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Obama and Cameron Reiterate Call for Russian Intervention in Syria Obama and Cameron Reiterate Call for Russian Intervention in Syria
(about 7 hours later)
WASHINGTON — President Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain expressed hope on Monday that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would eventually join the global effort to pressure the Syrian government to step down. But neither offered any basis for their hopes beyond recent conversations with Mr. Putin. And Mr. Obama acknowledged that “lingering suspicions” inside Russia made the likelihood of Moscow’s intervention uncertain. WASHINGTON — President Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said on Monday that it was urgent to bring the fighting in Syria to an end. But Mr. Obama portrayed the diplomatic effort to stem the bloodshed as an uphill struggle that might well fail.
Speaking to reporters in the East Room at the White House, Mr. Cameron said that governments around the world had a responsibility to bring the Syrian conflict and the rule of President Bashar al-Assad to an end. “I’m not promising that it’s going to be successful,” Mr. Obama said at a joint news conference with the British leader. “It’s going to be challenging, but it’s worth the effort.”
“Syria’s history is being written in the blood of its citizens,” Mr. Cameron said. “And it’s happening on our watch.” Mr. Cameron sketched a generally cautious program for strengthening the armed Syrian opposition — one that emphasized the possible expansion of nonlethal assistance to rebels fighting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
Mr. Cameron said he recently had what he called a “very frank conversation” with Mr. Putin, but he provided no evidence that Mr. Putin was likely to alter his support for Mr. Assad. Last week, United States officials said they believed that Russia might be preparing to sell S-300 missile batteries to Syria to enhance its air defenses. The meeting between the two leaders comes at an important juncture in the conflict, which has already killed more than 70,000, displaced millions and has drawn in outside powers, including Iran, Hezbollah and Israel.
Mr. Obama and Mr. Cameron each said that a peaceful, quick end to the civil war in Syria would be beneficial for Russia. “As a leader on the world stage, Russia has an interest, as well as an obligation,” to help get rid of Mr. Assad, Mr. Obama said. Last week, Secretary of State John Kerry secured Russia’s agreement to hold an international conference on the Syria crisis. The goal is to have a meeting that representatives of the Assad government and the Syrian opposition would both attend, and which would be held by early June. But a number of thorny questions, including which nations would attend, remain to ironed out.
But Russia’s lingering suspicion of Western democracies, long after the end of the cold war, will make it difficult for Mr. Putin and the Russian leadership to join the West against their longtime ally in Syria, the president said. At the same time, the ban on supplying arms to Syria that was imposed by the European Union is scheduled to expire at the end of this month, raising the question of whether Britain and France might seek to increase their support to the Syrian opposition if diplomatic efforts to foster a political transition to a post-Assad government continue to prove elusive.
Mr. Obama added that the violence in Syria — which he called a “combustible mix” — might have gone too far to make a peaceful resolution possible. In his comments to reporters, Mr. Cameron said that governments around the world had a responsibility to bring the Syrian conflict to a close. “Syria’s history is being written in the blood of its citizens,” Mr. Cameron said. “And it’s happening on our watch.”
“I’m not promising it’s going to be successful,” he said of diplomatic efforts to end the conflict. “Once the furies have been unleashed,” he said, it is “very hard to put things back together.” The British prime minister said he had recently spoken with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, at a meeting in Sochi in southern Russia. The two sides, Mr. Cameron said, had a common interest in stemming the growth of Islamic extremists in the Middle East but had major differences on how to approach the problem.
“I have been very vocal in supporting the Syrian opposition in saying that Assad had to go, that he is not legitimate,” Mr. Cameron said. “And President Putin has taken a different point of view.”
Mr. Cameron said it was vital to increase support to the opposition and “put pressure on Assad so he knows there is no military victory.”
Britain has already committed itself to providing the opposition with armored vehicles, body armor and power generators, which Mr. Cameron said are “ripe to be shipped.”
The prime minister said Britain was pushing to amend the E.U. arms embargo so that European nations would have “more flexibility” to support the rebels.
“If we don’t help the Syrian opposition — who we do recognize as being legitimate, who signed up to a statement about the future for Syria that is democratic, that respects the rights of minorities,” Mr. Cameron said, “then we shouldn’t be surprised if the extremist elements grow.”
But a Western diplomat said Britain was not planning at this point to send arms to the rebels or necessarily even to greatly expand its nonlethal aid. Rather, he said, Britain wanted to preserve the option to beef up its support in the future.
The generally cautious approach appears to reflect concerns that the moderate Syrian opposition might not be able to ensure that some of the support it receives does not fall into the hands of extremists and may also reflect wariness by Britain about becoming too deeply involved in the crisis.
The United States has been even more deliberate in its approach to the crisis. At the end of February, Mr. Kerry announced that the Obama administration for the first time would provide nonlethal aid to the armed wing of the Syrian opposition, which is known as the Supreme Military Council and is led by Gen. Salim Idriss. That assistance, which consists of medical kits and food rations, began to arrive two months later.
Since then, the United States has said that it plans to expand its nonlethal assistance further in consultation with the rebels. But officials said on Monday that this aid has not yet been provided.
Mr. Obama noted on Monday that he had spoken to Mr. Putin several times on the Syria crisis and made the argument that Russia has an interest in encouraging a stable and democratic Syria after Mr. Assad’s departure.
Mr. Obama said he would be “very persistent” in pursuing his diplomatic strategy but also emphasized the obstacles.
“Frankly, sometimes once some of the furies have been unleashed in a situation like we’re seeing in Syria, it’s very hard to put things back together,” he said. “There are going to be enormous challenges in getting a credible process going, even if Russia is involved because we still have other countries like Iran. And we have nonstate actors like Hezbollah that have been actively involved.
“And frankly on the other side, we got organizations like al-Nusra that are essentially affiliated to Al Qaeda,” Mr. Obama said. “All that makes a combustible mix.”