The controversy surrounding the the release of a draft cable critical of US government policy written by 51 State Department employees has garnered headlines, not so much for the fact that people within the bureaucracy are critical of the President's Syria strategy (given the complexity of the problem, Obama was always going to be criticised regardless of what he did) but that 51 people signed it. In reality, the cable will have no lasting effect on the way that the current US government looks at Syria, and nor should it.
Although it is a draft cable written by people who genuinely despair at civilian deaths in Syria, there are a few issues whose omission points to the practical limitations of the policy proposed by the dissenters.
Firstly, the cable tries to reduce the conflict to a choice between 'moderate' groups (who are never named) and the Assad regime. There is no mention of the al Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra or the much stronger and very Islamist Ahrar al-Sham al-Islamiyya (the former proscribed, the latter not), whose vision for a future Syria is the antithesis of that held by the secular liberal State Department dissenters. Is there a unified coalition opposing these radical groups? Would a protected and empowered 'moderate' opposition take on such groups to fight for secular liberal values?
More practically, the cable fails to enunciate the potential pitfalls of 'selected' air strikes. The Syrian Government knows (and the cable itself acknowledges) that punitive strikes can't do anything to tilt the balance towards the armed opposition. So what if the Syrian army loses a couple of artillery pieces or rocket launchers; they can be replaced by the Russians or Iranians within a week or two. And the regime and its supporters can hurt US interests more than the other way around because they have more skin in the game. A US air strike targets a Syrian artillery battery. Watch the Russians launch sorties against Free Syrian Army positions with the excuse that intelligence showed them operating with Jabhat al-Nusra elements. Take out a Syrian Army rocket launcher? See the regime's supporting militias start focusing on ground assaults against US-supported 'moderate opposition groups', restricting UN humanitarian convoys further. What will Washington do then?
One of Russia's (and Iran's) major strategic aims in deploying to Syria is to demonstrate US weakness. Launching a few strikes against Syrian regime targets but with no intent of doubling down for fear of tilting the balance in Syria will just damage US credibility further. Tellingly, while the dissent memo notes that 'military steps...may yield a number of second-order effects', it never says what those second-order effects may be or how they might be ameliorated. A bit of 'red-teaming' with some uniformed colleagues from the Pentagon during the drafting may have have helped in this regard.
As an aside, I must admit that I never knew about 2 FAM 70, the US document that outlines the way US State Department or USAID personnel can express alternate views to US government policy. It beggars belief that an Australian government of either hue would ever allow such freedom of expression within a key government agency.
Photo courtesy of www.whitehouse.gov