Stars and Stripes
September 3, 2013
Former SACEUR calls on NATO to back up Obama
By John Vandiver
Some critics have called President Barack Obama’s decision to seek Congressional support for military action in Syria as a sign of indecisiveness, but recently retired Adm. James Stavridis sees the decision as buying time to get NATO behind efforts to deliver a punitive message to the regime of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad.
“The North Atlantic Treaty Organization must be part of an international effort to respond to the crisis in Syria, beginning immediately with punitive strikes following the highly probable use of chemical weapons by President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime,” Stavridis wrote in a Monday op-ed in the New York Times. “The president, the secretaries of defense and state, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should all approach their counterparts to secure NATO action.”
So far, NATO has shown no sign that it intends to get involved in Syria beyond its current deployment of U.S., German and Dutch Patriot missile batteries along Turkey’s border with Syria. Those batteries are responsible for protecting Turkish air space from potential missile strikes from Syria.
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen on Monday said he is convinced Assad’s military has used chemical weapons and that an international response is required. However, NATO is not needed for a mission expected to be narrow in focus and duration, he told reporters.
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Stavridis, who served as head of U.S. European Command and as supreme allied commander-Europe for four years before retiring in May, wrote that NATO has a responsibility to protect in Syria even without U.N. Security Council approval, much like it did in Kosovo in 1999.
Since retiring and taking up his new post as dean at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Stavridis has begun to weigh in publicly on key national security matters. He recently penned a piece in Foreign Policy in which he advocated a post-2014 Afghanistan presence of 9,000 U.S. and 6,000 allied troops.
Now, he’s calling for NATO to step into the picture in Syria…
“The attacks tip the balance — a close one, to be sure — toward a need for punitive strikes as an initial form of intervention,” Stavridis wrote.
“These should be designed not only to send a strong signal that chemical weapons are unacceptable, but also to damage key parts of the Assad regime’s infrastructure. Attacks on aircraft, aviation centers, command and control sites and missile facilities would clearly reduce the danger to Turkey and Greece [sic].”
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