Illustration by Tom Bachtell

The carved minaret above Aleppo’s twelfth-century Umayyad Mosque collapsed in April. The city, which is Syria’s most populous, has endured Hittite, Macedonian, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman rule, little of it benevolent. But this year, forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have delivered a distinctly modern form of terror, one the British pioneered in Iraq, in the nineteen-twenties, then endured in the London Blitz: the bombing of civilians, to break their will.

Tom Malinowski, of Human Rights Watch, visited the region last winter, and in March he described to a Senate subcommittee the siege imposed by Assad’s forces as they battle Aleppo’s anti-government rebels:

When aircraft appear in the sky, there is no warning and nowhere to hide. Each day people just wake up and wish for bad weather. . . . Each local council faces dilemmas: Should schools be kept closed, denying children an education, or should they be opened, taking the chance that an air strike could kill dozens of kids? . . . Should people be asked to pick up their daily bread at bakeries, as they traditionally have done, even though government forces have repeatedly bombed bakeries as civilians lined up outside?

The Obama Administration recently announced that it intends to ship small arms to vetted Syrian rebel groups in the hope that, as the President told Charlie Rose, a stronger armed opposition might create a “counterweight” to Assad, and “potentially lead to political negotiations” to end the war.

The President made plain that he was reluctant to send even light weapons, and he warned against any “slip-slide” into “deeper and deeper commitments” to aid Syria’s rebels or civilians. Yet his decision marks an escalation of American involvement, and it has provoked unease that the United States will shuffle into yet another dreadful Middle East war. Syria’s civil conflict has now become deadlier than Iraq’s was at its nadir, in 2006. More than ninety thousand Syrians have died so far.

Assad has overseen the most directed, widespread killing of civilians by state forces since the Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s militias rampaged through Darfur a decade ago. Syrian rebels have committed kidnappings and murders, but their violations pale beside those of the government forces. According to recent assessments by American intelligence agencies, Syrian commanders have used chemical arms on multiple occasions, killing at least a hundred people. If proved, this would be the first case of such barbarity since Saddam Hussein ordered Kurds and Iranians gassed more than two decades ago.

President Obama’s stated goal is for Assad to relinquish power, and for Syrians to negotiate a peace among the dictator’s minority Alawite community; the Sunni majority, from which the rebels draw their strength; and the country’s Christians, Kurds, and other minorities. Yet the Administration’s plan to achieve that goal is vague, and there are many unaddressed questions. If a settlement is reached, whose troops will secure it? Diplomacy has so far yielded little progress; if that failure continues, then what? Would Obama ever set a hard deadline for Assad’s departure and back it with force?

“I want to understand the outcome that we believe we are trying to encourage,” General Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in April, sounding more befuddled about Administration policy than the President’s principal military adviser should. He added, “And once I understand the outcome, I can take the toolbox I have got, and I can probably provide an option or two or three.”

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Obama could probably use four or five or six options, particularly to protect Syria’s civilians from mass attacks and to rescue them when protection fails; to prevent chemical warfare; and to hold Syrian war criminals to account. Those priorities do not necessarily require further military escalation. Meanwhile, humanitarian aid to rebel areas is inadequate. The United States is spending more than any other country to help refugees, yet United Nations budgets to provide for the estimated million and a half Syrians who have fled to neighboring countries remain underfunded.

The President’s decision to supply guns introduces new risks. Syria’s armed opposition is fractious and increasingly sectarian, and it includes groups aligned with Al Qaeda. Arms in wartime trade as easily as silks in a souk, and it must be assumed that any weapons given to approved rebels can find their way to less reliable ones. The C.I.A. provided potent anti-aircraft missiles to Islamist fighters during the Afghan war of the nineteen-eighties, and its officers were still hunting down stray missiles years later, lest they be used by terrorists against civilian airliners. In any event, delivering crates of rifles to select rebels is unlikely to keep civilians safe or to intimidate a dictator who enjoys a monopoly of air power and is willing to gas citizens and shell bakery lines.

A bolder option would be to establish a humanitarian corridor in Syria’s north, including Aleppo, where civilians could shelter. The United States, Britain, France, Turkey, and perhaps other countries could send warplanes to stop Assad’s artillery and bombing attacks in a defined area by enforcing a no-fly zone and by helping rebels to defend the zone’s perimeter—without putting foreign troops on the ground. Between 1991 and 2003, the United States engaged in something similar in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, for the most part successfully, but at high financial cost.

Obama argued against this option to Charlie Rose. Just ten per cent of civilian deaths in Syria are the result of air strikes, the President noted, and protecting a humanitarian zone might require bombing Damascus, causing more deaths. Obama is clearly anguished about his menu of terrible-to-awful options. Earlier this year, during an interview with The New Republic, he asked, “How do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?”

It is a poignant question, though the comparison is inexact: The United States should work to ameliorate all major humanitarian crises, but Syria’s is such a crisis and more. The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s militias are the detritus of a long-failed state. Assad’s belong to a still coherent dictatorship allied with Hezbollah and Iran. Congo occupies a vast and underpopulated area of southern Africa. Syria borders Israel, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq—all American allies, whose interests are threatened by Syria’s implosion.

Two years ago, Obama explained his decision to support the deployment of NATO fighter jets to protect civilians in the much less complicated case of Libya. “When the entire international community almost unanimously says that there is a potential humanitarian crisis about to take place,” he said, “we can’t simply stand by with empty words.” He added, “We have to take some sort of action.” It will be the President’s burden during the months ahead to square that pledge with Assad’s resilience and Syria’s escalating violence. Whatever option he chooses, he surely knows that in Aleppo, and in scores of other Syrian towns and villages with less storied histories, the time of “potential” calamity is long past. ♦