WASHINGTON – With the death toll likely to be as high as 120,000 in the two-year Syrian conflict, some critics say the United States should start providing military assistance to curtail the fighting, which is destabilizing its neighboring countries and decreasing U.S. credibility and its stance on chemical weapons.
“The longer it goes on, the more people will die and the greater the chance of destabilization of Lebanon and Jordan, “ said David Schenker of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former senior Defense Department official on Middle East issues in the Bush administration. “The bottom line is that this is a problem that won’t age well. “
In Jordan, there are close to 500,000 refugees and in Lebanon, the number is even higher. According to Schenker, Jordan will have an estimated 1 million refugees by the year’s end and the country’s current population is only about 6 and half million people. Schenker says that this will be a “huge burden” on the country.
As more refugees move into both bordering countries, the local people are competing with refugees for the scarce jobs. In Jordan, the refugees are driving up unemployment and rental prices as they stay in housing complexes. Additionally, the influx of refugees, particularly Sunni Syrians, is tilting the sectarian power-sharing balance of the Lebanese government.
Schenker says the U.S. should intervene militarily and “tip the balance” in favor of the rebels. He said some of the U.S. options include providing weapons to the vetted opposition, cratering runways so that the Assad government can’t use aircraft to bomb civilians, targeting strategic weapons depots and creating no fly zones. He does not believe it would be advisable to deploy American troops on Syrian soil.
Currently, the U.S. government is providing $60 million in nonlethal assistance to the Syrian Opposition Coalition. The money is being used to expand the delivery of basic goods and services and for administrative functions of security and communication.
This is in addition to the $50 million in nonlethal assistance to Syrian activists that has been used to “organize opposition efforts across the country and to amplify their message to Syrians and to the world through communications and broadcasting equipment”, according to the State Department.
However, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution agrees the nonlethal assistance is not enough.
“What we are providing is reasonable, but fairly minimal and not adequate, “ Michael O’Hanlon said, a Brookings fellow who specializes in American foreign policy who is also a visiting lecturer at Princeton University.
O’Hanlon said it’s important to come up with a plan that resembles the Bosnia model and to consider the questions of what happens after Assad has fallen and how to stabilize the country. He said a “smart plan” would involve the following: protecting the rights of the minority groups in Syria, providing weapons to the opposition, establishing a reasonable peace deal with the Assad government and possibly intervening with military force of no more than 20,000 American troops.
If the U.S. continues to stray away from providing weapons, this could affect U.S. credibility and its stance on chemical weapons portrayed to other countries, according to Schenker.
He said as the conflict persists, there is “danger of chemical leakage into the hands of the terrorists and Islamist militants.”
It has been reported that the Assad government in Syria has used chemical weapons against its own people. Notwithstanding President Obama’s so-called “red line” on the use of these weapons of mass destruction in the conflict, the US has yet to intervene.
Schenker said US inaction in the face of these reports—and in opposition to the president’s warning to the Assad regime–sends a message not only to Syria, but to other countries in the region.
“It undermines US credibility in terms of the longstanding threat to use force to prevent Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon,” Schenker said.
