President Barack Obama hasn’t had many victories to point to in Syria, but there was one: the U.S. and Russia-brokered deal in 2013 that compelled the Syrian regime to hand over hundreds of tons of chemical weapons.

Now, a U.N. investigation has put even that victory in question, leading critics to hammer a U.S. president they say is too stubborn to admit he was wrong to pull back on military strikes, even after he’d warned the regime there that chemical weapons use would cross a “red line.”


The U.N. report, released earlier this week, found that Syrian President Bashar Assad has used chlorine gas against civilians at least twice since 2013, violating the Chemical Weapons Convention, which he joined as part of the deal he struck that year.

Still, the White House is giving no sign that Obama is willing to change his mind on military force or even establishing a no-fly zone. Instead, administration officials keep emphasizing the importance and historic nature of the 2013 agreement, while stressing its main focus was getting rid of Assad’s stockpiles of sarin, anyhow.

“They are in such a defensive mode right now, it’s sad,” said Randa Slim, a scholar of post-conflict reconciliation at the Middle East Institute. “They are more trying to spin the positive of their inaction than confront the true inaction.”

Obama issued his “red line” warning to Assad in 2012, which was widely seen as a pledge that the U.S. would be ready to launch airstrikes targeting the Syrian government. After it became clear that Assad had used sarin gas to kill hundreds of Syrians in 2013, Obama openly debated such strikes.

Ultimately, he backed off the idea, and his administration instead pursued the diplomatic route – working with Assad’s ally, Russia — to try to purge Assad’s stockpiles of chemical weapons.

Since then, there have been dozens of cases of alleged chemical weapons use in Syria, many involving chlorine. The ubiquitous industrial chemical isn’t tightly regulated under international weapons rules — but Assad is breaking his 2013 commitment not to use it to hurt people.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Thursday the U.N. findings are “not surprising,” adding that “the Assad's regime creativity in wreaking havoc and violence and bloodshed against innocent people apparently knows no bounds.”

(Earnest may be giving Assad a bit too much credit in citing his “creativity”: chlorine was arguably the original chemical weapon, first used to kill 800 French and Algerian soldiers in World War I.)

Earnest also took pains to narrowly define the White House’s mission with the original deal in 2013 – and declared that narrow mission to have been a success.

“It is important to draw a distinction between what we indicated that we were prepared to do and had succeeded in doing, which is getting the Assad regime to acknowledge that they had a stockpile of sarin gas,” Earnest said. That happened “because of the tough diplomacy of the United States and Russia.”

Assad also agreed to let other countries remove and destroy his chemical stores and dismantle Syria’s production facilities. Earnest continued: “As bad as the situation is in Syria right now, it would be even worse if we knew that the Assad regime's stockpile of sarin gas, for example, was floating around a country that had essentially been overrun by extremists.”

Mohammed Sahloul, a senior advisor to the Syrian American Medical Society who has traveled to conflict zones in Syria and testified about what he’s seen to the U.N., is underwhelmed.

“President Obama’s administration can pick and choose whatever they think is successful, and they have been picking and choosing, clearly. But for the doctors in Syria who have been facing the consequences of chemical weapons in Syria,” Sahloul continued, “these so-called successes do not mean anything.”

Sahoul co-wrote a report pegging the number of chemical weapons attacks at 161, with three-quarters happening after the 2013 agreement.

“A no-bombing zone or no-fly zone is long overdue,” Sahloul added. “President Obama has the moral responsibility to enforce that. Especially since he has red lines that were not crossed just one time or two times but … 161 times.”

That’s just part of the bloodshed since Syria devolved into civil war in spring 2011. As many as 470,000 people have died and millions have been forced from their homes. The U.N. probe’s report comes as negotiations aimed at resolving the conflict in Syria have stalled. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva on Friday and announced incremental progress in their bid to repair a badly broken cease-fire.

“We have the fact that the Geneva process is in intensive care right now, a coma,” Slim said. Along with the new U.N. report, she continued, “The evidence now basically is quite strong that diplomatic means have reached a dead end in Syria, at least diplomatic means in the way they are being enacted right now, in the absence of a military option.”

Obama and his aides still cite the lessons of the Iraq war in their reluctance to engage militarily, arguing that it would only add to the chaos without making America or its allies any safer.

A former top Obama foreign policy aide said people read too much into Obama’s off-the-cuff “red line”comment at the time. It wasn’t meant as a warning to Assad that he’d be removed from power if he broke the international norm against using chemical weapons, said Derek Chollet, now an advisor at Beacon Global Strategies. It was just about containing Syria’s suspected chemical cache.

“That’s a separate issue” from the Syrian civil war, the refugee crisis, and other fallout, Chollet said, adding that the U.S. should keep using diplomacy to resolve those issues.

“We went to Iraq over [weapons of mass destruction] that did not exist, and we are still dealing with the consequences today,” Chollet said. Even with “indisputable” evidence that Assad is waging chemical attacks on civilians, he said, “I’m not impressed by any of the ideas of how to use military force to try to solve this particular problem.”

To further complicate the Obama administration’s case that the 2013 deal was a success, there have been recent reports in Foreign Policy and other news outlets that investigators believe Assad may not have even turned over all of the deadly agents he was required to under that agreement.

National security analysts say it’s critical that the U.N. Security Council act on the latest investigation’s findings and hold Assad responsible — otherwise the international community could be sending a signal that using chemical weapons in war is acceptable.

Chlorine is a difficult substance for the international community to police: unlike sarin or mustard gas (which this week’s U.N. report determined had been used by the Islamic State in Syria), it has myriad legal uses, including for water purification.

It’s also easier to counteract and has largely been ruled out as a military tool. But in Syria, chlorine has proven not only deadly against civilians, but an effective weapon for psychological trauma and displacement, Sahloul said. Security experts have also raised alarms about terrorists getting ahold of the gas.

“When you give the impression to the world, and I’m talking about President Obama’s administration, that it’s ok to use chlorine,” Sahloul said, “that means you are really giving the green light, not the red light here… to use these kind of less aggrieved chemical agents.”

A White House official contested the idea that the administration is turning a blind eye, noting that the administration had pushed for the U.N. investigation and report after initial allegations of chlorine attacks in 2014. The report heads to the U.N. Security Council next week, where the U.S.’s envoy, Samantha Powers, has said members must “ensure consequences for those who have used chemical weapons in Syria.”

It is because Assad signed the Chemical Weapons Convention under Obama’s deal, the White House official said, that “we can hold them to account” in the international body.

The reality is that it may be impossible to convince Russia, which holds a veto on the Security Council like the U.S., to severely punish Assad, one of Moscow’s few allies in the Middle East.

Slim said the administration did not prepare for Assad’s defiance. “They don’t have a Plan B but a political dialogue.”