U.S. Faces a Challenge in Trying to Punish Syria

“We’re talking about a country whose economy is about the size of Pittsburgh’s,” said one administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the continuing debate within the administration about the next steps. “There are things you can do to amp up the volume” of sanctions, the official said, “but the financial impact is slim.”

The problem the Obama administration faces with Syria is similar to those involving North Korea and Myanmar, which have long been under sanctions. In Syria’s case, the United States already, in 2006, banned transactions with the Commercial Bank of Syria. In early 2007, it accused four government-related research organizations of working on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and banned transactions with them.

But later that year, when Israel found a nuclear reactor under construction in the Syrian desert and destroyed it in an airstrike, the United States took no further action, in part because the Bush administration could not think of any truly effective sanctions. Now the Obama administration is looking for specific sanctions against individual leaders, though most of their money is probably in Europe or Lebanon.

So far, President Obama has stopped well short of calling on Mr. Assad to step down, or of declaring, as he did of Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, that Mr. Assad had lost the moral authority to lead his country. Nor, apparently, has the administration been working behind the scenes to ease Mr. Assad out of office, as in the case of Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Asked how the administration justified treating Mr. Assad so differently, Jay Carney, the president’s press secretary, said Monday that it was “up to the people of Syria to decide who its leaders should be.” He tried to differentiate Syria in other ways as well.

“Libya was, again, a unique situation,” Mr. Carney said. “We had large portions of the country that were out of the control of Muammar Qaddafi.? We had a Qaddafi regime that was moving against its own people in a coordinated military fashion and was about to assault a very large city on the promise that it would show” what Colonel Qaddafi himself called “no mercy.” And, Mr. Carney continued, “we had the support of the Arab League.”

Administration officials say that while they lack many effective economic tools, they believe Mr. Assad is sensitive to portrayals of his regime as brutal and backward. “He sees himself as a Westernized leader,” one senior administration official said, “and we think he’ll react if he believes he is being lumped in with brutal dictators.”

Recently, the White House stepped up its denunciations of the Syrian government, and of Mr. Assad himself. “Over the course of two months since protests in Syria began,” Mr. Obama said in a statement on Friday, “the United States has repeatedly encouraged President Assad and the Syrian government to implement meaningful reforms, but they refuse to respect the rights of the Syrian people or be responsive to their aspirations.”

He accused Mr. Assad of putting “personal interests ahead of the interests of the Syrian people, and resorting to the use of force and outrageous human rights abuses.”