President Biden may be winding down the drone wars. Data collected by Airwars.org, an independent organization that monitors civilian casualties in war, indicate drone killings have dwindled to almost nothing. Above are a couple of Airwars charts.
This is excellent news, if true and if it is more than temporary.
Ryan Cooper, writing for The Week, wonders why Biden doesn’t take credit for his achievement. My guess is that Biden thinks restraint is unpopular. It is certainly unpopular in the Washington press corps.
Most of President Trump’s critics, at home and abroad, saw nothing morally wrong with the killing of Iranian General Qasim Soleimani. They criticized the murder on pragmatic and procedural grounds.
They said that while Soleimani was a bad person who deserved to die, killing him at this particular time until these particular circumstances without proper consultation would have dire consequences.
I don’t claim to know what happens next, but right now it looks as if the consequences might not be all that dire. If so, the critics seem like a bunch of nervous nellies—provided you see nothing wrong with assassination in and of itself.
President Trump
Iranians fired missiles with pinpoint accuracy at two U.S. military bases, causing damage but not casualties. Their action was a demonstration of American vulnerability and Iranian restraint.
It’s worth remembering that the United States simulated an invasion of Iran in the Millennial Challenge 2002 war games, and lost badly. An all-out shooting war is not in the interest of either side.
Iranian and Hezbollah leaders said they will take revenge in the form of stepped-up attacks on U.S. troops. They said they will spare American civilians.
I think Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper regard increased American military casualties as an acceptable loss. If they cared about the lives of American troops, they would have wound down the futile Afghanistan campaign years ago.
One danger is that Trump, Pompeo and Esper will regard Iranian restraint as weakness. Pompeo has said he hopes increased economic pressure will make the current Iranian government fall.
That’s entirely possible, but the replacement Iranian government would be more fiercely anti-American and less restrained than the current one.
For now, both sides have stepped back from the brink. What many feared did not happen. Trump’s procedural sins do not seem all that bad.
But a precedent has been set – that the assassination of foreign leaders is one more foreign policy option that has to be considered. Killing leaders of foreign governments may be expedient or inexpedient, but we think about it on a case by case basis.
Here are some of that bad consequences that can flow from the new ethical normal.
Our government, having decided that it is all right to commit criminal acts against foreigners, would decide it is all right to commit criminal acts against citizens.
Democratic foreign governments would decide the United States is a rogue state and unite to stop it. This would more likely come in the form of economic boycotts, divestment and sanctions rather than a military alliance..
Authoritarian foreign governments would take the United States as a role model. Assassinations would become commonplace, and some of them would be of American leaders..
The killing of General Qasem Soleimani was more than a blunder. It was a crime.
He was invited to Baghdad by the Iraqi government, a U.S. ally, with the knowledge of the U.S. government, to use his good offices to help negotiate peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
He came without protection because he thought he was on a mission of peace. His killing was an act of treachery as well as murder.
Qasem Soleimani
We Americans find it hard to accept the criminal nature of this act because we have been incrementally brought to believe that assassination, along with waging undeclared wars, is normal behavior.
Most of President Trump’s critics say that although Soleimani was an evildoer who deserved to die, his killing was inadvisable under the circumstances, or that Trump should have consulted with Congress before he acted.
What was his crime? Soleimani’s Quds force organized and led resistance in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen against foreign invaders – Israelis, Americans, Saudis and Islamic State (ISIS) and Al Qaeda terrorists.
He acted on behalf of Iranian interests and against U.S. (perceived) interests and was therefore an enemy. But there was a time when honorable soldiers could respect a brave and capable enemy.
Northern generals in the U.S. Civil War respected Robert E. Lee. Allied generals in World War Two respected Erwin Rommel. They wouldn’t have encouraged Lee or Rommel to come to neutral ground and then killed them from ambush.
President Trump has led the United States to the brink of war with Iran. But even if war is avoided, it is still an established principle that a President can order invasions and killings on his own personal judgment, and so more murders of foreign leaders are nearly inevitable.
What has happened, will continue to happen, unless we the people put a stop to it. We have not seen the worst.
President Obama said during the campaign that he’s worried about somebody like Donald Trump with access to the nuclear codes and all the other powers of the Presidency. A writer named Pratap Chatterjee listed nine things Obama could do to reduce Trump’s power to do harm.
Name innocent drone victims.
Make public any reviews of military errors.
Make public the administration’s criteria for its “targeted killings.”
Disclose mass surveillance programs.
Make public all surveillance agreements with private companies.
Make public all secret laws created in recent years.
Punish anyone who has abused the drone or surveillance programs.
Punish those responsible for FBI domain management abuses.
Pardon Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and the other whistleblowers.
That wouldn’t eliminate a President Trump’s power to start wars without authorization from Congress, but it would be a start on reducing Presidential powers to their Constitutional limits.
Malik Jalal has traveled from Pakistan’s Waziristan border region to Britain so as to plead with President Obama to stop trying to kill him.
Malik Jalal
Malik is an honorary title that means “village leader”. He is a member of the North Waziristan Peace Committee, whose mission is to negotiate with the Pakistan Taliban to reduce violence in the region. The committee’s work is sanctioned by the government of Pakistan.
He has survived four attacks by Hellfire missiles and now sleeps out in the woods with his six-year-old son. He wrote in The Independent that he has information that the U.S. military wants to stop the work of the Peace Committee because they think peace would give the Taliban a secure sanctuary.
Jalal wrote that the first attack came in 2010, when his nephew took his vehicle to a service station to get an oil change and to have the tires checked. A Hellfire missile hit Jalal’s vehicle and another vehicle parked just beside it. The nephew was injured and four innocent bystanders were killed.
The next time he was driving to a peace conference, with another vehicle on the road behind, which happened to be the same shade of red as Jalal’s. A Hellfire missile destroyed the trailing vehicle and all four occupants, all innocent bystanders, were killed.
Jalal became sure that he was the target after the next attack. He accepted a dinner invitation by cell phone and, while he was on the way, a Hellfire missile struck, killing three innocent people, including a father of three and a mentally retarded man.
The fourth attack came early in 2011, when the Hellfire missile struck a meeting of community leaders, killing 40 people, none of whom, according to Jalal were engaged in acts of violence.
Since then he has taken to sleeping out of doors on a mountainside far from his house and always parking his vehicle a long distance from any destination. Recently, he said, his six-year-old son has joined him on the mountainside. The little boy said it was unrealistic to think that the U.S. military would refrain from killing Jalal’s family just because he wasn’t at home.
President Obama, in a 2012 interview with CNN, said these were his criteria for deciding to order someone killed with flying drones:
1. ‘ It has to be a target that is authorized by our laws.’
2. ‘It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative.’
3. ‘It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.’
4. ‘We’ve got to make sure that in whatever operations we conduct, we are very careful about avoiding civilian casualties.’
5. ‘That while there is a legal justification for us to try and stop [American citizens] from carrying out plots… they are subject to the protections of the constitution and due process.’
In Afghanistan, U.S. forces have a policy of targeting unusually tall people, on the assumption that they probably are Arabs or other foreign fighters supporting the Taliban.
Investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill said that they targeted one man who turned out to be an Afghan man of normal height standing among a group of children. The drone killed the man and all, or all but one, of the children.
Other targets are chosen through analysis of signals intelligence and meta-data or information from foreign intelligence services. Any male of military age killed in a drone strike is assumed to be a terrorist.
When U.S. forces first invaded Afghanistan, I accepted that they were there to liberate the Afghan people from the tyranny of the Taliban. But if any dead adult male is assumed to be an enemy unless proven otherwise, then the United States is waging war against the Afghan people as a whole. This is not right, and it does not make Americans safer.
THE DRONE PAPERS an eight-part series by The Intercept about the U.S. military’s assassination program, based on a whistle-blower’s secret document. (Hat tips to Bill Harvey, my expatriate friend Jack, etc.)
Each week the President of the United States approves a list of death warrants, which are sometimes executed by trained assassins but more usually by flying killer robots.
The United States is at war, we are told, and the targets are our enemies. But the war has no defined enemy, the battlefield is the whole world, and there is no expectation it will ever end.
Hardly anybody I know thinks this is strange or abnormal.
Bernie Sanders is, from my point of view, very good on economic issues, pretty good on civil rights and civil liberties issues and not good on war and foreign policy issues.
He is a better champion of the interests of the American voting public than any other Democratic candidate, or any Republican. He is not much of a champion of harmless people overseas who get in the way of U.S. military operations.
He recently said that he’d continue President Obama’s drone killing policy, but in a kinder, gentler manner in which fewer people were killed. He also has called for a more active military role for Saudi Arabia.
What I take this to mean is that he would continue the Bush-Obama policy of global military intervention, but in a way that minimizes American casualties.
The issue with drone killings is not the technology. Drones can be highly useful in conducting military operations, and are preferable to dropping napalm bombs.
Drone killings, and Special Operations assassinations, are a Constitutional issue. It is whether a President of the United States has the authority to sign a death warrant for anybody anywhere in the world, based on his sole authority without any accountability.
The secondary issue is that, as applied to poor, primitive, brown-skinned people in remote areas, the policy is to kill people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is death by racial profiling.
Here are links to interesting articles I’ve come across recently. I may add links during the day. The comment thread is open to general and off-topic comments.
A coalition of parties in Catalonia say they will declare independence from Spain if they win the provincial elections September 27. Madrid will not recognize the results if the vote is “yes”, so the worst case possibility is a new Spanish civil war.
Governments justify turning over decision-making to central banks on the grounds that they are thereby substituting objective metrics, benchmarks and performance indicators for fallible human judgment. But at best, these metrics are human judgement once-removed and, at worst, masks for covert human agendas.
Jeremy Corbyn, the emerging new leader of the British Labor Party, seems a lot like Bernie Sanders. He is an aging, formerly obscure member of Parliament who wants to return the party to its original principles. His strong grass-roots support surprises and alarms the entrenched party leaders.
The Obama administration considers the real alternatives to drone strikes to be the unpalatable options of grueling ground wars or passive acceptance of terrorism.
Then it congratulates itself for picking the wise, ethical and responsible choice of killing people without knowing who they are.
We are always free to choose, no matter what our circumstances. But we are not free to choose the options we have to choose from.
Lynn Stuart Parramore wrote that our choices as to when to get married, whom to marry and whether to stay married are limited by our life circumstances. And those life circumstances are shaped by how much money we have.
There’s an old saying: Half the world doesn’t know how the other half lives. And another old saying: Don’t judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes (at least in imagination). These are things to keep in mind when judging the life choices of people in circumstances other than our own.
A judge in California ruled that teacher tenure is a violation of the state constitution. His reasoning is that tenure protects ineffective teachers, that poor and minority children have a disproportionate number of ineffective teachers and that tenure is therefore a violation of their rights.
Ravitch wrote that the problem with this is that financially-strapped school districts will tend to lay off the more experienced teachers, whether effective or not, because they are the ones that are paid the most.
Not covered by the decision: Overcrowded classes, the elimination of arts programs, or the lack of resources for basic needs, including libraries, librarians, counselors, after-school programs, and nurses, all of which disproportionately affect poor and minority children.
Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has taken refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for the past two years rather than be extradited to Sweden to be questioned in a sexual misconduct case.
He is afraid of being re-extradited to the United States on espionage charges because of all the secret information he has published. He offered to go to Sweden if he was assured he won’t be re-extradited, and also offered to be questioned where he is. Sweden has refused both conditions.
Kevin Gosztla noted that Sweden has meanwile passed a law that you can be extradited unless there is an actual criminal charge against you. Assange has not been charged with a crime, but the law isn’t retroactive to him. Gosztla also noted that Swedish prosecutors have traveled to foreign countries to question suspects in other cases, including murder cases.
Assange’s lawyers are working on a new appeal to Sweden to set aside the arrest warrant, and also are appealing to the United Nations Human Rights Commission on the grounds that Sweden violates international human rights treaties..
Lt. Col. John Paul Vann famously said during the Vietnam War that the best weapon in a war against insurgents was a knife, and the worst possible weapon was a bomb. That is, in order to win, it is necessary to kill your enemies without killing indiscriminately and making new enemies.
Unfortunately for the United States, our armed forces in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan used the way of the bomb against enemies who used the way of the knife.
I recently finished reading THE WAY OF THE KNIFE: The CIA, a Secret Army and a War at the Ends of the Earth by Mark Mazzetti (2013), which is a study of the American attempt to substitute targeted killing for indiscriminate killing and why it failed.
It is based on interviews with members of the CIA and Special Operations forces as well as freelance operatives. Mazzetti is fair to their point of view and to the risks they ran to do their duty as they saw it. He gives a good picture of the war on terror as they experienced it.
His book is excellent for what it is, keeping in mind that it does not deal with the war as experienced by civilians on the ground nor does it explore the higher-level economic and geo-political aims of the war (controlling oil, containing Russia and China).
The Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon have become powers unto themselves, with their own policy agendas that are separate from that of the elected leadership .
This is not only a problem of implementation of military and foreign policy. It is a Constitutional question which calls into question the possibility of limiting power by means of checks and balances.
Leon Panetta as a congressman was a strong critic of the CIA. But when President Obama appointed him director of the CIA, he was warned of the danger of endangering CIA “morale,” which, according to Mazzetti, he took as a veiled warning. Panetta quickly became a strong advocate for the CIA’s viewpoint within the administration. And the Obama administration itself doubled down on the policies for which Barack Obama as candidate criticized the Bush administration.
Instead of checks and balances, the government has an internal conflict between the CIA and the Pentagon. The CIA does not trust the Pentagon to react quickly and has developed its own para-military forces. The Pentagon does not trust the CIA’s intelligence and has developed its own sources of intelligence. In general, the CIA works with intelligence services of foreign governments, such as Pakistan, while the Pentagon regards them as quasi-enemies.
The CIA and Pentagon operate independently of each other, and often disrupt each others’ missions. Then there are mercenaries, and independent operators which are only loosely controlled by the U.S. government.
American foreign policy is implemented and largely determined by the CIA and Pentagon. The State Department and career diplomats have no say at all, as has been made clear at top-level meetings.
Drones don’t kill people. Governments kill people. Drones are not necessarily a problem. They have legitimate uses, including legitimate uses in war. The problem with killer drones is that they are a technology that makes it easy to commit acts of war and pretend that they are something else.
And of course surveillance drones are different from killer drones. They, too, have their legitimate uses. The issue is not surveillance drones versus other kinds of surveillance technology. The issue is how much surveillance we the people are willing to tolerate.
These are not technology questions. These are Constitutional questions.
I’m glad that President Obama decided against overt U.S. intervention in the Syrian conflict, but I admit I don’t know what to do to help the poor people of Syria. It seems as if the only alternatives are continued rule by a ruthless and brutal hereditary dictator, and rule by local militias and warlords.
The United States government, for all our high-tech flying killer drones and all our highly-trained special operations forces, does not have the capability to keep the peace in a country torn by civil war. Arming one or more of the fighting factions makes things worse. Bombarding the country makes things worse. Helping victims is good to do, but it doesn’t solve the problem. Maybe somebody who knows more about Syria than I do sees an answer. I don’t see any.
Arnon Milchan, producer of Hollywood movies such as Pretty Woman, Fight Club and LA Confidential, gave an interview about his earlier life as an Israeli secret agent in the 1970s who obtained materials and equipment for Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. This helps me understand the Israeli government’s fear of Iran’s nuclear program. If Israel could develop nuclear weapons without the world’s knowledge, why couldn’t Iran?
The National Security Agency is to espionage as flying killer drones are to warfare.
By separating the operator from the target, the NSA and drones create a perceived illusion of safety and impunity. By creating the illusion of omniscience, they diminish the perceived need for knowledge and good judgment. And by their technological prowess, they escape the physical limitations that limited the scope of espionage and warfare in earlier eras.
Espionage historically has involved deception and betrayal, war has involved killing and destruction. But repugnant as they are, they are necessary in the world as it is today.
Historically spying, like soldiering, has involved risk. Governments execute or imprison spies. That is why secret agents, starting with Nathan Hale, can be legitimately regarded as heroes. Risk has limited the scope of spying. The ability to electronically scoop up and store electronic data about people removes this limit.
One of the things that limit American intelligence is the widespread lack of proficiency in foreign languages and lack of knowledge of foreign cultures. Few Americans can walk around on the streets of Karachi or Tehran and be taken for anything but what they are. But if you can read the e-mail of foreign leaders and collect meta-data on foreign peoples, you might think deep understanding unnecessary.
The NSA gathers more data than is humanly possible to understand. This must be delegated to computer algorithms. They sift through data to find patterns of behavior, which are them used to put people on no-fly lists or drone target lists. The end result is that people trust the conclusions of the computer algorithm more than they trust their own judgment.
In the past, there were economic and physical limits to the scope of spying. It was not just that governments could budget only so much money for intelligence services. It was that there were only a certain number of people who were willing and able to take on this kind of work.
The documentary, Unmanned: America’s drone war, was released this week. You can download a copy from the Internet or view it here. It was powerful and disturbing on an emotional level, and at the same time made a case that the drone strikes benefit nobody except avowed enemies of the United States, and certain corporations who get billion-dollar drone contracts.
The movie highlights two drone victims. One is 16-year-old Tariq Aziz, who was selected by his village community to accompany tribal elders to a Grand Jirga, a meeting of village leaders, politicians, lawyers and journalists from all over Pakistan to discuss what to do about the drone strikes. He was killed while driving a car with another teenage a couple of weeks after the meeting.
The other is 67-year-old Momina Bibi, a 67-year-old grandmother and midwife who was killed while working in her vegetable garden. Her family testified about the drone strikes before Congress this week.
It has long been known that the killer drones often strike people who are not the intended targets. But it is also important to note that intended targets are not necessarily terrorists or militants. The film’s narrator said Tariq Aziz may have been fingered by an informant.
We Americans know little or nothing about the people of Afghanistan or northwest Pakistan. So our government relies on informants, who by definition are morally doubtful individuals, because what person would spy on his own people for the benefit of a foreign government?
Many prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are there because they were identified as Taliban by bounty-hunters. The American authorities evidently took the word of the bounty-hunters, without considering the possibility that they were random individuals, or personal enemies of the bounty-hunters, or people to whom the bounty-hunters owed money.
Why does the U.S. government continue a drone killing policy that has been shown to immoral, illegal and counterproductive? I think it is because the alternative to continuing the policy is for the people responsible for the policy to face the reality of what they have done. Confession and repentance are good for the soul, and until we Americans are able to do this, we are likely to continue on our bad path.
The video above is from a documentary film called Unmanned about drone strikes on civilians in Pakistan. The Rehman family, shown in that video, also is shown below when they came to Washington, D.C., this week to testify before Congress.
The family of a 67-year-old midwife from a remote village in North Waziristan told lawmakers on Tuesday about her death and the “CIA drone” they say was responsible. Their harrowing accounts marked the first time Congress had ever heard from civilian victims of an alleged US drone strike.
Rafiq ur Rehman, a Pakistani primary school teacher who appeared on Capitol Hill with his children, Zubair, 13, and Nabila, 9, described his mother, Momina Bibi, as the “string that held our family together”. His two children, who were gathering okra with their grandmother the day she was killed, on 24 October 2012, were injured in the attack.
“Nobody has ever told me why my mother was targeted that day,” Rehman said, through a translator. “Some media outlets reported that the attack was on a car, but there is no road alongside my mother’s house. Others reported that the attack was on a house. But the missiles hit a nearby field, not a house. All of them reported that three, four, five militants were killed.”
Instead, he said, only one person was killed that day: “Not a militant but my mother.”
Nabilia, the 9-year-old girl, said she is afraid to go to school because of drones overhead. Good for Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) for arranging for this testimony to be heard. It’s too bad that only four other members of the House of Representatives heard it.
Killer drones are justified on the grounds that they are a more precise method of killing than the alternatives—dropping napalm or cluster bombs from airplanes, or invading with ground troops. But the issue is not the method of killing. The issue is the killing of civilian bystanders in nations with which the United States is not at war. The significance of drone technology is that it makes killing so easy and so seemingly free of consequences.
It would be interesting to know whether this 67-year-old grandmother was killed because a drone went astray, or because of mistaken identity, or because some drone operator simply didn’t care. No matter which is these possibilities is the correct one, they indicate something seriously wrong with the U.S. use of drones.
Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer that people do not revolt because they are poor and miserable. If that there the case, the world would be in a constant state of revolt. No, Hoffer wrote, people revolt when something to which they think they have a right is taken away from them, or when hopes are raised that things will get better. Having a lot of highly educated young people without jobs is a spark that sets off the tinder.
If that is the case, the American people are ripe for revolt right now. Although we are wealthier and more free than much of the world’s population, our economic security and political rights are being eroded. The younger generation knows it is worse off than the generations that came before. And the hope of change generated by Barack Obama has proved to be an illusion.
Historically the powers that be in the United States headed off revolt by responding to the discontented and bringing them into the system. This happened with the labor movement in the 1930s and the civil rights protests of the 1960s. But I think this time is different.
The electoral process is being altered to increase the power of money and to shut out minority groups, poor people, young people and others who might upset the status quo. The legislative process is being altered so as to give veto power to the opponents of progressive reform. The administration of government is becoming interlocked with corporations and shielded from public view.
Protest and dissent are being criminalized. The U.S. government has the legal and institutional basis to impose a police state. And the United States is being locked into NAFTA-like trade agreements which give corporations rights that override national law.
President Obama wants Congress to approve a limited attack on Syria, as punishment for using nerve gas against civilians. He promised he does not plan a full-scale invasion of Syria. Here’s why I think Congress should not grant approval.
Bashar al-Assad
1. An attack on Syria will not benefit the people of Syria nor will it benefit the people of the United States.
2. We don’t know for sure whether President Bashar al-Assad of Syria did order nerve gas attacks on Syria.
3. Assuming that he is guilty, a limited attack on Syria will result in dead Syrians and possibly some damage to the government’s military power, but it will not hurt President Assad personally. An attack would likely strengthen his standing with the Syrian people and with Arab people generally.
4. The rationale for the attack is to maintain the credibility of American power. But an ineffective attack, which this is almost certain to be, will undermine credibility, and create a demand for further and more extensive action. As in Vietnam, the U.S. government would be in the position of a gambler doubling his bets rather than cutting his losses.
5. There are other ways to bring war criminals to justice than by bombing. Assuming there is proof of Assad’s guilt, the U.S. could bring charges against Assad to an international court. This would provide a basis, and a duty, for the international community to act.
6. There are other ways to help poison gas victims than by bombing. Our government could provide kits for sair gas treatment to whoever wants them. The side that would be helped the most would be the side not using gas.
7. Syria, unlike Iraq and Libya, has powerful allies, including Russia. There is a danger that Russia will enter a U.S.-Syrian conflict, just as China entered the Korean War. There is a danger of a wider conflict involving the United States, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Sunni Arab militants on the one hand, and Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and Shiite Arab militants on the other hand.
8. An attack on Syria, like the invasion of Iraq and the attack on Libya, provides one more incentive for the government of Iran to acquire nuclear weapons and delivery system as a deterrent against attack.
I read in my morning newspaper that President Barack Obama is certain that President Bashar al-Assad’s government must be punished for using deadly chemical weapons, including sarin gas, to kill hundreds of Syrian civilians.
But if the United States carries out a military strike on Syria, it’s not likely that it will harm President Assad personally. It is almost certain to result in the deaths of more Syrian civilians.
I’m reminded of President Bill Clinton’s efforts to punish Saddam Hussein by means of an economic blockade and intermittent bombing of Iraq. But Saddam did not suffer in the slightest from the low-level war against Iraq. He still had his luxurious life amid his many palaces. It was the ordinary people of Iraq who suffered.
Justice would require that President Assad be indicted for his crimes and tried before an international court, like Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Charles Taylor of Liberia. But even if it were feasible to take him into custody, I don’t think the U.S. government would allow this to happen, any more than in the case of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden.
In a fair trial, Assad, like Saddam or Osama, would be able to testify about their past relations with the U.S. government, and that would be too embarrassing for the U.S. government to tolerate—in particular, Assad’s role as a torture subcontractor for the CIA.
President Obama and the U.S. Congress could help relieve the Syrian situation in many ways. They could help feed and shelter refugees made homeless by the Syrian civil war. They could join with the government of Russia in trying to negotiate a cease-fire between the Syrian factions. If the United Nations authorizes a peacekeeping force, the U.S. could provide troops and material aid for that force.
In the above video, Fareed Zakaria, columnist for Time and host of a weekly CNN program on foreign affairs, outlined the historical background of Syria and made the case against full-scale U.S. military intervention in Syria.
But firing missiles at Syria is not a “moderate” alternative to all-out war. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, back in the days of the Vietnam Conflict, thought that a carefully calibrated bombing North Vietnam was a means of sending a message about U.S. resolve. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.
Occasional missile strikes on Syria won’t harm Assad. He may even welcome them, as a means of redirecting the people’s anger away from himself and toward the United States and its allies. The supposed punishment will fall on ordinary people in Syria, especially if the missile hits a gas storage facility.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 