Should the US Have Intervened in Syria in 2013?

The year 2023 marked twenty years since the US-led invasion of Iraq — an invasion that resulted in a swift military victory over Saddam’s forces, followed by state collapse, civil war, and endless chaos. Looking back on the anniversary of this most inglorious of wars, many commenters painted a picture of good intentions gone catastrophically awry. Of an intervention that damaged American credibility, killed hundreds of thousands, and poisoned domestic politics. A stark warning on the dangers of military adventures.

Yet Iraq is not the only foreign policy disaster to mark a significant anniversary that year. A decade ago, the US stood on the brink of another intervention in the Middle East, only to pull back at the last second. The result: chaos and carnage equal to anything in Iraq.

The Ghouta Massacre and Obama’s Red Line

The rockets that fell on Ghouta that night were unlike any that had fallen before. A rebel-held suburb in greater Damascus, Ghouta had been placed under a state of siege by Syrian regime forces. Forces that, over two years into the civil war, were already well-versed in atrocities.

But the massacre that unfolded early in the morning of August 21, 2013, would be on a whole new level. Not long after the rockets landed, civilians far from the impact site reported feeling their eyes sting. It was, one survivor later told Western newspapers, like being inside a kitchen when someone is frying chillies.

Closer to where the rockets fell, the symptoms were far less benign. In those unfortunate streets, people convulsed on the ground, foam seeping from their mouths. Women, children, and men all died in agony, suffocating as their bodies were wracked by spasms.

The culprit was sarin, a lethal nerve agent first developed by the Nazis. By dropping it on Ghouta, the Assad regime had just carried out the deadliest chemical attack in decades. By US estimates, 1,429 civilians died that night, a number that included 426 children.

More importantly from the Pentagon’s perspective, the attack also crossed an American red line — one that had been laid down by President Obama almost exactly a year earlier. A crossing that seemed all but guaranteed to ensure the US would enter the Syrian Civil War. Back in December of 2010, a Tunisian fruit vendor had self-immolated during a protest — a dramatic act that kicked off the Arab Spring.

Across multiple states in North Africa and the Middle East, long-serving tyrants were toppled, most famously Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. When the protests hit Syria, things took a far more brutal course. From the moment people took to the streets in the southwestern city of Deraa, Bashar al-Assad’s security forces responded with overwhelming might.

Crowds were fired upon. Protestors were summarily executed. Survivors were dragged away and tortured.

By August 2011, reports of regime-directed murder and mutilation had grown so frequent that President Obama called for Assad to step aside. But with the US then busy intervening in Libya, the White House didn’t take any concrete steps to ensure Assad stood down. On August 20, 2012, President Obama informed reporters that America had red lines in Syria — the biggest of which was the use of chemical weapons.

“A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized,” the president said. Although Obama didn’t spell it out, the underlying assumption was that a chemical attack would invite an immediate, military response.

Escalating Chemical Attacks and International Paralysis

Assad did not seem to get the message. Just four months later, in December of 2012, the Syrian regime used poison gas for the first time, dispersing Agent 15 over a neighborhood in Homs city, killing seven. When that invited no retaliation, Assad’s forces grew bolder.

March 19, 2013, has the distinction of being the day of the first recorded sarin attack of the Syrian Civil War, when the nerve agent was released in the Khan al-Assal neighborhood of Aleppo. In that case, both the government and opposition groups blamed each other. But there were no such ambiguities over what happened next.

That month and the next, Syria suffered multiple chemical attacks. By June, the French government was declaring it had evidence of multiple sarin attacks carried out by government forces. The allegations were strong enough that the UN authorized a team headed by Professor Åke Sellström to investigate.

Yet the US government still didn’t deem Obama’s red line to have been crossed. Then came the Ghouta attack, and all remaining ambiguity evaporated. By September 15, the Sellström team would have solid proof that sarin had been used in the massacre.

But even beforehand, the pressure was building for America to respond. In Europe, both France and the UK indicated they would join any military intervention. On Syria’s border, Turkey was demanding an aerial campaign that would cripple the Assad regime.

Yet Obama would never order the expected strikes.

Ghosts of Iraq and Libya Haunt the Decision

The debate over whether to strike Syria was a moral minefield. On the one hand, there was the need to uphold international norms against the use of chemical weapons and the fear that failing to act could both encourage other rogue states and make the US look weak. On the other, there were fears that strikes against regime targets could topple Assad so quickly that the Syrian government would lose control of its WMDs.

The Pentagon believed airstrikes could only destroy about 30 percent of Assad’s stockpiles, leaving the rest open to potential seizure by jihadi forces. Secret nuclear talks with Syria-backer Iran were underway, and the White House feared airstrikes might cause the Iranians to pull out. But most of this was mere window dressing.

The real discussion was about the ghosts haunting the government — the ghosts of two other interventions in the Middle East that had failed spectacularly. Just two years prior, in 2011, Washington and its allies had set out to stop Gaddafi massacring anti-regime demonstrators by imposing a no-fly zone over Libya. Quickly, the goal of the mission had broadened.

Government forces had been bombed, Gaddafi overthrown and killed, and the rebels handed victory. Only what followed hadn’t been the triumph of liberal democracy in Tripoli. It had been state implosion — a collapse into chaos that sent Libya spiraling into a hell from which it still hasn’t returned.

Iraq loomed even larger. After invading in 2003, the US-led coalition had overseen a total breakdown of law and order that led to thousands of American and tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and continued to suck in billions of dollars annually. Former Obama foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes was blunt about the impact it had on the Syria decision, saying on Pod Save the World: “You felt the ghost of Iraq that whole week.”

Nor was it just those in power who could feel the specter. In the aftermath of the Ghouta attack, polls by Reuters and other news organizations showed as few as nine percent of Americans were in favor of strikes on Syria. Over sixty percent were against them.

It was similar in Britain. Although the government of David Cameron had promised to back any strikes, public anger over the debacles in Iraq and Libya forced him to put intervention to parliament. In a shock outcome, the government lost by 13 votes.

Even as Obama was still considering his options, one of America’s closest allies had ruled itself out. Congress, likewise, seemed unwilling to enforce the red line.

Russia’s Diplomatic Gambit and the Failed Chemical Weapons Deal

On August 31, the press gathered for what was billed as a major speech — one in which everyone assumed the president would declare an intervention in Syria. Instead, Barack Obama told astonished reporters that he would seek authorization from Congress to bomb Assad’s forces. A decade later, people still argue about Obama’s thinking — whether he was doing the right thing, or whether he was just trying to spread blame when Congress inevitably voted the motion down.

The vote in Congress never happened. Instead, the crisis was defused by an offer from Russia. As the debate over Syria reached boiling point, a reporter asked Secretary of State John Kerry what Assad could do to stop the Americans from bombing.

Kerry responded with grim irony, saying Assad could voluntarily surrender his entire stock of chemical weapons. It was meant as a flippant comment — to reinforce the fact that any intervention that followed would be the fault of the guy with the WMDs. But within 90 minutes, Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov was on the phone, telling Kerry the Syrians were interested in his proposal.

What followed was a whirlwind of diplomacy. On September 9, Obama called off the Congressional votes while the US and Russia talked. By the 14th they had a working deal.

In return for surrendering all chemical weapons, Syria would be spared American retaliation. To ensure compliance, the US and Russia jointly agreed to impose sanctions and authorize military force if the regime conducted another attack like Ghouta. Obama administration officials would later describe this deal as a spectacular win.

After some 1,200 metric tons of sarin, VX, and sulfur mustard were removed from Syria and destroyed, the President memorably boasted: “It turns out we’re getting chemical weapons out of Syria without having initiated a strike.” Sadly, the White House had achieved no such thing. Just six months after the deal was inked — on April 11, 2014 — a regime helicopter dropped a barrel containing poison gas on the opposition-held village of Kafr Zita.

It was the beginning of a wave of similar attacks. The cause would turn out to be chlorine, an industrial product that had been exempted from the deal for economic reasons, but which was now being used to murder anti-Assad activists. At first, Russia seemed to cooperate.

Lavrov supported the creation of the Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) to examine evidence. The JIM finally began work in 2015, culminating in a report the following year. The findings on two attacks couldn’t have been clearer: on April 21, 2014, and on March 16, 2016, the Syrian government had used chlorine gas on its own people.

By rights, this should have triggered a Security Council response. But rather than accept the JIM report, the Kremlin attacked the investigation as politically biased. The Security Council became paralyzed under the threat of Russia’s veto.

On April 4, 2017, the Syrian government dropped sarin on the town of Khan Shaykhun. About 100 people died just as all those civilians had in Ghouta — their limbs twitching, suffocating, foaming at the mouths. Rather than destroy all his stockpiles, Assad had kept a few in reserve.

How Inaction Empowered Russia and Iran

America’s failure to act after Ghouta helped two of its greatest adversaries: Russia and Iran. Talking Obama out of intervention wasn’t just a masterful way to make America look weak and indecisive. Nor was it just a way to ensure Assad remained in power.

It was a means to project Russian power not just in the Middle East, but globally — to show the whole world that, as the US retreated from its role of world policeman, Russia was more than happy to step up. In 2015 — after years of blocking US action on Syria — the Kremlin suddenly announced its own airstrike campaign. Publicly, the reason was to accelerate the defeat of ISIS.

In reality, only a fraction of Russian missiles struck jihadi targets. The rest were spent eliminating pro-Western rebels and massacring civilians. The Russian tactics were simple: identify an area where anti-Assad fighters were embedded in the local community, then carpet bomb them until said community no longer existed.

They did this by targeting schools, hospitals, markets — anywhere ordinary people who might be against Assad gathered. By the end of 2022, it is estimated Russian bombs had killed 24,743 civilians. With Russian air support, the regime went from teetering on the brink to firmly back in control of much of the country.

Perhaps the biggest impact was psychological. Most of Russia’s modern generals cut their teeth in the Syrian air campaign. It is where the strategy was developed that would soon appear in Mariupol and in the airstrikes on Ukrainian infrastructure — a strategy of reducing a population to animal conditions to break an opponent’s morale.

Some, such as the Times of London, have argued a straight line can be drawn between Putin’s bloody successes in Syria and his decision to attack Ukraine in 2022. It is not totally implausible that victory in Syria gave Putin the confidence boost to make his reckless gamble, just as American inaction may have convinced him Washington wouldn’t come to Kyiv’s aid. Iran, too, had its fortunes massively boosted by Assad’s survival.

Initially, Tehran’s interventions on the side of Assad looked like they would be a disaster. Desperate to keep another Shia government in power, Iran spent billions propping up the butcher of Syria. At the height of the fighting, the Revolutionary Guards were losing thousands of elite soldiers on the battlefield.

Once the Russian air campaign got underway, Tehran’s fortunes started to shift. By the time the war wound down, it was clear Iran’s gamble had paid off. Even more than Russia, Iran became the premier foreign power in Syria, creating a direct link between the homeland and the parts of Lebanon under the control of its Hezbollah allies.

Successes in Syria likely encouraged Tehran to forcefully pursue its proxy war with Saudi Arabia in Yemen — a proxy war that, in its own way, became as deadly and as destructive as the conflict in Syria.

The Case for Intervention: A Salvageable Revolution

A recent report by Germany’s center-right Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) noted: “Even inaction can have dramatic consequences: restraint in Syria ultimately contributed to the humanitarian crisis we see today.” Because interventions like Iraq and Libya were so catastrophic, there is a tendency to see all interference as morally murky. What the KAS report reminds us is that doing nothing can be equally unethical — especially when even limited action could have profoundly positive outcomes.

That is the conclusion many in the French establishment have come to. Former ambassador Michel Duclos recently told the Guardian that in 2013, “the Syrian revolution was salvageable.” As early as December of 2012, Assad’s regime was teetering on the brink.

Both Iran and Russia had privately told the dictator he wouldn’t be able to hold on. Had the US — with or without France and the UK — responded to the Ghouta attack by bombing regime targets, it is likely the Syrian government would have collapsed. And while that would have brought risks, the nation in 2013 still had yet to utterly implode.

As Duclos put it: “At the time, the moderate opposition was still powerful, the jihadists on the sidelines, Iran awaiting the nuclear agreement and Vladimir Putin hesitant.” In this scenario, a regime collapse could have been followed by the pro-democracy forces declaring victory. ISIS was not yet on the scene.

Although war-torn, Syria perhaps could have been salvaged. Throughout the 2013 debates over intervention, Deputy National Security Adviser Antony Blinken had kept reminding the president that “superpowers don’t bluff.” His point was that a nation as powerful and respected as America cannot make a red line and then ignore someone crossing it — not unless it wants to see its credibility vanish.

Had Obama authorized strikes, they would have been a strong signal to Russia, Iran, and China that America does not bluff. A signal Vladimir Putin may have considered before annexing Crimea the following year. The KAS report points out that “intervention” need not have come in the form of a full-on American assault or an attempt at regime change.

Instead, the administration could have simply imposed a no-fly zone over parts of Syrian airspace. This could have been used to create safe zones for civilians and halt not just chemical weapons attacks, but the carpet bombing that came later, in which whole cities were reduced to rubble. At the bare minimum, such an approach would likely have saved tens of thousands of lives.

It could also have left some of Syria’s cities and infrastructure standing, avoiding the total economic collapse that followed. The UN estimates that between 306,000 and 350,000 have been killed in the Syrian conflict. Half the population became refugees — refugees that transformed the politics of countries from tiny, cash-strapped Lebanon to proud and wealthy Germany.

Of those who remained, more than 90 percent now live in crushing poverty. The regime is estimated to have carried out over 350 chemical weapon attacks across the conflict.

The Case Against: You Break It, You Buy It

When people argue non-intervention in Syria was the right call, they usually come from one of two perspectives: the general, and the specifically American. As the nation that would have led any strikes after the Ghouta massacre, the US would have borne the brunt of any fallout from things going badly sideways. And from the point of view of Washington, things could have easily turned out much worse than they already did.

One reason for this is the immortal principle: “you break it, you buy it.” If Obama had ordered strikes on regime targets in 2013, there is a strong likelihood those strikes could have led to the collapse of Assad’s government. At which point, the US would have been held responsible for everything that ensued.

That “everything” might have been a victory for democratic forces and the establishment of a functional or semi-functional state — what might be called the “Kosovo model” for interventions. On the other hand, it might have been an Iraq or Libya-style quagmire, or a barely functional state like US-backed Afghanistan. With America already embroiled in two expensive wars, a Syrian catastrophe could have been the final nail in the coffin of outward-looking US foreign policy.

Burned not three but four separate times, it is possible that today’s Washington would be so isolationist that no American arms would be currently keeping Ukraine propped up in its fight against Russia. This is easier to imagine when considering that even a no-fly zone might have translated into boots on the ground to secure WMDs. One old estimate put the total number of troops required at 40,000.

Naturally, tragically, some of those young men and women would have returned in body bags. Speaking of WMDs, one potential bad outcome would have been if some of them went missing following a regime collapse. Awful as he may be, Assad at least kept his chemical weapons firmly within the borders of his own nation.

Had they been stolen by jihadists, there is no reason to think they wouldn’t have traveled further afield. The doomsday scenario would have been a terror group using stolen sarin to mass-murder civilians in Israel, Europe, or the United States. Dispersed in a crowded, enclosed space at the right time, it could have led to carnage on a scale not seen since 9/11.

No definitive conclusion can be drawn. Could the US have done more in Syria? Self-evidently, yes.

No matter one’s politics, the entire Obama red line episode was clearly a messaging debacle. On the other hand, there is no way of truly knowing if an intervention in 2013 would have made things better or worse. While it is tempting to say things couldn’t possibly have turned out worse for the people of Syria, in war, things can always get worse.

Perhaps the best way to close is with an acknowledgement: that there aren’t always easy choices, or easy solutions; that even with hindsight, it is not always possible to see what was the right call. All that can be done now is to remember those who really suffered in this horrific civil war — the ordinary people of Syria, whose lives were alternately ruined and ended by this decade-long catastrophe. A catastrophe much of the world has, sadly, already moved on from.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the Ghouta massacre, and why did it matter for US policy?

On August 21, 2013, the Assad regime fired rockets loaded with sarin nerve agent onto Ghouta, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus. By US estimates, 1,429 civilians died, including 426 children. The attack directly crossed a red line President Obama had laid down almost exactly a year earlier, when he stated that the movement or use of chemical weapons would invite a military response—making the massacre the central trigger for the 2013 debate over whether America would enter the Syrian Civil War.

How did Russia’s diplomatic maneuver prevent US strikes?

During the crisis, a reporter asked Secretary of State John Kerry what Assad could do to stop American bombing; Kerry replied flippantly that Assad could surrender his entire stock of chemical weapons. Within 90 minutes, Russia’s Sergey Lavrov called Kerry to say Syria was interested. The ensuing deal, signed by September 14, removed some 1,200 metric tons of sarin, VX, and sulfur mustard from Syria—but Assad retained reserves and pivoted to chlorine attacks, beginning just six months later with a barrel-bomb strike on Kafr Zita in April 2014.

How did US inaction benefit Russia and Iran?

Russia exploited the outcome to project power globally: its 2015 air campaign in Syria killed an estimated 24,743 civilians by the end of 2022 and developed the tactics of targeting schools, hospitals, and markets that were later deployed against Ukraine. Iran’s gamble of propping up Assad ultimately paid off, establishing a direct corridor from Tehran through Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon and emboldening its proxy war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen.

What is the case that intervention in 2013 could have succeeded?

Former French ambassador Michel Duclos told the Guardian that in 2013 “the Syrian revolution was salvageable”—the moderate opposition was still powerful, jihadists were on the sidelines, and Assad’s regime was teetering. The Konrad Adenauer Foundation noted that even a no-fly zone could have halted chemical attacks and the carpet bombing that later reduced cities to rubble. Deputy National Security Adviser Antony Blinken argued throughout the debates that “superpowers don’t bluff,” warning that failing to enforce the red line would erode American credibility with Russia, Iran, and China.

What was the strongest argument against US intervention?

Critics warned that strikes risking regime collapse would leave the US responsible for the aftermath under the “you break it, you buy it” principle—potentially an Iraq or Libya-style quagmire at a time when America was already fighting two expensive wars. The Pentagon estimated airstrikes could destroy only about 30 percent of Assad’s chemical stockpiles, risking seizure of the rest by jihadist groups. One estimate put the troop requirement to secure Syria’s WMDs at 40,000 soldiers, and polls showed as few as nine percent of Americans supported strikes.

Sources

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