Syria’s civil war has occurred in two phases. The first phase, roughly from January 2011 until March 2012, was largely an internal affair. When the Arab Spring erupted in Tunisia and Egypt in January 2011, protests erupted in Syria as well.

Syria burns [By Jia Qiang/China.org.cn]

The second phase began when the US helped to organize a large group of countries to back the rebellion. At a meeting of foreign ministers in Istanbul on April 1, 2012, the US and other countries pledged active financial and logistical support for the Free Syrian Army.

Most important, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared: “We think Assad must go.”

That open-ended statement, without any clear means to achieve the goal that it announced, has done much to fuel military escalation and the rising death toll in Syria, while pushing the US repeatedly to defend its “credibility” against a line in the sand that it should not have drawn.

Then and now, the US has claimed to speak in the interest of the Syrian people. This is very doubtful. The US views Syria mainly through the lens of Iran, seeking to depose Assad in order to deprive Iran’s leaders of an important ally in the region.

The US-led effort in Syria is thus best understood as a proxy war with Iran — a cynical strategy that has contributed to the massive rise in violence.

The US government’s misguided move from potential mediator and problem solver to active backer of the Syrian insurrection was, predictably, a terrible mistake.

Impediment to peace

It put the US in effective opposition to the United Nations peace initiative then being led by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose approach was to call for a ceasefire followed by a negotiated political transition.

The US preempted this process by backing the military rebellion and insisting on Assad’s immediate departure. Russia argued that America’s insistence on Assad’s immediate departure was an impediment to peace. In this, Russia was right.

Now, bypassing the UN once again, the US is declaring its intention to intervene directly by bombing Syria, ostensibly to deter the future use of chemical weapons.

America’s motivations are not entirely clear.

No underlying logic

Perhaps there is no underlying foreign-policy logic, but only carelessness.

There are many dictatorships in the world that the US does not try to overthrow.

On the contrary, many of them are ostensibly America’s close allies.

So why does the US continue to back a deadly rebellion in a civil war that is continuing to escalate dangerously, now to the point of chemical-weapons attacks?

To put it simply, President Barack Obama’s administration has inherited the neoconservative philosophy of regime change in the Middle East.

The overriding idea is that the US and its close allies get to choose who governs in the region.

Assad must go not because he is authoritarian, but because he is allied with Iran.

The US should reverse course.

A direct US attack on Syria without UN backing is far more likely to inflame the region than it is to resolve the crisis there — a point well appreciated in the United Kingdom, where Parliament bucked the government by rejecting British participation in a military strike.

Instead, the US should provide evidence of the chemical attacks to the UN; call on the Security Council to condemn the perpetrators; and refer such violations to the International Criminal Court.

It is time for the US to help stop the killing in Syria.

That means abandoning the fantasy that it can or should determine who rules in the Middle East.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is professor of sustainable development, professor of health policy and management, and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2013.www.project-syndicate.org. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.