Somewhat amazingly, we have a president who actually understands the Middle East and the complications involved in taking a side in the Syrian civil war. He actually uses language at the end of this exchange that is indistinguishable from what I’ve been saying.
CHARLIE ROSE: So you think a no fly zone is not necessary?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: What I’m saying is, that if you haven’t been in the Situation Room, poring through intelligence and meeting directly with our military folks and asking, what are all our options, and examining what are all the consequences, and understanding that for example, if you set up a no-fly zone, that you may not be actually solving the problem on the zone.
Or if you set up a humanitarian corridor, are you in fact committed not only to stopping aircraft from going that corridor, but also missiles? And if so, does that mean that you then have to take out the armaments in Damascus and are you prepared then to bomb Damascus? And what happens if there’s civilian casualties. And have we mapped all of the chemical weapons facilities inside of Syria to make sure that we don’t drop a bomb on a chemical weapons facility that ends up then dispersing chemical weapons and killing civilians, which is exactly what we’re trying to prevent.
Unless you’ve been involved in those conversations, then it’s kind of hard for you to understand that the complexity of the situation and how we have to not rush into one more war in the Middle East. And we’ve got —
CHARLIE ROSE: So that’s why people think you haven’t, because you do not want to get involved in another conflict, having extricated the United States from Iraq and also soon from Afghanistan.”
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Charlie, I —
CHARLIE ROSE: And the idea of another conflict and getting involved in a war that had real significant Sunni-Shia implications and could explode into the region, you want no part of that, even though there has been a turn in the tide in Syria with the Assad regime and the Assad army, with the help of Hezbollah, doing better.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yeah, Charlie, that shouldn’t just be my concern, that should be everybody’s concern, you know. We went through that. We know what it’s like to rush into a war in the Middle East without having thought it through. And there are elements within the Middle East who see this entirely through the prism of a Shia-Sunni conflict and want the United States to simply take the side of the Sunnis. And that I do not think serves American interests. As I said before, the distinction I make is between extremists and those who are recognized in a 21st century world that the way the Middle East is going to succeed is when you have governments that meet the aspirations of their people, that are tolerant, that are not sectarian. And working through that is something that we have to do in deliberate fashion. So when I hear debates out there, on the one hand, folks saying, you know, ‘Katie, bar the door, let’s just go in and knock out Syria —
I don’t think Washington is capable of this level of nuance, and that presents a problem, For Washington, if anything is going Iran’s way or Russia’s way, it must be coming at our expense. But the president understands that elements of the rebellion in Syria are worse than Assad, both for religious minorities in Syria and for the United States and Israel. He also understands that the conflict is morphing into a sectarian conflict and that we cannot simply take the side of the Sunnis.
At the same time, we are under pressure from Sunni allies like Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to prevent the Shiites from prevailing in this fight. It might be possible for Obama to navigate these treacherous waters because he has a very sophisticated understanding of the issues, but it seems like he is almost alone in Washington. And he can’t control our allies. It looks like Obama has lifted his ban on allowing Saudi Arabia to provide the rebels with shoulder-fired anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons. Presumably, the CIA is carefully monitoring who gets these weapons, but the policy is incredibly difficult. If we are not really pursuing outright victory but conditions that can lead to meaningful mediation, we need American thought-leaders and policymakers to be on board with that. And I don’t think we have more than one person in Washington who can understand armed conflict in these terms.
