WH Announces Syria Sanctions
The New York Times reports:
A brutal Arab dictator with a long history of enmity toward the United States turns tanks and troops against his own people, killing hundreds of protesters. His country threatens to split along sectarian lines, with the violence potentially spilling over to its neighbors, some of whom are close allies of Washington.
Libya? Yes, but also Syria.
And yet, as the Syrian government’s bloody crackdown intensified on Friday, with security forces killing at least 16 people in Dara’a and more than 40 across the ocuntry, President Obama has not demanded that President Bashar al-Assad resign and he has not considered military action. Instead, on Friday, the White House took a step that most experts agree will have a modest impact: announcing targeted sanctions against three senior Syrian officials, including a brother and cousin of Mr. Assad.
The divergent American responses illustrate the starkly different calculations the United States faces in these countries. For all the parallels to Libya, Mr. Assad is much less isolated internationally than the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. He commands a more capable army, which experts say is unlikely to turn on him, as the military in Egypt did on then-President Hosni Mubarak. And the ripple effects of Mr. Assad’s ouster would be both wider and more unpredictable than in the case of Colonel Qaddafi.
“Syria is important in a way that Libya is not,” said Steven A. Cook, senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There is no central U.S. interest engaged in Libya. But a greatly destabilized Syria has implications for Iraq, it has implications for Lebanon, it has implications for Israel.”
These complexities have made Syria a less clear-cut case, even for those who called for more robust American action against Libya. Sen. John McCain, along with Senators Lindsay Graham and Joseph I. Lieberman, urged Mr. Obama earlier this week to demand Mr. Assad’s resignation. But Mr. McCain, an early advocate of a no-fly-zone over Libya, said he opposed military action in Syria.
Human-rights groups are even more cautious. “If Obama were to call for Assad to go, I don’t think it would change things on the ground in any way, shape, or form,” said Joseph Stork, deputy director of the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch, which had been supportive of military action in Libya. In this case, he said, targeted sanctions, he said, were the right move.
Those measures freeze the assets of three top officials, most notably Mahir al-Assad, President Assad’s brother and a brigade commander who is leading the operations in Dara’a. But Syrian leaders tend to keep their money in European and Middle Eastern banks, putting it beyond the reach of the Treasury.
The measures also take aim at Syria’s intelligence agency and the Quds force of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite paramilitary unit already heavily sanctioned by the United States. Iran, officials said, is using the force to funnel tear gas, batons and other riot gear to Syria.
