Inside the White House During the Syrian 'Red Line' Crisis

In the course of a presidency, a U.S. president says millions of words in public. You never know which of them end up cementing a certain impression. For Barack Obama, one of those phrases would be “red line.”

In August 2012, Obama was asked about what could lead him to use military force in Syria. “We have been very clear to the Assad regime,” he said, “that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.” We had received reports about a month earlier that the regime was preparing to use chemical weapons against the opposition, or transfer them to the terrorist organization Hezbollah. We issued private warnings to Iran, Russia, and the Syrian government; Obama made clear publicly to Assad that the world was watching, and that Assad would be held accountable by the international community should he use those weapons.

At first the warnings seemed to work. Weeks and months went by with  no sign of chemical attacks in Syria. But then, towards the end of 2012, we received the first reports of small-scale chemical weapons use. The U.S. intelligence community was resistant to snap judgments, particularly after the experience of inaccurate statements made about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the 2003 U.S. invasion. So it took a period of months before the intelligence community formally determined that the Assad regime had in fact used chemical weapons in April 2013. The question then became what we were going to do about it.

Our initial response was unsatisfying: Obama decided to publicize a decision to provide military support to the Syrian opposition. Almost by default, the responsibility for announcing this fell to me. By then, I had been a deputy national security adviser for nearly four years, and was known to be someone who was particularly close to Obama. Even though I had misgivings about our Syria policy, I wanted to do something about the catastrophe in Syria, just as I had advocated intervention in Libya. I had also internalized a certain ethos: If there was an issue that no one wanted to talk about publicly, I would do it. I thought it was part of my job, as Obama deserved to have someone willing to defend him. I sensed, though, that it would cost me, allowing me to be blamed for decisions I didn’t make but that others didn’t want to defend.

And defend it I did: on conference calls, in televised briefings, and in long conversations with reporters. I fought with lawyers to get clearance to say that Obama had decided to provide “direct military support” to the Syrian opposition,