Kurds protest Trump troop withdrawal plan (Getty Images)
Getting into is easier than getting out of.
(Old saying)
If something cannot go on forever, someday it will stop.
(Stein’s Law)
We can endure neither our disorders nor the cures for them.
(Livy, History of Rome)
One of the promises made by Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign was to wind down U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
Every time he tries to keep this promise, he gets so much resistance from war hawks in Congress and inside his administration that he backs down.
Not that President Trump is a lover of peace. His preferred method of waging war is to try to starve other nations into submission through economic sanctions, as with Venezuela and Iran. Economic war is real war, and produces real suffering, and creates its own type of danger of blowback.
Nor is troop withdrawal without adverse consequences. Pulling American troops out of Syria will leave U.S. allies in Kurdistan open to attacks by Turks and by the Assad government, not to mention a possibly revived Islamic State (ISIS).
Donald Trump, in his usual thoughtless way, forgot about the Kurds when he announced the Syrian troop withdrawal and tweeted a lot of silly things when he was reminded of them. I have no idea what happens next.
I try to free myself of the habit of seeing foreign conflicts as a fight between good guys and bad guys. But I can’t help rooting for the Kurds. They practice religious tolerance. They don’t massacre civilians. The Kurdish community in Rojava is attemptinga radical experimentin democracy. If somebody smarter than me has a plan for guaranteeing safety for the Kurds, I would be all for it.
I think it was Daniel Ellsberg who said that the American goal in Vietnam after 1965 was to postpone defeat until after the next election. I don’t see any purpose in keeping troops in the Middle East or Afghanistan other than postponing admission of defeat until after the next election.
As in Vietnam, withdrawal will result in death and misery for many, especially for those who supported U.S. forces. But withdrawal at some point is inevitable. The only question is how to minimize the harm. It would take a wiser and braver statesman than Donald Trump to answer that question.
Update. It appears that President Trump doesn’t intend to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria—only to move them out of the way of the Turkish forces moving into the Kurdish-held areas.
The people in Washington who’ve planned military policy in the past 15 years must think that (1) the United States is so rich and powerful that no mistake can possibly have any fatal consequence and (2) the only proof that a policy is a mistake is an admission that it is a mistake.
The radical jihadist militias that the U.S. government is arming want to impose Sharia law on Syria. Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad, were ruthless dictators who’d stop at nothing to stay in power. But they never persecuted Christians or other religious minorities merely because of their faith.
The McClatchy newspaper chain had a different business model than its U.S. rivals. Rather than catering either to the public or to the powers that be, their editors and reporters reported the news as they saw it, without fear or favor. Sadly this didn’t work out.
Why is President Obama arming proxy armies in Syria to fight against the Islamic State (ISIS) and the Assad government, despite warnings from his advisers that such policies have not worked in the past?
I think he is following in the footsteps of American presidents for the past 50 years, who have waged war and sponsored covert operations not to protect the American people and not in all cases to further the interests of U.S.-based corporations, but to avoid the appearance of seeming week.
Take the Vietnam Conflict. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson are now known to have had misgivings about military intervention in Vietnam. What they feared was the effect on American prestige of suffering a defeat, and the effect on their own popularity of having “lost” a country to Communism.
When Richard M. Nixon was became President in 1969, he inherited the Vietnam War, he was not responsible for the hopeless situation, yet he kept on fighting nevertheless. What was wanted, according to Henry Kissinger, was to save the USA and the Nixon administration from humiliation by having a “decent interval” between the withdrawal of the last American troops and the triumph of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese.
Our country would have been better off if Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had never committed the United States to defending South Vietnam, or if President Nixon had wound up the war quickly. Our nation would not have been so divided, our military would not have been demoralized and our leaders would not have been preoccupied for the next 40 years with wiping out the humiliation of that defeat.
Or take the 35-year cold war waged by the United States against Iran. I see no inherent conflict of interest between the governments of Iran and the United States. In fact, Iran and the USA share common enemies in Al Qaeda and its successor, the Islamic State (ISIS). But for the United States to reconcile with Iran would seem weak, after the humiliation suffered by the taking of U.S. embassy personnel as hostages by Iranian radicals in 1979. It is that, more than any public interest or business interest, that prevents the United States from seeking peace with Iran.
Here are the highlights of what I got out of the article.
Sarin has been only a minor factor in Syria’s civil war, accounting for 1 percent or less of casualties. The reason Syria is stockpiling poison gas is to deter attack from other nations, especially Israel. The government of Israel not only possesses nuclear weapons, but is believed to have a “robust” program of chemical and biological warfare manufacturing and training.
President Assad would never agree to dismantling of poison gas weapons without a Russian guarantee of protection against attack. Any dismantling would have be under the supervision of Russian experts. This would benefit the Syrian government because it would be a deterrent to attack by the United States.
Overthrow of the Assad government would lead to the balkanization of Syria into its various ethnic and religious groups and likely result in massacres of Syrian Christians and Alawite Muslims. Such conflicts could spread to Lebanon and other neighboring countries.
The stability of Syria is a vital national interest to Russia, and not just for reasons of prestige. One in six citizens of the Russian Federation is Muslim, and the Russian government has been fighting for years against rebels in the majority-Muslim province of Chechnya. Overthrow of Assad could create a base for supplying the Chechen fighters.
President Barack Obama made a good decision to back off from attacking Syria, and to back off from nominating Lawrence Summers to head the Federal Reserve Board.
I don’t think it ever shows weakness of character to change your mind when the facts warrant. The truly weak person doubles down on bad decisions rather than admit to a mistake.
An attack on Syria would have been a bad idea because it wouldn’t have solved the problem of poison gas warfare, and might have made it worse. A full-scale invasion of Syria would have brought the United States into dangerous confrontation with Russia. Neither danger has gone away, but both are less than they were last week.
The crisis may turn out to have produced a good result. If Syria actually does get rid of its poison gas weapons, this is something that wouldn’t have happened except for President Putin’s need to respond to President Obama’s threats.
Another good decision was Lawrence Summers’ withdrawal of his name from consideration as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Nomination of Summers to head the Federal Reserve would have been a bad idea because his ideas and policies were a main cause of the recent financial crash.
President George W. Bush in the last years of his second term made course corrections. He replaced Donald Rumsfeld at Secretary of Defense and established a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. Maybe President Obama will go through the same evolution. One can hope.
There is nothing humiliating in accepting objective reality—even if the only objective reality that you recognize is public opinion polls.
If I were a Russian, I don’t think I would be a supporter of President Vladimir Putin. Russia is a country where opponents of the regime die mysteriously, a tightly-knit group of self-described oligarchs control finance and industry and holdovers from the old Soviet Union are entrenched in government. But I think Putin made a lot of sense his New York Times article about Syria yesterday.
The potential strike by the United States against Syria, despite strong opposition from many countries and major political and religious leaders, including the pope, will result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders. A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa. It could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.
Vladimir Putin
Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multi-religious country. There are few champions of democracy in Syria. But there are more than enough Qaeda fighters and extremists of all stripes battling the government. The United States State Department has designated Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, fighting with the opposition, as terrorist organizations. This internal conflict, fueled by foreign weapons supplied to the opposition, is one of the bloodiest in the world.
Mercenaries from Arab countries fighting there, and hundreds of militants from Western countries and even Russia, are an issue of our deep concern. Might they not return to our countries with experience acquired in Syria? After all, after fighting in Libya, extremists moved on to Mali. This threatens us all.
He also stated:
It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”
He ended the article with these words:
My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.”
It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.
President Putin, it is true, has his own reasons for not wanting the Syrian government to be overthrown. Syria has been a Russian client state since the days of the old Soviet Union. It provides the Russian Federation with its only naval base on the Mediterranean. It is a potential outlet for a natural gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea region of Russia and Central Asia.
And while the Russian government’s proposal for a turnover of Syrian chemical weapons to an international authority sounds good, it would be impossible to implement while the country is in the middle of a civil war. After all, the United States promised in 1990 to get rid of our chemical weapons stockpiles by 2012, and has not managed to do so.
But the governments of the United States, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have reasons for supporting the rebels which have more to do with pipeline routes, geopolitical advantage and Sunni-Shiite struggles than with humanitarism. There is nothing at stake in Syria’s civil war that justifies a U.S. attack on Syria.
When I first heard the charges that the Syrian government had used nerve gas against rebel forces, I disbelieved them. It didn’t make any sense to me that Bashar al-Assad would do something that was not only wicked but foolish. Then I gradually became convinced there is something to the charges. Who else but the Syrian government would have the capability to launch such attacks?
Mohammed Jihad al-Lahman, Speaker of the Syrian People’s Assembly, wrote a letter to members of the U.S. Congress appealing to them to refrain from attacking his country.
Among other things he offered evidence that the gas attacks were made by the Syrian rebel forces. He said that Turkish and Iraqi authorities captured rebel forces with nerve gas weapons, that Syria appealed to the United Nations back in March to investigate nerve gas attacks by rebels and that the Syrian government turned over evidence of rebel use of nerve gas to the Russian and Chinese embassies.
All these allegations can easily be checked, and ought to be checked before any congressional vote.
The Russian government called on Syria’s leaders to place their chemical weapons under international control and eventually to destroy them. Since Syria depends on Russian backing, there is a good chance this will be accepted.
It provides a good opportunity for Barack Obama and John Kerry to climb back off the limb they’ve gotten out on. I wonder how much the crisis is due to President Obama having said the use of chemical weapons is a “red line”, believing when he said it that the line never would be crossed.
However, if Bashar al-Assad agrees to place Syria’s chemical weapons under international control, some good will have come from President Obama’s threats. Assuming the agreement is carried out, of course.
It turns out that the Russian government would “welcome” the Syrian government handing over its chemical arms to an international authority, but aren’t offering to take responsibility for implementing this and wouldn’t support a threat of military action if they didn’t comply. So less has changed than I thought.
Juan Cole, a Middle East historian, wrote that there are two factions among the Syrian rebels—radical Sunni Muslims linked to Al Qaeda in the north of Syria, backed by Turkey and Qatar, and another less radical faction in the south of Syria backed by Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United States.
According to Cole, the purpose of the planned U.S. attack is to weaken the Syrian forces on the southern front and help the rebel faction favored by the United States.
How did the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Qatar come to play such a big part in Middle East power politics? This guest post on Informed Comment helps to explain.
The following is by a blogger for the Washington Post. I think it deserves more attention than it got.
Secretary of State John Kerry said at Wednesday’s hearing that Arab counties have offered to pay for the entirety of unseating President Bashar al-Assad if the United States took the lead militarily.
“With respect to Arab countries offering to bear costs and to assess, the answer is profoundly yes,” Kerry said. “They have. That offer is on the table.”
Asked by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) about how much those countries would contribute, Kerry said they have offered to pay for all of a full invasion.
“In fact, some of them have said that if the United States is prepared to go do the whole thing the way we’ve done it previously in other places, they’ll carry that cost,” Kerry said. “That’s how dedicated they are at this. That’s not in the cards, and nobody’s talking about it, but they’re talking in serious ways about getting this done.”
Kerry didn’t say which Arab countries he had in mind, but Saudi Arabia and the Gulf oil mini-states are the only ones who would have the money to finance such an operation. They reportedly have been financing the Syrian rebels, so this might be cost-effective for them to do.
We Americans should ask ourselves how these Arab countries’ interests are served by overthrowing Bashar al-Assad and whether those interests are the same as our interests. If our interest is in promoting freedom and democracy, my answer is, probably not.
Syria is in the middle of a struggle involving Saudi Arabia, Iran and other countries for power and influence in the region. I don’t see how the people of the United States, or the people of Syria, or freedom and democracy, are served by the United States taking sides in this struggle.
Why does President Obama want authorization from Congress to attack Syria, when he claims he doesn’t need it and some administration officials say he may go ahead even without authorization?
Surely one reason is that a favorable vote will give him political cover. Senators John Kerry and Hillary Clinton voted for the Bush administration’s requests for authorization to use military force against Iraq and Al Qaeda. That made it possible for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to say that they had equal responsibility.
That same will be said by Barack Obama and Joe Biden if Elizabeth Warren or Rand Paul vote for the authorization to use force against Syria, and later criticize administration policy. It’s a good political ploy. Let’s hope that a majority of the Senate and the House of Representatives have as good an understanding of the situation as a majority of the American people.
President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have said that the President has authority to order an attack on Syria on his own authority. They say he is merely consulting Congress as a favor, and would still be free to act if Congress refused to pass his resolution.
Really?
Here are the words of the United States Constitution, which Obama and Kerry swore an oath to uphold.
Article One, Section 8. The Congress shall have power … …
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land or Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrection and repel Invasion; … …
Article Two, Section 2. The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual service of the United States; … …
The Founders limited the power of the President to wage war because they didn’t want the new nation to be governed like a European monarchy, where the king could go to war for personal reasons unrelated to the welfare of the people.
Time passed, and over the years Presidents expanded their power and stretched their authority. In response, Congress in 1973 passed the War Powers Resolution. It began as follows.
The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to
(1) a declaration of war,
(2) specific statutory authorization, or
(3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.
The resolution went on to state that in cases of dire emergency, the President could initiate military action, provided that (1) he report to Congress the necessity and Constitutional authority for such action, (2) he cease action after 60 days unless given specific congressional authorization and (3) he cease action immediately if Congress so resolves.
When President George W. Bush asked Congress for authority to use military force against Al Qaeda and to force Saddam Hussein to comply with U.N. resolutions on weapons of mass destruction, I thought these were justified grants of authority for specific purposes. But the two resolutions by Congress were used by Presidents Bush and Obama as open-ended grants of power to use whatever force they thought necessary against hostile governments and individuals. President Obama’s proposed Syria resolution is subject to being interpreted in this open-ended way.
The House of Representatives refused to vote authority for the Libyan intervention, but Obama went ahead anyway. I hope Congress asserts its authority in this case and that the President is prudent enough to heed its words.
Attacking Syria will not be like intervening in Bosnia or Kosovo, invading Iraq or overthrowing the government of Libya. In all these cases, the United States attacked countries that were small, weak and isolated.
This is not the case with Syria, whose government is supported by Iran and Russia. It is more like North Vietnam, which had allies that supplied it with modern weapons. Attacking Syria also would be like bombing North Vietnam in the sense that it would risk a direct confrontation with Russia.
It would be embarrassing from President Obama to step back after drawing a “red line” against President Assad using poison gas, and then saying he knows for sure that Assad did use poison gas. But it will be even more embarrassing if Obama has to back down after ordering missile strikes into Syria, and downright humiliating if he has to order U.S. troops withdrawn after failing to achieve his goal.
What President Obama would have to do in order to make me favor a declaration of war against Syria is to show me an objective that is worth the sacrifice and risk, and to convince me that he has a realistic strategy for achieving that objective.
“Punishing Syria” is not an objective. “Getting rid of Assad” is not a worthwhile objective unless you have some reason to think that what comes after Assad will be better. And please don’t say that nothing could be worse than Assad. That’s what many of us thought about Saddam, and how wrong we were!
President Putin’s statements about Syria have been restrained. He evidently doesn’t want to back President Obama into a corner. But I don’t think he will stand idly by while Obama orders an attack on a Russian ally.
This is from a post by James Fallows of The Atlantic about a letter he received from an Army wife. I’ve already linked to it, but I think it deserves a separate post. The letter describes the sacrifices that military families have made and how they’ve been treated in return.
1) We have been constantly at war for more than a decade. My own husband has been deployed seven times and is currently getting ready for his fifth trip to Afghanistan (three of his previous deployments were to Iraq). He is not alone (and, frankly, he’s one of the lucky ones who tends to have a year or more in between deployments.)
2) During the buildup / surge, recruitment needs were such that standards dropped to serious lows. Waivers were granted willy-nilly. As a result, the service ended up with a lot of shiftless thugs who have now served long enough to be in leadership positions (or at least positions where they can be obstructionist and demoralizing).
3) The military does everything in its power to keep soldiers deployable, including ignoring injuries and mental health problems. Soldiers basically get two options: quit (and give up your years toward retirement so that you can go in an endless queue and hope that the VA processes your case and gives you treatment) or soldier on in pain.
4) The military uses semantics to evade its promises. We are told that troops are being withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan. In reality, soldiers are still being deployed and endangered, we just call them “peacekeepers” and “instructors” and “trainers” now.
5) Service members are being used as a pawn in the budget fiasco. Troops currently being deployed (for the fourth, sixth, ninth, etc. time) are being told that their tours may stretch one indefinitely due to “lack of funds to train replacements”.
6) The Army’s response to budget cutting is to weed out the older/more expensive soldiers before they can retire. Yes, physical fitness standards are important, but the move toward “tightening up” the standards (basically taking away the lower performance requirements for older soldiers) is a sneaky way to screw someone who has fought for the country for eighteen or nineteen years out of his or her pension (in most cases, you don’t get anything if you are even a day short of 20 years).
7) Proposed/rumored changes to pensions are extremely worrying. For soldiers in their late 30s and beyond, it is too late to earn a full civilian pension if the Army fails to follow through on its promises.
8) Cutting back (or perhaps even eliminating) commissaries, on-post schools and MWR [1]is all on the table (budget-wise), as is lowering the amount of BAH [2] that soldiers get (and don’t forget the proposal to lower the cost of living increase). Tuition assistance is being abolished or curtailed. Also, the furloughing of civilian DoD workers, in most cases, just means that the soldiers put in extra hours to make up the difference. Tricare [3] is being modified to require co-pays. There is a rumor (I haven’t seen this confirmed anywhere) that spouses and children are going to be kicked off Tricare and forced to purchase their own coverage through the health care exchanges under the Affordable Care Act.
9) The civilian hiring freeze makes it next to impossible for military spouses to obtain jobs when we are moved to new posts (trust me- I’m a professional. Moving every three years (sometimes to jurisdictions where my license won’t transfer) has been devastating on my career. I credit divine intervention for landing my current job when we PCSd from Texas. It used to be that well-qualified spouses would sign up at the employment liaison office and move smoothly from an office on Fort Wherever to Fort Wherever else- but now we can’t), this puts even more financial pressure on military families.
All of that being said- Yes, it is a volunteer Army. My husband knew what he signed up for and his commitment to the service is unwavering.
The military ideal is an ethic of honor and mutual loyalty, which goes down as well as up. What this letter described is no different from how some failed business corporation would treat its employees. The paragraph about soldiers being separated from the military just before they become eligible for retirement reminds me of stories I heard about Eastman Kodak Co. during its decline.
American soldiers, Marines and other troops are not responsible for the failed U.S. military policies of the past 10 years and more. The worst abuses of American power have been by mercenaries, the CIA and others not bound by a military code of conduct. There is an all-important difference between “the military” and “militarists” (and I apologize if I have ever unthinkingly used the first word when I meant the second).
The way to support the troops is to not ask them to sacrifice life and limb needlessly, and to make sure they and their families get what they need.
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.
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.
If I were a dictator trying to put down a rebellion, and the world’s most heavily-armed superpower told me that the one thing that would unleash their attack on me is the use of poison gas, I don’t think I would use poison gas.
And if I did use poison gas, I would use it in a decisive way, that would end the rebellion once and for all. So I have been skeptical about charges that the Syrian government used poison gas against rebel forces. But a report by Doctors Without Borders / Medecins Sans Frontieres provides strong circumstantial evidence that thousands of people have symptoms of being victims of poison gas. [New Scientist magazine published a similar report. Added 8/30/13.]
I don’t think the rebel forces could have been the ones to use poison gas. It would have been virtually impossible to cover up. So while it still doesn’t make sense to me that the Syrian government would use poison gas, my experience of life tells me that people sometimes do things that don’t make sense.
Juan Cole, on his Informed Comment web log, suggested a reason why the Syrian government might have used gas and thought they could get away with it. Or maybe there is some other explanation. I don’t know. Neither do Joe Biden or John Kerry.
If gassing of civilians really is the main issue, the best thing is to wait for the report of the UN inspectors in Syria.
Overthrowing the Assad regime could create a haven for al Qaeda, larger than the one that Osama bin Laden formerly had in Afghanistan.
The U.S. war on terror evolved in a bizarre way. Back during the Bush administration, Congress authorized military action against al Qaeda and associated forces. Osama bin Laden and his followers were Sunni Muslims. Using that authorization as its legal basis, the U.S. government threatens attacks on governments that are enemies of al Qaeda—the Shiite Muslim government of Iran and the Shiite-friendly government of Syria.
The rebel forces that the U.S. government is supporting in Syria are led by supporters of al Qaeda—the same kinds of people the U.S. is waging drone warfare against in Pakistan and Yemen. We’re told that, on the one hand, al Qaeda is such a threat that we Americans have to accept perpetual war and perpetual martial law, but now we’re being told that, on the other hand, it is okay to support al Qaeda to attain a geopolitical objective.
LINKS
How U.S. Strikes on Syria Help Al Qaeda by Barak Barfi for The Daily Beast. The ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), the local al Qaeda affiliate, is the leading force among the rebels and will come out on top if Assad is overthrown.
The United States and its allies have overwhelming military force compared to the government of Syria. But that doesn’t mean an attack on Syria or an invasion could be carried out without consequences.
For example.
For a good chunk of Tuesday, website administrators at Twitter, The New York Times, and other high-profile media outlets appeared to be locked in a high-stakes battle with self-proclaimed Syrian hackers for control of their Internet domains.
Just as quickly as twitter.co.uk, nytimes.com, and other domains were returned to their rightful owners, Internet records showed they’d be seized all over again and made to point to a Russian Web host known to cater to purveyors of drive-by malware exploits and other online nasties
Whether or not these hackers really were Syrians, the incident shows that small countries have ways of retaliating that don’t involve armed force or violent terrorism.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 