Center for American Progress Recomendation

After a Possible Strike in Syria: Planning Ahead for Potential Responses and New Threats to U.S. Security Interests | Center for American Progress

A U.S.-led military strike against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria could begin soon in response to the Assad regime’s large-scale use of chemical weapons on its own people last week. The reported elements of this proportionate response are designed to respond to the Assad regime’s chemical-weapons violation and to avoid enmeshing the United States more deeply in Syria’s multisided conflict.
In response to the first reports of small-scale chemical-weapons use in Syria last April, the Center for American Progress advocated a multifaceted approach to guide a U.S. response. This response included three major components:

1. Demand an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting on the Assad regime’s likely chemical-weapons use to help validate the facts.
2. Engage NATO and regional partners in planning the U.S. response, which would aim to destroy “appropriate military targets, including delivery systems, logistics, and applicable command and control.”
3. Request that NATO and other allies begin planning for a major multinational refugee relief mission in Jordan.

These components should be undertaken prior to military action, which always carries both risk and uncertainty. As such, the United States and its partners should perform a risk assessment of possible reactions to a strike against the Assad regime and prepare for these possible contingencies. This risk assessment will neither be perfect nor predictive, given the uncertainties that are involved. Nonetheless, it is worth conducting some speculative analysis and contingency planning about some possible threats that the United States and its partners might face, however likely or not, in the wake of strikes.

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