With the Trump White House struggling to contain the fallout from the bombshell revelation that the president shared sensitive intelligence with Russian governmental officials, former Obama administration appointees cannot help but join the pile-on. “Russians are working against our interests in Syria,” declared retired Rear Admiral John Kirby, the former spokesman for the State Department. “Never been serious [about] ISIS. Giving them intel not only won’t help, could hurt.” He’s right, but the admonition comes far too late to be taken seriously. For six long years, the Obama administration presided over the chaos and death that typifies the Syria crisis. History will not reflect kindly upon their conduct.
On Tuesday, the State Department released a series of previously classified intelligence assessments regarding the actions of the Syrian regime that shocked even those who had closely followed the horrors committed in that nation’s civil war. It’s perhaps no surprise that Bashar al-Assad “practiced extrajudicial mass executions,” as Acting Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Stuart Jones revealed. But the scale of those executions was previously unknown.
“Since 2012, the regime has routinely conducted airstrikes and artillery strikes in dense urban centers, including with barrel bombs, improvised unguided bombs, which are sometimes described as air-dropped IED,” he noted. “The Assad regime systemically targeted eastern Aleppo’s hospitals in multiple strikes, killing patients and medical professionals.”
From 2011 to 2015, the regime abducted between 65,000 and 117,000 people and executed thousands of prisoners without trial in Saydnaya Prison on the outskirts of Damascus. “We now believe that the Syrian regime has installed a crematorium in the Saydnaya prison complex which could dispose of detainees’ remains with little evidence,” Jones said. He revealed that the practice of incinerating the victims of Assad’s industrialized murder factory began in 2013 and he supplied photographs to prove it.
What’s galling about the Obama administration’s efforts to burnish its own record by attacking their successors isn’t just that President Obama balked at the opportunity to attack the Assad regime when it might have made a difference. It is that they did their best to ignore these systemic abuses of human rights not out of cowardice but a myopic desire to achieve a greater end: the nuclear accords with Iran.
“These atrocities have been carried out seemingly with the unconditional support from Russia and Iran,” Jones declared, as though that’s a surprise to anyone. The Iranian regime began introducing regular troops into Syria as early as 2012. Before Russia intervened militarily on Assad’s behalf, Moscow was providing material support and diplomatic cover for the criminal regime in Damascus. Russia aided in the cutting off of rebel centers, forcing choked off civilians to make horrible choices. The months-long siege of Aleppo, for example, forced civilians to “turn to extremists for help, or starve,” the New York Times reported. This was the culmination of Russia’s strategy to bomb hospitals, schools, and civilian infrastructure to rubble—compelling anti-Assad rebels to lose both hope at home and credibility abroad.
The Obama White House presided stoically over all of this. The former president has defended his decision not to intervene in the conflict as one of the proudest achievements of his political career. It was that contorted, self-deluded logic that led his State Department and Secretary of State John Kerry to pursue ill-fated ceasefire arrangements brokered by Moscow, knowing they would fail. “What’s the alternative?” he asked sheepishly.
Bill Clinton, too, struggled with his failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda. There, 300,000 died while Washington dithered. “If we’d gone in sooner, I believe we could have saved at least a third of the lives that were lost,” Clinton told a reporter in 2013. “It had an enduring impact on me.” The Obama administration’s devotees pretend to be impervious to such introspection, but the weight of so many souls lost on their watch is heavy. They may talk a good game, but the thousands murdered and incinerated at Saydnaya will haunt those who failed them.
