In 2013, nearly two and a half years into an uprising-turned-war, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad launched a chemical weapons attack that killed more than 1,400 people, including 400 children. U.S. president Barack Obama's prior declarations that chemical weapons were a “red line” raised expectations that he would carry out limited strikes against Assad. After two weeks of debate and diplomacy, the United States announced that it had instead reached an agreement to destroy Syria's chemical weapons stockpile.
Supporters of this outcome credit Obama for avoiding action that might have provoked serious retaliation by the Assad regime or dragged the United States into a quagmire.Footnote 1 They hail the removal of Syria's chemical weapons, the primary U.S. national security concern in the conflict, without military force. In this view, Obama not only advanced the prohibition against such weapons but also exercised a prudence that “faced down the war machine,”Footnote 2 rose above the “Washington playbook,”Footnote 3 and redefined U.S. foreign policy.Footnote 4
Critics counter that Obama's failure to follow through on his promises undermined America's credibility and reduced the country to “a bystander to the greatest atrocity of our time.”Footnote 5 Obama's detractors accuse him of sacrificing Syria to avoid jeopardizing a nuclear deal with Iran, a key Assad backer.Footnote 6 They say that he wrongly invoked historical analogies of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya rather than seriously engage the ways that pressure on Syria could yield very different results.Footnote 7
Though starkly opposed, these views have in common the fact that they are grounded in American debates about American policymaking and America's place in the world. Missing are the perspectives of Syrians themselves. Not all Syrians opposed Assad, and not all opponents endorsed U.S. military intervention.Footnote 8 Yet a review of available opinion shows that many Syrian oppositionists were in favor of limited strikes. Their call was motivated not by enthusiasm for bombardment of their homeland, but by desperation given the absence of any comparable alternative for punishing Assad and deterring subsequent atrocities.
Syrians’ expressions of this stance offer a counterpoint to other issues that have figured prominently in analysis of the red line episode, such as strategic calculations, debates on legality, and political blowback. Moreover, they cast valuable light on the specifically ethical significance of this juncture in international affairs. In putting them at the forefront, I follow Michael Walzer in seeking to draw out “practical morality” from “experiences that men and women have really had and . . . arguments that they really have made.”Footnote 9 Beyond grounding moral reasoning in lived historical examples, Syrians’ words invite us to think about the ethics of military intervention from the oft-overlooked vantage point of those on whose behalf intervention would have taken place. This is especially imperative given that the Syrian men and women considered here were disadvantaged in three ways: they were the ones most hurt by the no-strike outcome; their opinions had little effect on the U.S. decision; and their appeals were ultimately denied.
Analyzing a selection of such voices, I suggest that the Syrians’ perspectives highlight three different dimensions of the ethical case for limited strikes in 2013. First, they remind us that the ethical context of the red line question was Syrians’ intense sense of abandonment by the international community. Second, they emphasize the ethical stakes of the limited strikes; namely the refusal of an opportunity to hold the Assad regime accountable, weaken it from within, and thus change the equation of the war. Third, they make sense of the ethical consequences of the nonintervention outcome, and especially its effect in deepening civilians’ despair, accelerating extremism, and convincing the Syrian regime and its allies that they could kill with impunity.
This essay explores these points in five parts. To show how accessible these Syrian views were to Western readers, I limit my discussion to examples available online in English. I supplement these sources with interviews that I have conducted with more than four hundred displaced Syrians since 2012 in order to signal how published opinion resonates with what I have found during my ongoing field research.Footnote 10
Background
Against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, citizens from across Syria launched peaceful protests against the authoritarian Assad regime. The regime responded with violence, and the opposition eventually took up arms. The regime intensified its reprisals, state and nonstate actors became involved, territory fragmented between regime and rebel control, and the resulting humanitarian crisis reached catastrophic levels.
In response, Obama denounced Assad. He incrementally authorized support to rebels, first in the form of nonlethal aid and then, in June 2013, in the form of limited arms to vetted fighters.Footnote 11 However, Obama communicated a clear unwillingness to intervene militarily. At the same time, the White House gave special attention to Assad's arsenal of chemical weapons, voicing concern that he would use them against his own people or Israel, or that they might fall into extremists’ hands.Footnote 12 In August 2012, Obama stated, “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.”Footnote 13 In April 2013, U.S. intelligence confirmed that the regime had used chemical weapons. The United Nations formed a mission to investigate these and other charges, arriving in Damascus on August 18, 2013.
Three days later, a large-scale rocket and artillery attack hit rebel-held Ghouta in the suburbs of Damascus. Videos of glazed-eyed victims suffocating, choking, and foaming at the mouth suggested the use of sarin nerve gas. After careful scrutiny, U.S. intelligence concluded that chemical weapons had been used and that the Syrian government was responsible.
As the world turned its attention to Obama's red line pledge, U.S. and British warships and French fighter jets were deployed to the region. Plans were drawn to fire missiles at some fifty targets.Footnote 14 Obama repeatedly emphasized the limited character of the proposed strikes. “We are looking at the possibility of a limited, narrow act,” he told the press. “We're not considering any open-ended commitment. We're not considering any boots-on-the-ground approach.”Footnote 15
On August 29, the British parliament voted against participation in the operation. Obama announced that he would not order strikes, but instead seek authorization from Congress. As debate ensued, opinion polls found that six in ten Americans opposed airstrikes.Footnote 16 While the majority of representatives were undecided, many more were against than in favor.Footnote 17
On September 9, Secretary of State John Kerry publicly remarked that Assad could avert strikes if he admitted that the country possessed chemical weapons and then surrendered them. Within hours, Russia informed Kerry that the Syrian government had agreed to just that. The United States and Russia finalized an agreement and the UN Security Council endorsed it. Congress postponed its vote on limited strikes indefinitely.
Ethical Context: Anguished Abandonment
It is important to understand the ethical context in which many Syrian oppositionists called for U.S. strikes after the Ghouta chemical weapons attack: exasperation and outrage after two-and-a-half years of what they understandably saw as international indifference to Assad's atrocities. By 2013, numerous human rights investigations had already concluded that the Assad regime's killing, torture, and indiscriminate assaults amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.Footnote 18 Syrian oppositionists appealed to the international community for protection of some kind, be it no-fly zones, humanitarian corridors, or weapons for the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA).
External actors repeatedly responded with words but no action, and the regime repeatedly escalated its assaults. Among supporters of the revolution, the shift from hope for international solidarity to disillusionment with the world's silence can be traced according to the names that activists gave Friday protests. In September 2011, crowds assembled under the banner, “Friday for International Protection.”Footnote 19 By February 2013, they instead brandished the slogan, “Friday of: The international community is Al-Assad's partner.”Footnote 20
That sense of abandonment also came out repeatedly in my interviews. “We have started to develop a resentment against the world,” one man told me in fall 2012. “We now think that the whole world is against us.”Footnote 21 A man I interviewed a week before the chemical weapons attack agreed, saying, “The world has left us to face this monster by ourselves.”Footnote 22 Particularly infuriating was the pattern by which international actors made toothless condemnations of Assad that remained unenforced by concrete action to aid civilians from his onslaught. The village of Kafranbel decried this complicity in one of its sarcastic weekly banners in June 2013: “Obama! Your request to Iran and Hezbollah's terrorists to leave Syria made them wet their pants in fear. Thanks.”Footnote 23
Syrian oppositionists warned that this failure of humanitarian responsibility would lead to even worse ethical consequences. A man I interviewed in September 2012 was one of many who saw it as a main factor pushing a civic uprising for freedom toward religious extremism. “No one has helped us. No one has put his hand in our hand and joined with us,” he lamented. “The world is watching and knows what is happening in Syria. So in this case we have no one else but God.”Footnote 24
Intellectual and former political prisoner Yassin al-Haj Saleh penned similar alarms as early as September 2011: “Hundreds of thousands of Syrians feel they are left without support . . . . How long are they expected to follow the dictates of revolutionary conscience, instead of responding instinctively to protect themselves and preserve their lives?”Footnote 25 Eight months later, Saleh described the rise of a “militant nihilism” among brutalized Syrians, attributing it to the regime's relentless violence, the ineffectiveness of the exile-based opposition leadership, and the inaction of regional and international powers. Inaction left Syrians feeling that the world “is indifferent to them, if not actively conspiring against them.”Footnote 26 The outcome, he concluded, was a radical loss of trust in everything once believed to be reliable, including international commitments to human rights. If change did not happen soon, he predicted, “nihilism will become unstoppable.”Footnote 27
Ethical Stakes: Opportunity to Reset
The brazenness of the 2013 chemical weapons attack galvanized new attention surrounding the question of atrocity prevention in Syria. For Syrian oppositionists who supported military intervention, the ethical stakes were high. They argued that even limited strikes could save lives by destroying infrastructure that the regime used to kill civilians. Strikes would show Assad that he could not continue to slaughter civilians with impunity. On the flip side, if foreign powers continued to deliberate but opted against strikes, Assad would understand the purported red line to be a green light to do whatever he wished.
Many Syrians who called for limited strikes believed that, far beyond just addressing the issue of chemical weapons, they could shift the war's balance of power against Assad. France also viewed the operation in such terms: “The idea was to choose targets in a manner that would bring [Bashar] to the negotiating table,” France's foreign minister explained.Footnote 28 French officials concluded that strikes could cause the regime to crumble from within. Indeed, as the United States considered the operation, some senior figures in the Assad regime secretly contacted France indicating their desire to defect.
On the ground, witnesses pointed out signs of this potential crumbling. Syrian observers and journalists reported that the army was in a “state of high alert and fear”Footnote 29 and experiencing a “wave of new defections.”Footnote 30 The number of people leaving Syria for Lebanon doubled, a conspicuous surge of them from among the pro-regime elite.Footnote 31 Oppositionists argued that many supposed loyalists stuck with Assad on the expectation that he would win against poorly equipped rebels, but would switch sides if Assad faced real resistance from foreign militaries. In an interview with the website Syria Deeply, veteran activist Michel Kilo discussed this incipient cascade of defections and hailed their significance:
Michel Kilo: Even before a strike there are noticeable changes in Syria. For example, there's been a wave of defections, there's been a check on the role of Russia in the conflict, and there is a rethink of the role of Iran in the future of our country. Even though the Americans haven't yet launched their strike, there are positive effects [of the threat alone], from this step forward by the international community that was long overdue . . .
Syria Deeply: Now that all this has happened, do you think the U.S. should still go forward with the strike? Or that it's achieved enough and should abandon the plans?
Michel Kilo: The U.S. is now obligated to carry out the strike. If President Obama decides not to launch this attack, after he said that it's unacceptable for [Bashar al-] Assad to hide behind Russian support, it would be a huge defect for the U.S. to pull back. And after all its declarations, stating openly that a chemical attack is unacceptable, after all the announcements that a chemical attack will not go unpunished, [abandoning the strike] would be a major boost for the Assad regime.Footnote 32
If there was a chance that an intervention could weaken Assad and move the war toward a conclusion, many Syrians regarded it as an ethical obligation to try. To do otherwise was to say that Syrian lives were not worth the cost of limited strikes. As the revolutionary network Local Coordination Committees declared: “Abandoning a people equals abandoning humanity itself . . . . The time of death has lasted for too long in Syria. Our people wait for help from the world.”Footnote 33
Ethical Consequences: Despair and Extremism
If the promise of a red line raised Syrians’ hopes of action against Assad, aborting those strikes was the death knell for such hopes.Footnote 34 For many, the chemical weapons agreement communicated two unconscionable shifts: it recast a humanitarian emergency as a question of chemical disarmament, and it transformed Assad from a deplored dictator into a partner in that disarmament. “In the eyes of the world, the Syrian crisis has been addressed duly,” wrote a revolution leader. “Syrians have to be grateful for their extended tragedy being reduced to use of weapons of mass destruction. Death by all other means, denial of their rights, destruction of their country were all lesser matters.”Footnote 35
For many oppositionists, the world's nonresponse to their suffering compounded that suffering. Handwritten signs in rebel-controlled areas expressed pained messages such as, “I, the Syrian citizen, am worth an onion peel to the international community”;Footnote 36 “The only project under international support is the project to destroy Syria, history, the nation, and the human”;Footnote 37 and “When the Syrian people chanted ‘Death and Not Humiliation,’ it did not occur to them that these were two separate things, that al-Assad would do the killing and the world would humiliate them.”Footnote 38
Human rights activist Razan Zeitouneh denounced the West for exchanging its “moral ethical obligations for the legal ones.” Her words are worth quoting at length:
Why does the West insist on dealing with our dead and injured as if they were less valuable than a Westerner—and as if our casualties don't even deserve respect or compassion?
After the chemical massacre in Syria's two Ghoutas, we believed that the world would, at last, take our interests into account in one way or another. We did not believe that, upon seeing hundreds of dead children, the international community would act only in favour of its narrow interests . . .
As a human rights activist who has always believed in the humanitarian principles of the United Nations, I can talk for hours about the psychological breakdown and the amount of humiliation I felt after the adoption of UN Security Council resolution 2118. This resolution implies that Bashar al-Assad will continue to rule Syria for at least one more year, with the international community's acquiescence. The resolution also reveals the lie we have all been living regarding the human rights principles that have not been applied, not even in form, in Syria. If this is how I have been affected, how does the ordinary Syrian citizen, who has never believed our misleading slogans about human unity and equality, feel after suffering such discrimination and injustice? . . .
Syrians will not forget that the international community forced the regime to dismantle its chemical weapons, yet could not force it to break the siege on a city where children are dying out of hunger on a daily basis. “Could not” is not an accurate word for what has happened and what is happening; “did not want” or “did not have the interest” might be more accurate. The Syrians will not forget that.Footnote 39
Echoes of this sentiment abound. From the rebel-controlled Damascus suburbs, the newspaper Enab Baladi declared, “Once again the Syrian people lost their bet on the international community . . . . The Syrians are destined to be let down whenever they seek help; they are destined to continue their struggle alone.”Footnote 40 A man I interviewed during this period elaborated:
It's not just that [other countries] did nothing. The bigger problem was that they were telling us, “Rise up! We are with you. Revolt! We support you” . . . . When Obama says that chemical weapons are a red line, people are encouraged to stand by the revolution because they have international supporters. So when the regime crosses these lines and there's no enforcement of these threats, the population enters into the stage of despair . . . . The international community made the Syrian society hopeless and suicidal.Footnote 41
Despair, as Saleh and others warned earlier, was a win for the two enemies of the revolution's civic core: religious extremism and Assad. According to the journalist Sam Dagher, the chemical weapons attack and the lack of international response to it constituted the “single most important event” helping Salafi-jihadi groups recruit militants and justify violence.Footnote 42 In the wake of the nonstrike decision, eleven Islamist groups formally rejected the Syrian National Coalition, the nationalist opposition's exile-based leadership.Footnote 43 Exasperated with Obama, the countries of Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia accelerated assistance to groups that the United States rejected. With Saudi support, Islamist militias merged into the Salafist Army of Islam, and then into the new Islamic Front that November.Footnote 44 The al-Qaeda–linked Nusra Front, formed in 2012, and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), formed in 2013, continued to grow. When the United States and European allies began bombing in Syria in 2014, they targeted only ISIS. An activist spoke for many when he decried that “the root of the Syrian crisis—the Assad regime—is left aside.”Footnote 45
Meanwhile, the nonstrike outcome emboldened Assad and his backers. Russia initiated aerial bombardment of rebel-held areas on the regime's behalf in 2015. At the time of the 2013 chemical weapons attack, the Syrian conflict had claimed around one hundred thousand lives and produced 1.7 million refugees.Footnote 46 As of this writing, the death toll (likely far) exceeds half a million. There are approximately 6.6 million Syrian refugees, and an equivalent number of internally displaced people.Footnote 47
Conclusion
Chemical weapons inspectors eventually located and removed 1,300 tons of chemical weapons from Syria. Nevertheless, the Assad regime carried out another 294 chemical weapons attacks during the five years following the chemical weapons agreement.Footnote 48 One was a sarin gas attack that killed some eighty civilians in April 2017. President Donald Trump responded by launching fifty-nine missiles at a Syrian regime airfield, aiming at infrastructure used to deliver chemical weapons and giving advance warning to Russia in order “to minimize risk to Russian or Syrian personnel.”Footnote 49 This one-off strike, unaccompanied by larger military or political engagement, was too little, too late. By 2017, the Assad regime, assisted by the Russian air force, had retaken significant swaths of territory from rebel hands, including strategically critical Eastern Aleppo. The growth of Islamist groups and Kurdish militias, direct military intervention by Turkey, and the establishment of the Islamic State rendered the war landscape vastly more complex than it had been in mid-2013. Correspondingly, the FSA and Syrian National Coalition had become shadows of the bodies that once inspired popular confidence.
Had the red line–intervention taken place, it would have occurred in entirely distinct political circumstances and might have resulted in very different outcomes. Thinking through that counterfactual occurrence, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum interviewed twenty former members of Obama's Syria team and ten nongovernment Syria experts. The study concludes that limited strikes in August 2013, followed by intensive diplomacy, “could have been a watershed event, improving the conflict's outcome with respect to the level of killing and atrocities.”Footnote 50
As this essay has shown, many Syrians at the time said the same thing. Their urgent pleas for limited strikes cut against legalistic arguments precluding them.Footnote 51 They also controvert assumptions that U.S. intervention is always imperialist and warmongering, or that use of military force is never appropriate. They offer a particular challenge to Americans who, voicing opposition to Obama's proposed intervention, put forth the slogan “No war on Syria.” Had American public debates given more space to Syrian voices, Americans might have had to confront the nightmare of the war that was already underway in Syria. They thus might have considered the ways that U.S. strikes, rather than provoking aggression, might have punished and deterred the war's main aggressor. It is too late to seize that opportunity to effect that positive turning point in the Syrian war. However, it is not too late to learn from those Syrians whom we failed. Doing so challenges us to think deeply about circumstances in which there is not only an ethical case for limited strikes but also an ethical duty.
