nine months, I didn’t see the sun,” he said. After his release, he went to opposition-held Aleppo and then came to Turkey when Aleppo fell to the Syrian regime late last year.
When Gohoul and other Syrians speak of America’s “lies” and games, they refer to an August 2011 statement made by then-U.S. President Barack Obama that Assad should step aside, which wasn’t followed by any steps to make that happen, and especially to Obama’s “red line” comments on the use of chemical weapons.
Such an event, Obama said in 2012, would change his “calculus” regarding military engagement in Syria. But when Assad’s regime launched a poison gas attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta the following year, killing some 1,400 civilians, Obama famously backed away from retaliation. Instead, he agreed to a Russian-brokered deal that was supposed to have resulted in Syria giving up its chemical weapons stockpiles.
The utter failure of Obama’s decision has been exposed with horrific results by this week’s poison gas attack on Khan Sheikhoun in northern Syria. More than 80 people were killed, including at least 27 children.
Assad had every reason to believe he would get away with it.
The current American president, Donald Trump, made his isolationist bent explicitly clear shortly after the Ghouta chemical weapons attack and while Obama was still president: “We should stop talking, stay out of Syria and other countries that hate us, rebuild our own country and make it strong and great again-USA!” he tweeted in 2013.
And just last week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Assad’s rule was a “political reality that we have to accept.” Assad, it seemed, could count on U.S. ambivalence regardless of his crimes.
Instead, Trump surprised the world.
The 59 cruise missiles he ordered launched at the Shayrat Airfield, from where America believes the chemical weapons attack originated, represent a stark policy reversal for the U.S. president. It is one for which he deserves credit.
It is worth underlining that while Obama publicly sought to rebuild America’s relations with the “Muslim world,” he did little while Syria was torn asunder, and while Assad brought death to hundreds of thousands of its citizens. It is Trump, for all his Muslim-bashing nativism, who has finally deployed American military force against the most prolific murderer in that country.
Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland delivered an awkwardly worded statement yesterday in which she said Assad’s chemical attack “raises grave questions” about the possibility of working with his regime. But Prime Minister Trudeau — also to his credit — has said Canada “fully supports” the American airstrikes.
That statement puts Canada alongside many American allies, including its traditional Sunni Muslim ones in the Middle East, such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which had been disappointed by Obama’s decision not to strike Syria four years ago. Trump’s decision will go some way toward improving those strained ties.
And yet at this point we cannot know what the full impact of these strikes might be. If they are a one-off response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons, they will change little on the ground in Syria: Assad will take note that he cannot safely use sarin gas and will continue slaughtering Syrians with barrel bombs and other more conventional weapons. Russia will stick by him, and the Syrian war will grind on with Assad nearly as secure as he was last week.
If, on the other hand, these strikes signal an American shift toward a policy of regime change, the impact will be monumental. “It’s very, very possible, and, I will tell you, it’s already happened, that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much,” Assad said following the chemical attack.
Dislodging Assad at this point would require massive U.S. commitment, even if all the actual on-the-ground fighting is done by Syrians. It risks, also, a confrontation with Russia. There are other escalatory measures Trump might consider, including establishing no-fly zones and safe havens within Syria, or providing more substantial support to Syrian rebel groups. It seems more likely that Trump will hold to the more limited goal of deterring Assad’s future use of chemical weapons. But Trump has shown himself to be unpredictable, and anything now seems possible.
Michael Petrou is a fellow at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies and the recipient of the 2017 R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellowship.
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