War by Other Means by Keith Kellogg

Author:Keith Kellogg [Kellogg, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781684512508
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2021-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

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By 2017, Syria had been in a state of civil war for years. No matter how many times people assumed that Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, was doomed to fall, he never did. He had most of the guns, he had Russian support, and he was determined to stay in power no matter what the cost.

United States policy under President Obama had been to provide covert aid to Syria’s rebels while pushing for a diplomatic solution through the United Nations. A UN Security Council resolution (UNSCR 2254) called for a political solution to the conflict while providing hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian support.

Providing more than a billion dollars’ worth of arms and logistical support was one thing, but President Obama had little stomach for committing American troops to another fight in the Middle East and tried to keep some distance from the conflict. In August 2012 reporters asked him under what circumstances he would commit to using direct American military force in Syria. Obama said, “We have been very clear to the Assad regime. A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.”

Obama’s self-proclaimed “red line” was crossed in August 2013, when the Assad regime used sarin nerve gas to kill more than a thousand men, women, and children in the suburbs of Damascus. There was no hiding what he had done, and Assad did not deny it. It was deliberate, brazen, and provocative. It was done in the face of what Assad clearly understood to be American policy; he just as clearly—and correctly—assumed that the Obama administration would do nothing. The actual response, as he apparently calculated, would only be moral outrage in the media and diplomatic protests by the American government. In the meantime, the regime, with the help of the Russians, maintained its stockpile of nerve gas—and Assad would use it again.

When it comes to weapons of war, none are “pretty.” But nerve gas is horrific. Developed by the Nazis in World War II, but never used by them, sarin nerve gas is considered a weapon of mass destruction and is outlawed by the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. The Russians signed the 1993 convention; so did we. Syria acceded to the convention in 2013, apparently thinking the international community would, as so often, accept form over substance.

Early on the morning of 4 April 2017, I received a call summoning me to the White House Situation Room. Early morning calls never brought good news. This morning was no exception. Walking into the Situation Room from my West Wing office, I asked the senior duty officer what was happening. He told me that the intelligence agencies had assessed, with high confidence, that the Syrian military had conducted a chemical attack on a small town in northwest Syria called Khan Shaykhun. Initial reporting indicated that the Syrian military had used nerve gas against a civilian target; reported casualties were in the hundreds. The attack had been conducted during daylight hours with Russian-supplied jet fighter-bombers.

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