This Syria business certainly seems to have everyone’s attention, if not approval.
NightWatch‘s John McCreary had this to say last night (I’ve highlighted some key passages):
Syria: Update. The mainstream media headlines with slight variations predict that an attack against Syrian targets by US missiles could occur as early as Thursday. The UK and France are lobbying hard for action because of the alleged chemical attack.
Special Comment: Numerous pundits and experts have expounded on the need for the US to take action, the consequences of inaction, and the potential for a US attack to generate a regional conventional war. Curiously, they have not mentioned the probability of Iranian-instigated terrorist attacks in the US.
NightWatch has little to add to all that “wisdom,” but prefers to comment on matters not covered.
Feedback from one of the finest analysts alive provided a reminder that the “bugs and gas” (biological and chemical warfare) lobby in US intelligence contains fine people who get few opportunities to shine. That’s because of the limits of intelligence on bugs and gas. Next to nukes (nuclear weapons) they are the most protected weapons a country, such as Syria and North Korea, has.
As a result, studies of national capabilities and stock piles of bugs and gas are notoriously suspect, but err on the side of caution because a little goes a long way. As a result, the record of predictive accuracy tends to be poor. That record includes the inaccurate judgments about various weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003.
The detection of actual use of bugs and gas agents and of the specific agents used, as during the last year of the Iran-Iraq War, is even harder. It always requires reliable and competently educated and specially trained investigators on the ground at the site. Actual use cannot be inferred from radio intercepts or any other indirect or remotely collected information source.
A second observation derives from the Russian use of a chemical agent in 2002 when Chechen terrorists held more than 700 Russian hostages in a Moscow theater. The Russians used a crowd suppression agent that killed 116 people, but enabled 650 to be rescued. The agent is not banned by the Geneva convention on chemical warfare.
If the Syrians used such an agent, which can be delivered by mortars and artillery as well as aircraft, there would be no international legal justification for attacking Syria based on the Geneva convention. It would not have been violated. The possibility that a non-banned substance was used makes it all the more urgent that competent investigators inspect the sites to identify the agent as well as the culprit.
A third observation is that the use of lethal gas is notoriously and inherently dangerous, often depending on the weather and the delivery system. It can blow back, in some instances, for miles. That is why military forces do not use it.
A fourth observation from Feedback from chemical warfare experts is that lethal gas kills effectively. There are no large numbers of people left alive but suffering. Victims die by the thousands. Survivors are few, if any. That is the lesson of Iraq’s use of such weapons at Hallabjah against the Kurds and later against the Iranians. Casualty reports from Syria are precisely opposite of the lethality pattern in a chemical weapon attack.
A fifth observation is that US media have given Syrian forces more than enough warning to enable them to protect themselves and their weapons. Leaks about US attack plans represent either monumental incompetence in operational security or a deliberate effort to tip off the Syrians for arcane political purposes.
In either event, the leaks ensure that Syrian military forces will suffer no significant damage from a US attack. An attack under these conditions must be considered entertainment for the benefit of the international press instead of a serious military operation.
As for Syrian defense capabilities, Syria has a respectable integrated air defense system, but the Israelis have defeated it thrice in the past year. It poses no serious impediment to a missile or air attack except to the unwary or unlucky.
Syria has supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles that have a range of 300 nm. Syria will use them if it can acquire the US destroyers off its coast.
As for the value of limited punitive strikes, Syria already has shown that it can withstand limited, genuinely surgical, punitive attacks by the Israeli air force. The Israelis have attacked three times in the past 18 months and the Syrians have not retaliated. Apparently that is because the Israeli attacks have had no demonstrable impact on Hizballah’s operations or Syria’s prosecution of the fight against the opposition.
Syria is in an existential battle. Surgical, pin prick NATO attacks are trivial compared to the prospect of Syrian forces destroying the rebel concentrations east of Damascus. This means Syria might not retaliate for a US attack, but just continue to prosecute the fight. Iran and Lebanese Hizballah are the more dangerous sources of retaliation.
As for ripple effects, Iran is so heavily invested in the survival of the government in Syria that US and NATO planners must plan for retaliatory attacks in Western Europe, in the US, in the Persian Gulf states and everywhere the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force has a presence. Iran’s responses will depend on the damage inflicted on Syria.
Concerning leading from behind, American audiences apparently are not aware that in Libya and in Mali, Western European air forces were unable to sustain combat flight and logistics operations without comprehensive US support, from intelligence to mission planning to all types of resupply. Some US military personnel are resentful because they received so little recognition for so much effort to compensate for European NATO lack of capabilities.
The notion of leading from behind is a political and media myth. NATO is incapable of sustaining any but the most elementary level of air combat for a minimal amount of time without comprehensive US support. That means the feel-good notion of a coalition of the willing is actually a cover term for US military operations with minimal NATO help for window dressing. This is not a criticism, it is a fact of European economics.
The blogger DiploMad has reposted an item, originally written at the time of our Libyan engagement, that remains relevant (with minor substitutions, provided by me at no extra charge) to this adventure as well. It includes the following:
President Obama has said
QaddafiAssad must go. OK. So we’re going to target him? Apparently not, except when we do, but not really. Have we gone bear hunting with the idea of wounding the bear? Who are the rebels? Does anybody really know? Who’s in charge of the rebels? Anybody? What are their goals? The US wants to pass command and control, so to whom? Will it be NATO? Who provides the bulk of NATOs resources and capabilities? One guess, and the answer is not the UK, France, Italy, or Spain . . . It’s a bit like arguing whether a Ford is better than a Mercury. Same factory, folks. Will it be some other harebrained scheme for collective control that will leave the US with the responsibility but not the authority? No answers, so instead we have bombing.Above all, however, the administration has not defined our interests. What was so pressing about
LibyaSyria to excuse the manner in which we got involved? Aren’t the people leading the charge into theLibyanSyrian desert the same ones who spent years deriding the idea of a threat from Saddam? No answers, so instead, we have bombing.Obama and his hopeless coterie must understand that war must form part of a policy, it is not just mindless, bored vandalism. Meanwhile, we will just keep bombing until we think of something to do . . ..”
“Mindless, bored vandalism” seems about right. At the very least, I’ll say this: if that is not what’s happening here — if there is in fact some coherent, grand design behind this petulant outburst — we have yet to see any evidence of it.
30 Comments
Syria is a cluster situation. There are no good options. Those who advocate sitting on our hands have the burden of explaining why we should do nothing while genocide occurs. Those who advocate military action have the burden of explaining why chemical weapons are different than bullets, and why the ineluctable unintended consequences of bombing Syria are worth bearing.
So it’s not surprising that Obama’s opponents will blast him from their keyboards. After all, they don’t have to make a decision, and they will not be held accountable for the consequences of action or inaction. If he takes decisive action, he will be slammed for what the Iranians or Hezbollah do. If he does nothing, he will be called a weakling who lacks the manly resolve of his predecessor. Even so, the DiploMad blog is particularly feeble.
We have repeatedly “defined our interests.” As the world’s pre-eminent power, we have an interest in seeing that the norms of civilized society are upheld and chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons are never used. Are we to be a global leader, or do we just want bragging rights?
What was “so pressing” about Libya was the necessity of preventing an impending massacre of citizens. Based on this limited objective, the military intervention was successful. There was no massacre. We upheld our “defined interests” by using military force to prevent the deaths of innocents.
Those who “derided the threat from Saddam” were vindicated because he posed no threat. He had no chemical weapons. Assad has them, and he used them. Syria is not Iraq. It’s a pretty clear distinction between military action which is pre-emptive and mistaken, and military action which takes place after the fact.
This is not to suggest that military intervention is a no-brainer — at best, it’s a judgment call that it is the least bad option — but mindless Obama opposition and fatuous comparisons to Iraq are unhelpful.
Hey, that second article isn’t fair to us Brits.
We’ll contribute, we have planes and ships (can you lend us some gas money?), we have troops (both of them are really great guys!) and we even have some Block IV TLAMs (We’ve only got two, we haven’t paid for them yet and we had to rent out the warheads so we just have concrete instead, and we couldn’t afford the type 70 launchers so we can’t fire them anyway). We don’t want control either (we don’t want the blame when it all goes TU).
After all we, have to save our money to pay for the council houses and benefits all the AQ and rebels will need when they decide to lose and move to Bradford.
As you can gather – you don’t know what incompetent national leadership is until you’ve seen ours.
Why are comparisons to Iraq “fatuous”? There are many parallels. At least there was Congressional approval. (I suppose that was because Mr. Bush was so old-fashioned as to consider Congress to be an important branch of government.)
I agree that there are no good options. But what is our aim here? Huffing and puffing about “civilized norms” and being a “global leader” are all very well, but whom do we think we are “leading”, at this point, anyway? (Certainly not anyone in the Muslim world, nor the Russians, nor the Chinese, nor the U.N. …)
With the Libyan fiasco in mind (not to mention our feckless bumbling in Egypt), what do we actually expect to achieve with this action, and what are our criteria for success? What do we want?
After a bloody and costly decade, we are about to hand over Afghanistan back to the Taliban. Despite our efforts, Iraq is a festering sinkhole of sectarian violence. Might we learn something from all of this? (I certainly have.) If, as you say, there are no good options anyway, mightn’t we consider just sitting on our hands for once, while our enemies reduce each other?
Sorry, Able. You have my sympathies, as I’m sure you realize.
If it’s any consolation to you, we’re catching up with you just as fast as we can, and will be “tits up” ourselves, before you know it.
Not only was there Congressional approval, Bush felt compelled to send Powell to the UN to fib.
Unlike Iraq – which was a full-scale military invasion with hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground – the operation in Syria will (apparently) be limited to surgical missile strikes. No American President in recent memory has asked for Congressional approval for military actions on this scale (e.g., Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Bosnia, Cambodia, etc.). There were no formal declarations of war for the Korean war or the Vietnam war (the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was just that, and not a formal declaration). If you define war as “any time a bullet is fired,” then you have the same complaint against nearly all of Obama’s recent predecessors.
We are leading our allies. I would expect to see participation by the NATO countries and perhaps others.
Libya was not a fiasco. The purpose of military action was not to establish an irenic paradise of harmony and free puppies. It was to prevent thousands of people from dying, and it was successful in achieving that at no cost of life. More people are alive today because we intervened in Libya. That is a good thing.
What we expect to achieve is to raise the cost of using WMD for those dictators who possess them, as well as to reinforce our global credibility. A barking dog has more credibility if you know that it also can bite.
You will not get an argument from me regarding your implication that Iraq was a horrible mistake and Afghanistan was a necessary war which was grievously mismanaged.
If it was simply a matter of letting “our enemies continue to reduce each other,” that would be one thing. However, the 100,000 people who have been killed by Assad are not our enemies, and my view is that the exigencies of this situation require us to do something to protect them.
I am skeptical of military adventurism, especially in the Middle East. However, this situation (as with Libya) calls out for the measured use of force to achieve admittedly limited goals of reducing future bloodshed.
Ah, “surgical missile strikes”. Are these not an act of war? Would we not consider them an act of war if they fell on our own soil?
Dangerous precedents all, and violative of the Constitution. (Indeed the lovely Nina’s father, Randolph G. Phillips, chaired the National Committee for Impeachment, which sought to impeach Richard Nixon — prior to Watergate — precisely on the grounds that Mr. Nixon’s attacks on Cambodia were unconstitutional arrogations of war-making power.)
I won’t argue Libya with you here. I consider it to have been an egregious fiasco on almost every imaginable criterion, including the one you cite.
As for leading “our allies”: big deal. They are nothing more, at this point, than our courtiers. Our guarantees of their security, at enormous cost, have made possible their socialist prosperity throughout the postwar era, and they contribute very little to operations of this sort. They follow along in these misadventures because it costs them almost nothing.
Leaving aside that many of the people killed by Assad ARE in fact our enemies, and that the forces opposing Assad are very much our enemies and are no gentler than he is, I agree that it would be nice if everyone in the region, and elsewhere in the world, would just stop murdering each other, at least in those particularly nasty ways that we disapprove of so strongly. (Why can’t people just stick to good old bayonets?) Your point seems to be: how better to ensure such an outcome than by dropping a few bombs?
There it is, then: the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Oh, and as for “genocide”, I wonder what the fall of Assad, should it happen, will do for Syria’s Christians (and those of Jordan, which will probably be the next domino to topple once the jihad succeeds in Syria). It certainly hasn’t gone well for them in Egypt since we helped to bump off Mubarak.
No doubt the Alawites and Shiites of Syria aren’t sleeping so well lately either…
And this:
Somebody should explain that, one of these days, to the Kurds of Halabja.
The point of all this: as you said in your opening remarks, there are no good options, and any action will be fraught with unintended consequences. I completely agree.
After everything we’ve done in the Middle East, and how poorly it’s all turned out, and how much it has cost us, a large majority of Americans simply aren’t up for another round. We cannot possibly lose anything in terms of respect for our foreign-policy savoir-faire, which is already at rock bottom; as we demonstrated in Libya and Egypt, our word means nothing anymore, and everybody already knows it. Perhaps, then, it’s time, finally, to keep our hands in our pockets. Must we always just go blundering in?
At the very least, it seems to me that this should not happen without the approval of Congress. Surely that can’t be too much to ask.
Forgive me for piling on, but I just noticed this:
Great reason for bombing another country: fear of being called a pussy. (Which is, by the way, a pussy’s worst fear.)
Something else John mentioned you might’ve highlighted, Curiously, they have not mentioned the probability of Iranian-instigated terrorist attacks in the US.
Only reason I point that out is because you remember from October 2011?
http://warontherocks.com/2013/08/irans-cartel-strategy-the-islamic-revolutionary-guard-corps-in-the-western-hemisphere-2/
I knew who Randolph Phillips was before I met him, because I knew his name from the full page ads he placed in the New York Times calling for Nixon’s impeachment (although when we met, I confused Randolph G. Phillips with A. Philip Randolph, so I was unclear whether he was the anti-war guy or the civil rights guy).
I remember very clearly meeting him and his family when I booked them into their suite at the Colonial Inn in Martha’s Vineyard. The distinguished-looking father who was kinda wild-eyed; the mother with a European accent which spoke of aristocracy fallen on parlous times; the daughter with wild hair and a free spirit; and the son who was a totally normal-looking American kid. I thought: OK, I got it, it’s the Addams family.
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There is an inherent conflict between Congress’s war-authorizing powers and the exigencies of modern warfare. Congress was in session when the chemical bombings occurred, and they won’t be back for another week or two. As President, do you do nothing until Congress returns, and then wait for their plodding dysfunction to subside before they (hopefully) take up the matter?
The action in Libya was taken hastily to prevent an imminent massacre of civilians. As President, do you put the matter before Congress so Rand Paul can use the filibuster and other parliamentary maneuvers to block action until they’re all dead?
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When Bush was invading Iraq, I remember you asking whether, in the event that your neighbor is torturing a child and the child is screaming, do you have a responsibility to act?
I’m guessing that in your mind, this line of questioning is now (to borrow Ron Ziegler’s term) inoperative.
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I’m sympathetic to the argument that the Middle East is a forlorn and hopeless cluster situation which will remain so until long after the cows come home, so it would be follow to waste soldiers and money there. However, I don’t think that this is the American Way. I believe that we have an obligation to do what we can (within reason) to avert innocent bloodshed. Better to try and fail than not to try at all.
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The fact that President Obama will be called a pussy for inaction does not mean that his motivation to bomb another country is his fear of being called one.
You may call the President a Muslim, a Socialist, a Kenyan, or – gasp! – a narcissist, but if you call him a pussy, I’m afraid I shall have to ask you to step outside.
Well now Peter, now we see what’s behind all this Syria stuff. John’s Birthday!
http://warontherocks.com/2013/08/obamas-birthday-gift-to-mccain-war-with-syria/
One Eye?
It would appear Chong-Eun’s adoption of this place’s media has set a precedent for madmen the world over. Now comes Basher writing us a letter. Perhaps not surprisingly, his use of English (not to mention his grammar) exceeds my ability.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/so-whats-it-going-to-be,33662/
I can understand the limitations regarding the English language for Arkansas residents.
I once did a lot of business with WalMart, and I had lunch with one of their employees. I ordered bouillabaisse.
“We don’t use words with that many syllables here in Arkansas.”
“But Bentonville has three syllables too!” I ejaculated.
“Yeah, but they’re easy syllables. We know how to say that.”
The Constitution gives the President the power to convene an emergency session of Congress when an emergency arises.
A telling question. In other words: should the President defer to Congress when he believes that what he wants to do is the right thing, and knows that Congress won’t grant him the authority to do it? (Weren’t we just talking about this?)
My answer: yes, yes. That is the central, essential principle upon which this republic was founded: that there shall be separate and coequal branches of government, whose natural antagonism will prevent usurpation and concentration of power. It is our only bulwark against tyranny, save for the armed power of the people themselves. If Congress will not agree to let Mr. Obama to go to war, then he oversteps his Constitutional authority by doing so. He may not like it, and you may not either, but that is the way this system is supposed to work.
You are right that I advocated in favor of toppling Saddam Hussein on humanitarian grounds. (At the time, you did not agree.) I have learned a lot since then, and am no longer the confident neoconservative I was twelve years ago. It seems our positions are now reversed.
I remain sympathetic to the impulse to provide humanitarian relief in situations of horrific violence — but there is simply no guarantee that such intervention as we might engage in here will achieve such a result. Bombing kills people — and by interfering with Assad, all we are doing is assisting the opposition, who are no better than he is, and just as likely to slaughter innocents. The link provided above by JK is, despite its provenance, actually an excellent summary of the situation.
Our motto should be: first, do no harm. At the very least, for God’s sake, consult Congress.
Maybe yes, maybe no.
One-Eye: “I ejaculated.”
Advice: Never ejaculate in public.
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
It’s obvious Jerkwad, you ain’t being serial.
Of course re-reading I’d accept your premise:
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=11109195&postID=2809293377036371930
Horace:
I hope I am not talking out of school in disclosing that as a youth, our gracious host thought it was absolutely hilarious whenever the word “ejaculate” was used in its secondary sense.
It was at this time that he informed me that the reason that shit is tapered is “so your ass doesn’t slam shut.”
As he notes, we have all learned a lot since then.
Scurrilous calumny. (The first paragraph, at least.)
Off-topic, too.
Something wrong with scurrilous calumny? You say it like it’s a bad thing.
As for being off-topic: it’s my core competency.
Not to mention premature …
In defense against the charges of scurrility and calumny, I need only recall how you gave your friend James Tate the name of E. Jack U. Tate.
I rest my case.
Never happened.
Since you’ve descended to .. well, my level. I will point out that on this side of the pond ‘one eyed man’ is a colloquialism associated with an anatomical appendage in the .. ‘nether regions’.
Just Sayin’
“In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is King”. – Erasmus
“And that King doth ejaculate, albeit prematurely”. — Onan’s handmaiden