WASHINGTON—The United States is coming under increasingly bitter criticism for its perceived lack of leadership over Syria as the country’s brutal civil conflict heads toward new levels of intensity.
Washington appears unable or unwilling to prevent its ally Turkey from bombing Kurdish fighters inside Syria, its critics say. And it has done little to rein in Russia’s mounting military involvement on behalf of Bashar al-Assad.
President Barack Obama, at a summit in California, said “this is not a contest between me and Putin.”
“The real question we should be asking is what is it that Russia thinks it gains if it gets a country that’s been completely destroyed as an ally, that it now has to perpetually spend billions of dollars to prop up?” Obama said.
In the eyes of his detractors, Obama is guilty of refusing to engage in Syria by doing exactly what he said he would do when he was elected in 2008: pulling America out of Middle Eastern wars, after the Iraq debacle, and “pivot” US foreign policy towards Asia.
A pointed attack came Tuesday from France, where few have forgotten Obama’s last-minute refusal to take action against Syria in 2013 after evidence surfaced that the government used chemical weapons against civilians.
“Obama had said, ‘If he uses chemical weapons, it will cross a red line,” former Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Tuesday on Europe 1 Radio. “And that red line was crossed with no reaction.”
“When the history books are written, we’ll see that this was a turning point, not only in the Middle East crisis but also for Ukraine, Crimea and the entire world,” Fabius said earlier this month, adding that he regretted “ambiguities” and the “lack of very strong engagement” Washington has shown with respect to Syria.
After the bombing of hospitals and other civilian targets around the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Monday, the State Department only bemoaned the “continued brutality of the Assad regime against its own people” and questioned Russia’s “willingness” to put a stop to it.
For Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, that simply wasn’t enough.
“Historians will one day look back at our archives and wonder what we thought we’d accomplish with such statements,” Schanzer tweeted Tuesday.
Republican Senator John McCain lashed out at the Obama administration’s Syria choices.
“The intensification of Russian air strikes in Syria over the past two days, including the bombing of schools and hospitals, is tragically unsurprising,” McCain said.
“As expected, our adversaries in Syria are using that time to accelerate and conclude their siege on Aleppo… This is diplomacy in the service of military aggression, and unfortunately, the Obama administration is enabling it,” he stressed.
The White House has dismissed the accusations of inaction.
Washington says the military coalition of 65 countries it has led for the past 18 months has carried out thousands of air strikes against jihadists of the Islamic State group, who control territory in both Syria and Iraq.
At the same time, Secretary of State John Kerry—a skeptic of military interventionism known for his boundless public optimism about the diplomatic process—has spearheaded an attempt to launch a peace process together with 20 global and regional powers.
