Obama has also resisted leading America into another Middle Eastern war since encountering difficulties extracting USA military forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, while United States military commanders have expressed concern about a lack of a clear alternative to Assad who could unify the country and advance U.S. national security interests.
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More than 50 State Department diplomats have signed an internal memo critical of USA policy in Syria, calling for military strikes against President Bashar al-Assad’s government to stop its persistent violations of a civil war ceasefire.
The program experienced limited success, and the U.S. Defense Department has now switched its strategy to work with a limited number of rebels instead of entire units.
The cable, signed by working-level diplomats, demands “a judicious use of stand-off and air weapons”, according to the New York Times, and lays bare the divisions in Washington policy circles.
Nevertheless, Obama has said Assad must relinquish control if there is to be peace.
Much of the thrust of the document has been advocated inside the administration by Secretary of State John F. Kerry for much of his time in office.
The State Department has acknowledged the existence of the cable as confidential diplomatic communication, but did not comment on its contents.
Kerry, who is not due to return from an overseas trip until late Friday, has been told about the memo, which was delivered Tuesday to the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning. Kerry, himself, has pushed for stronger U.S. action against Syria, in part to force a diplomatic solution on Assad.
Obama has resisted such pressure and has been backed up by his military commanders, who have raised questions about what would happen in the event that Assad was forced from power – a scenario that the draft memo does not address.
The document was filed in the State Department’s “dissent channel”, a forum set up during the Vietnam War to enable employees to log their opposition to policies with top officials, according to the Times.
The bombing Thursday is likely to test already strained relations between the U.S. and Russian Federation, and came just a day after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned Russian Federation and Syria to respect a cease-fire treaty signed between the three nations earlier this year.
Officials say the confidential paper is supported by about 50 mostly mid-level State Department employees who deal with USA policy in Syria.
Ford, who is now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, resigned from the Foreign Service in 2014 out of frustration with the administration’s hands-off policy toward the conflict.
In the memo, the State Department officials wrote that the Assad government’s continuing violations of the partial cease-fire, known as a cessation of hostilities, will doom efforts to broker a political settlement because Assad will feel no pressure to negotiate with the moderate opposition or other factions fighting him.
“The status quo in Syria will continue to present increasingly dire, if not disastrous, humanitarian, diplomatic and terrorism-related challenges”. In recent years, the USA has tried to help negotiate cease-fires involving the Assad regime, while Russian Federation has intervened directly on his behalf.
It said the officials were critical of the United States policy in the Syrian war.
The document urges a credible threat of military action against the Assad government.
The cease-fire, which Kerry helped negotiate in Munich last winter, has never really taken hold.
Lavrov said the United States could be “playing some kind of game here, and they may want to keep al-Nusra in some form and use it to topple the regime”.
“What’s brought this to a head now is the real downturn in the negotiations, not just between the USA and Russian Federation, but between Assad and the opposition”. Terrorist groups such as Islamic State (ISIL, also known as Daesh), as well as Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Nusra Front), both outlawed in Russian Federation and a range of other states, are not part of the deal. In 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed arming and training anti-Assad rebels.
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Even as it launched an aggressive bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the White House has gingerly approached the separate Syrian conflict. Over the past several years, it has expressed dismay at the lack of political and military organization of moderate opposition forces, and expressed continued concern that any weapons it gives to opposition fighters can end up in the hands of the Islamic State or Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria.
