Matt Johnson

*Originally published in Political Fiber, August 31, 2012

The Obama administration has handled the Syrian civil war with startling inconsistency and complacency. Whether it’s electoral politics or a a fear of overreach, something has deflated the once-robust executive stance on human rights in the Middle East.

In the face of indiscriminate atrocities, a steadily increasing casualty count and a widening humanitarian crisis, it’s time to muster the will to intervene in Syria.

On August 20, President Obama made the following statement during a White House news conference:

We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.

But Obama’s current “equation” is oddly divorced from the strength of his past rhetoric.

The most obvious dissonance arises between his inactive Syria policy and his swift, forceful action in Libya. On March 28, 2011, Obama delivered a rousing speech at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. He detailed the nightmare scenario that was avoided in Libya. “We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world. It was not in our national interest to let that happen. I refused to let that happen,” he said.

Why aren’t airstrikes being discussed for Syria? The fighting has already created more than 200,000 refugees and piled up over 18,000 corpses. Just last Sunday, the grisly aftermath of a government-sponsored massacre was uncovered in Daraya, Syria.

Local activists posted a video of blood-soaked bodies sprawled out on a basement floor. A “coordination committee” claims to have found 150 dead bodies crammed into the basement of a mosque; some had been stabbed, while others had bullets lodged in their heads. The borders of the city were sealed off while scores of men, women and children were systematically executed.

Of course, before these orders were carried out, Daraya was ruthlessly shelled from afar. According to local sources, the death toll for the week was over 630, almost half of which were executions.

Unfortunately, Obama will only consider intervention once chemical weapons are either mobilized or used. This strategy flirts with disaster on an offensively gruesome scale. When a regime is already slaughtering civilians without hesitation, it’s simply nonsensical to wait until only the vilest weapons are used.

There’s also no guarantee that “a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around” will be detected in time. Assad’s crimes have already “reverberated across the region.” There has been much talk about “arming the opposition” and the risks entailed by doing so – but these can be circumvented. The U.S. should lobby at the U.N. for an air campaign to protect defenseless cities like Daraya.

Because of the imposing (but surmountable) difficulties involved, an international coalition similar to the one that acted in Libya should be formed. Such cooperation is of paramount importance because, according to a recent article from the U.S. Naval Institute, a mission in Syria would require “…at least 191 strike aircraft, at least six times the number of comparable aircraft in the opening phase of Odyssey Dawn [the intervention in Libya], and perhaps several times more bombers and cruise missiles” (brackets added).

The necessity of a greater deployment of force stems from Syria’s expansive integrated air defense system. Although the U.S. has more than enough fighters and bombers, the international community has already asserted its willingness to complement American action in Libya. The obvious hurdles are Russia and China, but the case must be made regardless.

In December 2006, former UN General Secretary Kofi Annan lamented the lack of engagement in Darfur by chiding, among others, “…those whose reflex of solidarity puts them on the side of governments and not of peoples…”

In the wake of a decade of war and the air campaign in Libya, many commentators and leaders have a reflex of inaction. Hopefully the United States won’t yield to it.