US shifts to planning for a post-Assad Syria

The Obama administration must worry about Assad’s arsenal, including chemical weapons.

With the growing conviction that the Assad family’s 42-year grip on power in Syria is coming to an end, Obama administration officials are working on contingency plans for a collapse of the Syrian government, focusing particularly on the chemical weapons that Syria is thought to possess and that President Bashar Assad could try to use on opposition forces and civilians.

Pentagon officials were in talks with Israeli defence officials about whether Israel might move to destroy Syrian weapons facilities, two administration officials said. The administration is not advocating such an attack, the US officials said, because of the risk that it would give Assad an opportunity to rally support against Israeli interference.

President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas Donilon, was in Israel over the weekend and discussed the Syrian crisis with officials there.

Obama called President Vladimir Putin of Russia and urged him once again to allow Assad to be pushed from power. Russia, so far, has refused. A White House statement said that Putin and Obama “noted the growing violence in Syria and agreed on the need to support a political transition as soon as possible that achieves our shared goal of ending the violence and avoiding a further deterioration of the situation.”

The statement pointedly noted the “differences our governments have had on Syria,” but said the two leaders “agreed to have their teams continue to work toward a solution.”

Additional sanctions

Within hours of the bombing, the treasury department announced additional sanctions against the Syrian prime minister and some 28 other cabinet ministers and senior officials, part of the administration’s effort to make life so difficult for the regime that Assad’s allies desert him.

Behind the scenes, the administration’s planning has already shifted to what to do after an expected fall of the Assad government, and what such a collapse could look like. A huge worry, administration officials said, is that in desperation Assad would use chemical weapons to try to quell the uprising.

“The Syrian government has a responsibility to safeguard its stockpiles of chemical weapons, and the international community will hold accountable any Syrian officials who fail to meet that obligation,” Carney said.

Any benefit of an Israeli raid on Syria’s weapons facilities would have to be weighed against the possibility that the Assad regime would exploit such a raid for its own ends, said Martin S Indyk, the former US ambassador to Israel and director of the foreign policy programme at the Brookings Institution.

He and several administration officials said the view was that Assad might use chemical weapons as a last resort. “But it crosses a red line, and changes the whole nature of the discussion,” Indyk said.

Russia, in particular, would probably have to drop its opposition to tougher United Nations sanctions against Syria, and Assad’s other remaining ally, Iran, would probably not look too kindly on a chemical attack.

The Obama administration must also worry about Assad’s arsenal, including chemical weapons, falling into other hands, including those of al-Qaida – a risk at the centre of the administration’s concerns, according to Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group.

“The government is falling,” Malley said. “But what will the fall look like? It could fall in Damascus, but not elsewhere; it could crumble in other areas but not the Alawite ones – there are a lot of variations to this.”

Beyond trying to stop the Assad regime from using unconventional weapons, the US must also work to make sure that the Alawite minority, ascendant under Assad and largely loyal to him, is not massacred once its protector is gone.

Obama has come under criticism from some Republicans in Congress who say that the United States should intervene militarily in Syria, and from Mitt Romney, his Republican opponent, who has said that he would arm the Syrian opposition, which the administration has not done directly.

Instead, Obama has backed UN efforts and urged Russia to join the US in calling for Assad to step down. While the president has been faulted for his policy toward Syria, some foreign policy experts said that Obama’s approach could be vindicated, particularly if Assad is toppled without the US taking military action.

The administration has not officially armed the Syrian rebels, but it has provided some financial aid, and has helped to prop up the Syrian opposition by its many efforts to delegitimise Assad through a steady stream of calls for him to step down. The US, Malley said “may actually achieve what it wanted – a fall of the regime without having to intervene militarily.”

But, he added, “Then it has to deal with all the variants of what a fall looks like, and what a post-Assad Syria looks like.”