Is Obama Getting Serious About Syria?

Zack Beauchamp highlights the president’s new agenda for the Syrian crisis, which he laid out in his West Point commencement address yesterday:

The section on support for Syrian rebels seems to mean US military training for the more moderate anti-Assad factions, like the comparatively secular fighting forces coordinated by the Supreme Military Council. The Wall Street Journal reports that Obama is “close” to authorizing the US military to help out moderate rebels, and post-speech comments from a senior Obama aide confirmed that option was on the table.

We know roughy what this training would look like because the CIA is already doing it.

Syrian rebels told PBS Frontline that CIA operatives have trained them in military tactics and the use of heavy American-made weapons. “They trained us to ambush regime or enemy vehicles and cut off the road,” a rebel identified as Hussein explained.

The big difference between this ongoing CIA operation and Obama’s potential new policy is that training would be overt instead of covert: uniformed US troops, not CIA spooks, will train Syrian rebels. That’ll likely mean more extensive training for the rebels. But, without a truly massive effort, it’s unlikely that this will fundamentally change the military balance of power between the rebels and Assad.

Leslie Gelb fears that Obama has “jumped out of the Afghan frying pan only to leap back into the Mideast fire”:

Obama’s instincts are wrong if he’s letting himself be pushed into a renewed effort to unseat Syrian President Assad without a plausible plan to do so. Perhaps Obama thought that a new anti-terrorist emergency fund he was asking Congress to fund would distinguish his approach. It’s to be a $5 billion barrel to support friends and allies with arms, training and the like. But Obama and President George W. Bush provided Afghans and Iraqis with hundreds of billions in arms and economic aid to a very modest effect indeed.

Obama will have to explain much more to demonstrate that his strategy is truly new and that it can be effective—and also that his small steps approach won’t lead to bigger ones later on in the face of likely failures—much as happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.