In Syria, America Had No Good Options

The following excerpt from The Atlantic is from a chapter in Susan Rice's new book Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For.

"You’re shitting me, right?” I asked Denis McDonough. He was the White House chief of staff, and he was standing in my office doorway on an evening in late August 2013.

“No, I’m serious,” he said. “I was just on my nightly walk with the president, and he thinks we should pause and first go to Congress.”

I was stunned. President Barack Obama had suddenly decided not to order missile strikes on Syria immediately, as planned, but first to get congressional approval for U.S. military action in response to Syria’s horrific use of chemical weapons. Denis said a small group of us would soon gather in the Oval Office to discuss this further with the president. As national security adviser for less than two months, I’d already chaired several National Security Council principals-committee meetings on our response to Syria’s violation of the president’s so-called red line on the use of chemical weapons. Nearly 2,000 people, including many children, had been killed by the Syrian regime in a sarin-gas attack on the Ghouta region. At that point, almost all the NSC principals believed we needed to act militarily to demonstrate to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that he could not violate international law by using deadly gas against civilians without paying a price.

Yet no question was easy with respect to Syria, whose civil war I believe was the hardest policy challenge the Obama administration faced. The news that McDonough had come to relay—that the president had changed his mind—underscored the fundamental dilemma we faced. In Syria, our values and national interests often felt in conflict. Our moral conviction that Assad had to be stopped competed, at virtually every point in the conflict, with the reality that there were only bad options and worse ones.