Secretary of State John Kerry scored victory in Geneva today by pressuring Russia’s Sergey Lavrov to agree to very clear procedures and a tight timetable for the gathering, storing and destruction of all Syrian President Bashar al Assad’s chemical weapons.
Assad will be ordered to comply under threat of potential military action authorized by the United Nations Security Council, but military strikes will not be automatic in case of failure to obey. The Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons will perform the necessary supervision and coordinate the expertize.
The plan satisfies Kerry’s conditions of transparency, accountability, timeliness, and enforceability. To this degree, President Barack Obama’s immediate goals should be achieved substantially within coming days and weeks, rather than many months.
Unless President Vladimir Putin reneges on promises made in Geneva, Assad will no longer have possession of chemical weapons, access to their components or the option of using them. Within a year, all of them will be destroyed.
However, Kerry’s victory masks some gaps. First, a brutal dictator responsible for over 100,000 deaths, two million refugees and three million displaced families, can now sleep peacefully. Obama may no longer be free to start a chain of events that would have severely weakened Assad’s power, caused his defeat and brought him before a war crimes tribunal.
In this sense, Obama’s current request to Congress seeking support for military strikes may now be moot. The precise legal position will become clearer in coming days.
Assad will lose his heinous chemical weapons but may escape punishment for crimes committed with conventional weapons, many against civilians. He is free to continue using non-chemical weapons, including tanks and aircraft, to pound his opponents regardless of how many towns are reduced to rubble and how many innocents are killed. The Syrian President may see the new situation as a diplomatic success, so far as his game plan is to survive in power.
Second, the US is no longer the power holding Assad accountable for the humanitarian catastrophe he has caused simply to remain in power. The Kremlin, a regular human rights violator, has put itself on the high table as an equal of the White House.
Moscow has become the indispensable power for peace in Syria, without conceding an iota of its protection of Assad’s right to rule the entire country. It has not changed its narrative that Assad is a beleaguered leader trying to protect his compatriots against ruthless terrorists.
The Geneva Plan has many logistical and technical problems (outlined in my earlier reports) but some of the world’s top chemical weapons experts who advised the Kerry-Lavrov negotiations are confident that they can be overcome. The needs are for political will and determination, backed by the threat of force.
Today’s agreement underlined the option of punishment for noncompliance by invoking Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which authorizes the use of force to coerce obedience. But that decision would be taken only in the UN Security Council where Russia could still place vetoes, if it negotiated in bad faith in Geneva and prefers to protect Assad.
However, the plan implies, without saying so clearly, that Obama’s hands are now tied if he wants to conduct military strikes against Assad with a coalition of the willing. The US military cannot attack Assad’s forces or hold him to account militarily without prior Security Council approval.
Lavrov underscored this point at a joint press conference with Kerry in Geneva today: “There is nothing said about the use of force, not about any automatic sanctions we – as I said, all violations should be approved in the Security Council convincingly.”
Obama would have to go to the Security Council under chapter 7 to argue the case for military intervention, however limited and whether or not without boots on the ground. Before that stage, he will have to wait for the international process agreed today to run its course.
That means the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons will have to certify that Assad has not complied, is dragging his feet or resisting compliance. Then, the Security Council would have to assess Assad’s attitudes and decide whether to approve international military intervention or other types of sanctions.
In any case, there is no element in the plan that permits the Security Council or any country to depose Assad. The customary way to depose him would be through elections after a peace agreement that provides for a transitional government.
Such an orderly transition is being discussed under plans for a Syrian peace conference in Geneva, which will include most of the warring factions. Kerry and Lavrov have announced they will meet in New York soon to carry the conference plans forward, with the sponsorship of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and executive work by special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and his team.
Meanwhile, in effect, Obama’s finding has been repudiated that Assad should quit power because he no longer merits the job of President and is killing the people he is sworn to protect. The main ways to depose him now, in the absence of a full peace agreement, are defeat in war or assassination.
For the moment, defeat is unlikely because the Geneva plan is narrowly limited to the chemical weapons issue. It places no constraints on Russian rearmament of Assad to replace the chemical arsenal with equally devastating conventional weapons.