"The creation of safe zones will lead to the US's full military involvement in Syria"

"... If President Barack Obama determines that toppling the regime of Bashar al-Assad by force is a vital U.S. national interest (though it isn’t), he should create a coalition to act quickly, decisively and effectively to do it. Otherwise, he should avoid half-baked measures, such as the safe-zones scheme, that can lead to an open-ended military commitment without accomplishing the intended results.

The desire to do something about Syria is understandable.... But the president is absolutely right to be wary of ill- considered interventions, including the idea du jour for stopping the killing. (John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has begun talking up the concept.) Like the Annan plan, safe zones are far more compelling on paper than they would be in practice.

The arguments in their favor go something like this: Safe zones would absorb fleeing refugees, relieving pressure on Turkey, which has received at least 25,000 of them; a political opposition might set up a headquarters in the sanctuaries; and powers such as the U.S., France, the U.K. and key Arab states could help organize, train and supply fighters from the rebel Free Syrian Army and other groups there. This would send a powerful signal to Assad that the noose was tightening. A foreign presence on Syrian soil might shake the regime and accelerate its fragmentation.

To have even a chance of working, the right conditions would have to be present. Those would include full Turkish buy-in and an international mandate legitimizing intervention, preferably a resolution of the UN Security Council. Most important would be a sustained military commitment to protect the zones and the corridors leading to them. This would require air patrols and thus the suppression of Syrian air defenses. It would also mean carrying out offensive air strikes against the regime’s forces, if the Syrians respond militarily, and ultimately securing Syria’s stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons to prevent their use against coalition troops.

Even if all that could be achieved (and it probably couldn’t), safe zones are real headaches. Protecting these areas from the air might not be possible and would thus require boots on the ground. The farther coalition forces got from Turkey’s border, the harder and messier this would be. Once in, there would be no choice but to prevail.....

It took eight months to bring down Muammar Qaddafi’s regime in Libya. And the advantages that effort enjoyed -- French enthusiasm, Russian acquiescence, a Security Council mandate, and a tin-pot dictator with no serious military, air defenses or weapons of mass destruction -- don’t apply to Syria. Plus the NATO after-action report on Libya -- with its accounts of faulty information sharing; a paucity of military analysts and planners; heavy reliance on American know-how; and a lack of aircraft required to intercept electronic communications -- doesn’t inspire confidence in another coalition mission. The report suggests that, unlike Libya, Syria would have to be a U.S.-dominated operation........ if we do make Syria our priority, we have to accept the costs: To maintain the pressure against Iran’s nuclear program, we’ll need the Russians and the Chinese on board, but we won’t get them to support both our policies on Iran and Syria.

Above all, we shouldn’t delude ourselves. The creation of safe zones will lead to our full military involvement in the Syrian crisis. If we’re prepared to go in this direction, fine. But we can’t let our moral outrage push us into embracing a plan, thinking we can get rid of Assad on the cheap. We can’t."