The New York times
VIENNA — Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, said on Tuesday that if President Bashar al-Assad of Syria continues to block access of humanitarian aid to besieged cities and towns, they were prepared to help the World Food Program airdrop food and emergency supplies.
The very fact that they had to threaten the airdrops — which are expensive and often inaccurate — amounted to an admission of how little progress has been made in achieving either the lasting cease-fire or the regular humanitarian relief that European and Arab nations, along with Iran, laid out as the first steps toward a broader peace agreement.
The threat to conduct airdrops came after a meeting in Vienna of the International Syria Support Group, made up of the nations that drafted a largely unimplemented plan to end the country’s civil war. They gathered at a low point: A once-promising “cessation of hostilities” has largely collapsed, an effort to start negotiations between the opposition and the government broke down, and there has been no progress toward negotiating a “political transition” that was supposed to begin on Aug. 1.
Bolstered by Russia’s intervention to help prop him up, Mr. Assad is in a stronger position than he has been in years, many experts say, and has rejected the idea that any new government would have to exclude him. He has the strong support of Iran, his longtime provider of security, though Russian officials seem less concerned about whether Mr. Assad himself remains in power or is replaced by another leader from his Alawite Shiite sect.
At a news conference on Tuesday afternoon with Mr. Lavrov, Mr. Kerry rejected a suggestion that, in dealing with Mr. Assad, he was operating without the kind of leverage he had in Vienna last year during the Iran nuclear negotiations — when American sanctions and sabotage of the Iranian program created the pressure that led to a deal.
But Mr. Kerry — who White House aides say has complained in Situation Room meetings about the lack of clout to force Mr. Assad to make good on his commitments — argued that the Syrian leader would be making a mistake to believe he would pay no price for refusing to cooperate.
“If President Assad has come to a conclusion there’s no Plan B,” he said, referring to more coercive action to force him to comply, “then he’s come to a conclusion that is totally without any foundation whatsoever and even dangerous.”
Mr. Kerry added later that Mr. Assad “should never make a miscalculation about President Obama’s determination to do what is right at any given moment of time, where he believes that he has to make that decision.” Mr. Assad, he said, has “flagrantly violated” the United Nations resolution calling for a nationwide cease-fire and allowing humanitarian assistance.
Yet in making public a case that there would be consequences for Mr. Assad’s intransigence, Mr. Kerry was touching on one of the hardest issues facing Mr. Obama and his national security team in their last eight months in office. The president has repeatedly defended his decision not to authorize a military strike against Mr. Assad after he crossed what Mr. Obama had described as a “red line” against using chemical weapons. He also rejected a no-fly zone to protect fleeing civilians and opposition forces.
Those steps would draw the United States deeper into a war in which Mr. Obama initially saw no vital American interest, though Mr. Kerry and other officials, in private, have argued that the size of the humanitarian disaster in Syria and the destabilization of Europe by the flow of refugees have created such an interest.
In the Vienna talks, Mr. Kerry could not credibly threaten military intervention if Mr. Assad continued to defy the United Nations and the resolutions of the Support Group. He did suggest that if there were continued violations of the cease-fire, any violator — he clearly had Mr. Assad’s forces in mind — might become a target. But he also argued that military solutions would be of limited use, saying he and Mr. Lavrov agreed on “the futility and stupidity of an escalated process that could destroy Syria altogether and create even greater problems throughout the region,” which would attract “more and more jihadis to Syria.”
It is unclear whether an effort to get around the blockades to food and humanitarian deliveries would be effective. A spokesman for the opposition’s negotiating group, Salem al-Meslet, said in a statement that “if there is no full, unimpeded access, the World Food Program must deliver airdrops to those in need without the consent of the regime.” He said the airdrop has to be “continuous, intensive, and cover all areas in need,” a description that sounded more like the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49 than the periodic attempts to get food to starving Syrian populations.
So far, there has been no resemblance to the Berlin effort. The first airdrop to the government-held area of Deir al-Zour, besieged by the Islamic State, ended badly. The supplies did not reach people in the besieged area. Officials have not been willing to say whether they ended up in the hands of the Islamic State fighters.
In general, airdrops are hugely expensive and inefficient compared with trucking aid into a country, and United Nations officials have long said they should be used only as a last resort. It is particularly hard to know how they might target drops in densely populated areas like Daraya, a rebel stronghold southwest of Damascus.
The frustration with the Assad forces — and the Syrian leader’s unwillingness to allow in humanitarian aid after insisting for months that he would — led to some surprisingly undiplomatic language. Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special envoy for Syria, told reporters here that the Syrian government’s cutoff of towns was “the closest to a medieval type of siege that we’re seeing in recent history.”