Hillary Clinton floats a Syria no-fly zone. How real an option for US?

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clintons confirmation that a no-fly zone is one of the options the United States is considering to address Syrias unabated bloodshed does not mean such a step is imminent.

In fact, it may have been uttered with the hope of making the need for such a leap to deeper American intervention in Syrias civil war less likely.

Secretary Clinton may have intended this as a final shot across the bow to Russia and other powers supporting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, to say were trying to avoid something youd be very unhappy about, says Michael OHanlon, a national security and defense policy specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington. And that something Clinton may have been signaling, he adds, is that with or without the United Nations, we are going to be getting more involved in this [conflict] if Assad remains in power with outside help of his own and the war drags on.

IN PICTURES: Inside Aleppo, Syria

Clinton spoke of a possible no-fly zone and other options for assisting Syrias rebels in their fight to oust Assad after her meeting in Istanbul Saturday with Turkish Foreign Minist! er Ahmet Davutaglu. Clinton said she and Mr. Davutaglu agreed that a no-fly zone and other assistance the rebels are seeking from Western powers need greater in-depth analysis, adding that you cannot make reasoned decisions without doing intense analysis and operational planning.

Translation: Any decision is not for tomorrow. But just the mention of a possible no-fly zone suggests the West may be moving closer to the kind of military intervention it undertook in Libya last year on the side of rebels opposed to Muammar Qaddafi and which Russia has bitterly criticized.

NATOs intervention in Libya followed UN Security Council action that the West took as a green light. That is why some international security analysts say any US-backed military involvement in Syria at this point would more closely resemble Western intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s, which followed UN paralysis on the conflict.

In 1999 the US and NATO undertook a bombing campaign in the Kosovo war without UN authorization that eventually turned the conflict in the rebels favor.

But to this day the UN and NATO have peacekeeping forces in Kosovo, regional experts note a reminder, in case Clinton and other Western officials needed one, that military interventions are not always easy to end. (The Western intervention in Libya stretched on longer that NATO anticipated but nevertheless ended in a matter of months, some pro-intervention analysts point out.)

Clinton has a long list of factors to consider in analyzing the no-fly zone option, Brookingss Mr. OHan! lon says , and one of them is how opening the door to military intervention could lead to deeper involvement.

You have to consider the slippery-slope phenomenon, he says, how this could evolve from a no-fly zone to a no-go zone as the Libya intervention did. If no-fly fails to stop Assads attacks, OHanlon adds, then theres a lot of pressure to strike at Syrian tanks and artillery.

The Wests deepening intervention in Libya did not prompt more than protests from Russia and other anti-interventionist powers because those powers interests in the Qaddafi regimes survival was not so great. But the US, already worried about the potential for the Syria conflict to balloon into a proxy war for dueling regional interests, is well aware that Russia, Iran, and others are unlikely to sit back (and indeed are already intervening) as the West jumps in.

After the US completes its in-depth analysis, another factor determining whether or when to intervene will be the US presidential campaign.

President Obama would like to avoid deeper involvement in Syria, but if staying out becomes impossible then he will want military intervention to look like a last resort, says OHanlon, who has studied Obamas use of the military. The presidents conscience could eventually prompt a decision to deepen US involvement, he says, but nothing suggests that would happen in a hasty manner.

If he cant altogether avoid it, he at least wants to maintain a perception that hes essentially a reluctant warrior, he says.

The situation might be different if Obama didnt have his use of drones to attack the Al Qaeda leadership, the taking out of Osama bin Laden, his surge of troops in Afghanistan, and Libya under his belt. But OHanlon says those actions leave Obama confident enough of his record that he doesnt feel compelled to intervene in Syria for interventions sake.

If hed never used military force maybe he would act differently on Syria, he says, but I think at this point he feels he can afford to look at all the ramifications, and maintain a perception that hes the somewhat less interventionist and more cooperationminded of the two candidates.

IN PICTURES: Conflict in Syria

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