Obama in a bind on Syria

WASHINGTON – For three years, President Barack Obama has resisted the pull of potential U.S. military action in Syria.

He has held firm even as the civil war’s death toll climbed toward 200,000, the Syrian government used chemical weapons against civilians and Islamic State militants strengthened amid the chaos.

Now Obama must decide whether the extremist group’s murder of American journalist James Foley, as well as the broader threat the group could pose to U.S. interests, should change his cautious calculus.

Pressure is coming from his own military leaders to go after the Islamic State inside Syria. But he must weigh that against his aversion to the risks that could come with plunging the United States into a country torn apart by an intractable internal conflict.

White House officials have suggested that airstrikes in Syria are an option, though the officials say specific military proposals have not yet been presented to the president.

“We’re actively considering what’s going to be necessary to deal with that threat, and we’re not going to be restricted by borders,” said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser. Even before Foley’s murder, Obama found himself on far different footing in the Middle East than he probably expected in the sixth year of his presidency.

Obama has said he will not send U.S. combat troops to another ground war in the Mideast. But expanding the airstrikes in Iraq and broadening them to include Syria could mean a lengthy American military commitment in the region.

“What we should have learned over the past dozen years in that part of the world is that the use of military power is very unpredictable,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

That may be particularly true in Syria, where President Bashar Assad’s government is warring with opposition forces. Unlike in Iraq, the battle lines are more clearly drawn. Syria has a host of military players in close proximity to each other.

The Islamic State is among the groups fighting Assad, meaning a U.S. campaign to weaken the extremists could actually strengthen a leader the White House has sought to push from office.

Obama could try to counteract that uncomfortable dynamic by also taking strikes against Assad, though that could put the U.S. on the hook for the kind of long-term commitment to rebuilding Syria that he has tried to avoid.

The risks are no less troubling if Obama allows the Islamic State to continue having unfettered access to a safe haven in Syria. Politically, it could bolster the argument from his critics that he is overseeing an American retreat on the world stage. It also could give the militants space to strengthen and become a threat not just to U.S. interests in the region, but also to the U.S. at home.

To White House critics, the unappetizing options are the result of Obama’s own foreign policy missteps. They argue that he gave extremists an opening in Iraq by not doing more to reach an agreement with the Iraqi government to leave U.S. forces in the country after 2011. They say his decision to not provide heavy weaponry to more moderate rebel groups in Syria also helped facilitate the Islamic State’s rise.

Obama’s advisers say the responsibility for stemming the rise of the Islamic State does not rest solely with the United States. The White House has been imploring Sunni states in the region – Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates in particular – to wield their influence with tribal leaders in Iraq and get them to push the Islamic State out.