President Trump reportedly hopes that cruise missile attack Syria and the 11-ton MOAB bomb dropped on Afghanistan will make American threats more credible when he deals with North Korea and other hostile countries.
But it is not enough for a leader of a great nation to be able to make credible threats. He also has to be able to make credible promises.
It is not enough for foreign heads of state to feel in danger if they oppose the United States. They have to be able to feel safe from U.S. wrath if they cooperate with the United States.
Otherwise the threats will make them redouble their efforts to be able to strike back.
Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi and Bashar al-Assad all found that appeasing the United States was more dangerous than defiance.
Unfortunately for President Trump, he—for reasons not of his own making—is in a situation in which neither his threats nor his promises are credible.
[Correction 4/8/2017: Sarin, as peteybee of Spread an Idea pointed out, is a liquid, not a gas.]
Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon and a self-described expert on persuasion, thinks that the best way for President Trump to respond to fake news about Syrian gas attacks is by means of a fake response—
The reason the Assad government would bomb its own people with a nerve agent right now is obvious. Syrian President Assad – who has been fighting for his life for several years, and is only lately feeling safer – suddenly decided to commit suicide-by-Trump.
Scott Adams
Because the best way to make that happen is to commit a war crime against your own people in exactly the way that would force President Trump to respond or else suffer humiliation at the hands of the mainstream media.
And how about those pictures coming in about the tragedy. Lots of visual imagery. Dead babies.
It is almost as if someone designed this “tragedy” to be camera-ready for President Trump’s consumption. It pushed every one of his buttons. Hard. And right when things in Syria were heading in a positive direction.
Interesting timing.
Super-powerful visual persuasion designed for Trump in particular.
Suspiciously well-documented event for a place with no real press.
No motive for Assad to use gas to kill a few dozen people at the cost of his entire regime. It wouldn’t be a popular move with Putin either.
The type of attack no U.S. president can ignore and come away intact.
A setup that looks suspiciously similar to the false WMD stories that sparked the Iraq war.
I’m going to call bullshit on the gas attack. It’s too “on-the-nose,” as Hollywood script-writers sometimes say, meaning a little too perfect to be natural. This has the look of a manufactured event.
My guess is that President Trump knows this smells fishy, but he has to talk tough anyway. However, keep in mind that he has made a brand out of not discussing military options. He likes to keep people guessing. He reminded us of that again yesterday, in case we forgot.
So how does a Master Persuader respond to a fake war crime?
Is Vladimir Putin’s objective in Syria to destroy ISIS or to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad? It seems to me that the answer is “yes”.
I’ve read articles criticizing Putin for concentrating Russian airstrikes on rebels other than ISIS. Some of these articles hint that Putin or maybe even Assad are secretly supporting ISIS.
I think this criticism mistakes the nature of air power. Command of the air can be devastatingly effective when used in combined operations with ground troops. But bombing alone, in and of itself, seldom defeats a determined enemy.
What these maps show is that Putin’s air strikes are concentrated on “rebels” not part of ISIS and not part of the al-Nusra front (formerly known as al Qaeda).
There is, however, no clear distinction between ISIS, al-Nusra and generic “rebels”. Individuals and small bands change affiliations according to the situation, and U.S. weapons given to “rebels” are often acquired by ISIS through capture, gift or sale.
Christoph Reuter of Spiegel Online suggested that Assad wants to defeat the U.S.-backed rebels first and ISIS last, because, so long as ISIS is in the field, he can present himself as the only alternative. I suppose this is possible, but the simpler explanation is that Russia is concentrating on bombing the troops that are actually fighting the Syrians.
The fundamental fallacy which is committed by almost everyone is this: “A and B hate each other, therefore one is good and the other is bad.”==Bertrand Russell, 1956
Hospital emergency room staff in Douma, Syria, in August
I’ve written a good many posts on why I think it is a mistake for the U.S. government to arm terrorist rebels in Syria. That doesn’t mean I should forget or ignore the crimes of Syria’s ruler, Bashar al-Assad.
Here is an account by Majed Aboali, a volunteer Syrian doctor, about the Syrian government’s systematic bombing of civilian populations, including hospitals.
Government airstrikes—barrel bombs, missiles, and vacuum explosives—are responsible for some 90 percent of the people killed over the summer. On top of that comes the collective terror of the chemical attacks—chlorine barrels in 2015 and 2014, sarin in 2013.
What did the world do to stop the killing? It sent jets to bomb the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) but did nothing to stop the far greater killing of civilians by the Syrian government’s airstrikes.
For my Syrian colleagues, IS pales as a problem next to Assad’s attacks on civilians. If the world would stop these attacks on civilians, we Syrians could stop the estimated 10 percent of the killings committed by IS.
The hospital in Douma has been targeted many times. Somehow, they have avoided a direct hit. But we do not know if they will survive the next attempt. Which is why the world must act to stop the killing.
The Islamic State (ISIS) has, according to this writer, established a stable government in the area it controls. ISIS successfuly operates oil wells, sells oil in international black markets, provides jobs and keeps order, at least for those willing to submit to its rules. Its horrible atrocities frighten poorly-disciplined and poorly-motivated troops of its enemies.
The Russian government is worried about the growing power of ISIS, especially in Syria. Unlike the United States, Russia supports the Bashar Al-Assad’s Syrian regime. Moscow hopes for success of all-Syria peace talks, but is prepared to support Syria’s government by any means short of sending Russian troops.
Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan’s tyrannical ruler, worried that the Maidan protests in Ukraine would encourage would-be protesters in his country. But now he’s more worried about the precedent set by Russian incursions in Ukraine.
Too offset Russia, Karimov is strengthening Ukraine’s ties in China, other east Asian countries and the Persian Gulf states. This is a blow to Vladimir Putin’s hopes of creating a Eurasian Union, a Russian-dominated economic union of former Soviet nations to offset the European Union.
China is building artificial islands on reefs in the South China Sea in territorial waters that also are claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines and Taiwan. These islands will become offshore Chinese air bases and naval bases.
President Obama is asking Congress for authority to bomb Syria, but he said he has no intention of invading Syria. Bombing will result in the deaths of some Syrians and some damage to Syria’s war-making capability, but it will not threaten the power of President Bashar al-Assad. In fact it will strengthen his power, by turning the Syrian people and Arab people generally more against the United States than they already are.
What then can you about President Assad? We don’t know his role, if any, in the gas attacks. Maybe he ordered them. Maybe his brother or some other element of the Syrian army ordered them. Maybe a pro-government or anti-government militia carried them out. Maybe the gas attacks were a deception operation by the Saudi or some other foreign government.
If there is proof that he ordered the nerve gas attacks, then we should bring a criminal case at the Hague. There is a precedent for trying heads of state for crimes against humanity. He could be tried in his absence. Admittedly, Assad could not be brought to justice unless he was captured outside his country or his regime was overthrown, but these limitations are not nothing. Of course all this is contingent on Assad actually being guilty of ordering the gassing of civilians, which at present is not at all certain.
What then can we do to help the Syrians? Writer Charles Stross had a thought.
Nerve agents like Sarin aren’t black magic; they’re close relatives of organophosphate insecticides. Medical treatments exist. In particular there’s a gizmo called a NAAK, or Nerve Agent Antidote Kit. The drugs it relies on (neostigmine, atropine, and diazepam) are all more than fifty years old and dirt cheap; they won’t save someone who has inhaled a high lethal dose, but they’ll stabilize someone who’s been exposed, hopefully for long enough to get them decontaminated and rush them to a hospital for long-term treatment. Mass Sarin attacks are survivable with prompt first aid and hospital support.
We should be distributing gas masks, field decontamination showers, NAAK kits, and medical resources to everyone in the conflict zones. Government, civilian, rebels, it doesn’t matter. By doing so we would be providing aid that was (a) life-saving (b) cheap, and (c) put a thumb on the side of the balance in favor of whoever isn’t using nerve gas. We’d also be breaking with the traditional pattern of western involvement in the region, which is to break shit and kill people, mostly innocent civilians who were trying to keep their heads down. It wouldn’t fix our bloody-handed reputation, but it’d be a good start.
The other thing we Americans could do is to provide help and asylum for refugees, especially Christian refugees. Syria, like Egypt, was a Christian country before it was a Muslim county, and still has a large Christian minority. They will inevitably become the scapegoat for anything done by the supposedly Christian United States.
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.
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