Special to WorldTribune.com

The White House on Aug. 18, 2011 released a written statement from President Barack Obama: “For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President (Bashar) Assad to step aside.”

Four years later, Assad remains in power with the backing of Iran’s terror proxy Hizbullah, Obama’s weak policy has led to the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) and over 220,000 have died in Syria.

Obama’s flawed strategy in the Syrian crisis has only led to a humanitarian disaster, according to analysts interviewed by McClatchy news service.

Ryan Crocker, who has served as ambassador to Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, called Obama’s statement “an uh-oh moment, based, I think, on a fundamental misunderstanding of the basic history and dynamics inside Syria.”

Obama administration officials were said to have believed that calling on Assad to step aside would merely be a part of the Arab Spring domino effect that saw leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya toppled.

Experts say that strategy was not only flawed, but that Obama had no backup strategy should Assad remain in power, as he did.

Frederic Hof, who led the State Department’s response to the Syria crisis and is now with the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council, said Obama’s statement should only have been released after “a very careful and very comprehensive interagency planning process” that identified U.S. objectives in Syria and offered the president policy options as part of a broader, agreed-upon strategy.

“At that point, a presidential statement saying Assad must step side would reflect an approved national security strategy for Syria. It would reflect something of substance, it would reflect the manner in which the United States intends to proceed,” Hof said. “This was done entirely backwards, in this rush to get the president on ‘the right side of history’ based on a faulty and thoroughly unsupported, unsubstantiated assumption that this guy was going to be gone in 20 minutes.”

“The White House and the State Department both – and I include myself in this – were guilty of high-faluting rhetoric without any kind of hard policy tools to make the rhetoric stick,” said Robert Ford, who was the U.S. ambassador to Syria at the time.

“To be fair to the White House, they did ask me shortly before the president made the announcement whether it was a good idea. And I said, ‘well, you might as well go ahead at this point,’ ” Ford said. “That was a mistake.”

“The only policy tool we were willing to engage was more sanctions. And everybody knew that Assad wasn’t going to step down because we upped the sanctions,” Ford added. “That was understood.”

Obama’s Syria strategy is also said to have opened space for Islamists who replaced moderate rebels as the dominate force in the anti-Assad movement. ISIL now controls a third of Syria while Al Qaida’s Nusra Front has a large presence in another third. Rebel groups who support democracy, such as the Free Syrian Army, have been reduced to bit players.

Efforts to build and train a force of moderate rebels have been a complete failure as the Obama administration dumped $500 million into a program that has graduated just 60 fighters, many of them seized by Islamists within weeks of hitting the battlefield.

Many U.S. officials and diplomats now say (privately) that the fall of Assad would only lead to a free-for-all among militants for control of Damascus. They can’t say it publicly as they’re tied to Obama’s policy that was set in stone on Aug. 18, 2011.

  Arab Spring, ISIL, Report: Obama’s 2011 call for Assad’s ouster led to humanitarian disaster, Robert Ford, WorldTribune.com