Unless Romney can answer how arming rebels would not make a bad situation worse, his proposal looks like a ploy, not policy
Syria's Dante-esque hell is now having its five minutes in the spotlight of the US presidential campaign, with Mitt Romney calling on the Obama administration to "begin to lead and put an end to the Assad regime" and "work with partners to organize and arm Syrian opposition groups so they can defend themselves".
Don't worry, your correspondent is not going to collapse into a fit of hand-wringing about foreign policy ending at the water's edge. Quite the opposite: if only the killings in Rwanda, and the failure of the US and others to respond, had been an issue in the 1994 US midterms.
To use the campaign platform effectively to move a foreign policy matter, a candidate needs several elements: some personal connection with the issue; a plan that is credible to at least some serious experts and connected clearly to US national interests; and a plurality of his/her own party's intelligentsia united behind the plan.
Personal connection matters. Four years ago, no one doubted the sincerity of John McCain's emotional connection to Georgians fighting Russia – just the wisdom of threatening Russia as a method of solving the problem. Romney's disadvantage is structural: governors get to know the world by marketing products to it. But it is also personal: he has appeared uncomfortable on national security topics, struggled to establish a cohesive set of national security advisers, and made critique after critique that lacks any policy prescriptions that would differentiate him from Obama.
His advisers' views on humanitarian intervention range from hostile to supportive. And then, there is John Bolton, whose fondness for intervention is not matched by fondness for UN mandates or the patient diplomacy that "working with partners" implies.
As the GOP establishment is divided on national security, it is divided on Mitt Romney. The New York Times has tallied up the list of GOP security luminaries – the Kissingers, Scowcrofts, Rices, Powells and Bakers – who have either declined, as yet, to endorse Romney or have done so with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm. And the views of the GOP's interventionists – Senators McCain and Graham at the forefront – are not those of the rank and file. The Republican base supports winding down the war in Afghanistan and exiting in 2014; is lukewarm on the need for war with Iran now; and unenthusiastic about the Libyan intervention. Those are all cases where McCain and Graham led the calls for more – and more lethal – action.
Romney's political advisers understand this very well. This is why Romney's positions on Afghanistan and Iran, under the rhetoric, are hard to distinguish from Obama's – and why they can be hard to distinguish at all.
Here we arrive at the central problem: does Romney have a solution for Syria's agonies? In fact, regional powers have been working to arm Syrian militias for several months now – and the effort is going badly on two fronts.
First, the militias have not, in fact, been able to hold their own with Syria's army and security forces anywhere, with foreign guns or without them. Second, observers say that as fighting drags on and atrocities mount, the militias are growing increasingly focused on sectarian violence and local feuds. Arms sent to fight the government may well heighten killing among Syria's ethnic groups.
This could make the stability of any post-Assad settlement harder to establish, rather than easier. It might also result in the spillage both of conflict and the weapons to pursue it across borders, destabilizing Lebanon, portions of Iraq and potentially Jordan. From both humanitarian and strategic perspectives, this is an outcome to be avoided.
Those who propose an all-out campaign to arm the rebels – and suggest that the Obama administration's failure to give them lethal aid (it has acknowledged giving communications and other support) is a moral failure – need to offer a response to this worry. But for the political reasons outlined above, Romney is unlikely to do that, or do it successfully.
That may well mean that the American public perceives his concern for Syria's suffering citizens to be nothing but a political ploy. And that would be a real moral failure.