Hey, whaddya know. Looks like:
a) Our “credibility”, and incontrovertible moral imperatives, don’t require us to bomb Syria after all;
b) Our “incredibly small” strike — described as being equal, in its fearsomeness, to making Assad eat Cheerios with a fork instead of a spoon — might not be about to send its blunt and puissant “message” to blackguards and evildoers the world over;
c) U.N. “hocus-pocus“, however annoying, is nevertheless preferable to Congressional “joke’s-on-POTUS”;
d) The Houyhnhnms of our foreign-policy Justice League — whose hippo*-cratic oath seems to begin with “First, do some harm” — have, in the event, been well and truly pwned by that nasty little Yahoo, Mr. Putin.
* From the Greek ‘hippos (ίππος)’ = ‘horse’, of course, of course.
It’s sad, it must be said, to see such a farce play out on the world stage — but then again, as Oscar Wilde remarked: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”
Let the spin begin! (It will all turn out to have been a master-stroke by the Lightworker, I expect.)
20 Comments
Let’s posit that Assad gives up his chemical weapons.
If Obama had done what his opponents demand – i.e., nothing – then Assad would still possess and use his weaponry.
If Assad gives up his weaponry because of Obama’s threat to use force, then the horrors of a few weeks ago will not be repeated, at no cost to us in soldiers or treasure.
Which outcome is preferable to you?
Ha. Right on cue. It’s a master–stroke!
Why should I care what right wing websites have to say about Syria? They – along with National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and all the other stars in the right wing firmament – all enthusiastically backed the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which turned into the worst foreign policy disaster in American history. What credibility do they have? Why should anybody listen to what thy have to say?
Fine, you needn’t pay any attention. The Mideast-foreign-policy genius of the current administration is self-evident, after all.
But I’ve got news for you, amigo: nothing is going to happen.
Well, perhaps so. Then again, it may all work out fine. Saddam Hussein gave up his WMD after Operation Desert Fox. Qadaffi gave up his WMD after pressure from the West. Whether Assad will follow the lead of his despotic brethren remains to be seen.
If it does work out, however, it will go down in history as a success of this administration’s foreign policy, and the bed-wetters who played the role of Neville Chamberlain will have been proven equally wrong.
I think, rather, that this short video explains Mr. Putin’s strategy in far simpler terms.
Next: after the laughter dies down: extended dithering and fumfering while all momentum evaporates, and then … nothing.
Since you brought up “credibility”, and “foreign-policy success”: how’s Libya going?
Oh, and as long as we’re at it: what gave Qaddafi pause, and brought him compliantly into line, was the very regime-change operation in Iraq that you mentioned above (the worst foreign-policy disaster in American history, I think you said).
After that he was our sonofabitch, and we got along very nicely. Until, that is, we completely reversed ourselves and threw him to the wolves – who now have the run of the place.
Success! High-five.
The objective of military action in Libya was not to create a land of irenic harmony awash in prelapsarian delight. It was to prevent an imminent massacre of civilians, and was successful in doing so. It also led to the death of a brutal dictator who sponsored terrorism and shot down civilian aircraft. Whatever happens after the military strike is up to the Libyans, and is exogenous to the correctness of our rescue of innocents.
Your suggestion is that we should have done nothing and let the Libyans get slaughtered?
Similarly, the objective of military action in Syria is not to depose Assad, change the balance of power in the civil war, or make Damascus — the oldest continuously occupied city on Earth — a citadel of freedom. These are suggestions from people who buy their straw men at Costco for the volume discount.
The primary purpose to launch a military strike is non-proliferation. If dictators use chemical weapons and the West does nothing, in the future you will get more of it rather than less of it. Raising the cost of barbarism will not stop it, but it will reduce it.
The secondary purpose is to enforce American credibility. You are more likely to avoid a barking dog if you know that it also bites.
At least since the day when Joseph Stalin coined the phrase “American exceptionalism,” the country has stood for certain values. We have stood by these values even when there was no strategic national interest, as in Kosovo. Your suggestion is that we should abandon action and substitute lip service instead?
The father of conservatism, Edmund Burke, famously said that the only thing which is necessary for evil to take over the world is for good men to do nothing. The signal failure of modern conservatism — along with its disdain of empiricism and an inability to evaluate policy issues from the perspective of the disadvantaged — is that it has jettisoned Burke’s dictum to engage in man’s age-old exercise in philosophy: to find a moral justification for selfishness and inaction.
The fact is: Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Libya, and Egypt, combined with our distress here at home, are why there is such scant enthusiasm for further adventuring.
So instead we have this pathetic attempt to thread the needle by threatening a “Goldilocks” attack: so “incredibly small” as not to really do much damage; safe enough not to stir up political trouble by costing us anything. But the idea that this faint-hearted, diffident, shoegazing attempt at intimidation is going to cow a man like Assad — a second-generation ruthless Arab dictator who is fighting for his life and who has Russia at his back — is simply absurd.
You want to impress an Arab dictator? Go crush him — or at the very least, crush the guy standing next to him. Otherwise, stay on the porch.
We haven’t the balls, and Assad knows it. More to the point, so does Putin.
In the words of Rocky Rococo: maybe yes, maybe no.
In the fullness of time, the Truth shall be revealed to us all.
Maybe, maybe not. Meanwhile, the rebels did plenty of massacring of their own, NATO themselves slaughtered plenty of civilians, we betrayed a leader we had struck a deal with, and now Libya’s economy is destroyed, and the fragmented and collapsing nation is in the hands of warring bands of thugs. Whatever Libya was, it is now completely annihilated.
What you describe is the classic neocon style: pick some horrid country, define some vague and morally uplifting-sounding objective, go in and smash the place up for a while, get bored, and move on. It’s like a terrifying, giant child at loose in the world.
Forget Stalin. If you want to understand American exceptionalism, go back another century and read Tocqueville. It had nothing to do with stomping and smashing the other nations of the world in order to make them play according to our “values”. We have ours, they have theirs.
No, when there really is no national interest at stake, as in the Congo, Rwanda, etc., we tend to do nothing. If you think there were no interests in play in Kosovo, I have a bridge to sell you. (You might, for example, find it interesting to look into something called AMBO).
If Burke, that great champion of liberty (who never said that, anyway) saw you invoking his name in defense of the political ideology you hawk here at this website, it would be pistols at dawn, my friend.
Something like this, in other words. I’m sure they’re very grateful.
The point is: it is hardly obvious that any “good” comes of these interventions you’ve become so fond of (and that I’ve become so wary of). In the case of Libya, for example, we controlled the fever by killing the patient. How “humanitarian” is that?
Libya has been a “fragmented and collapsing nation” long before we got there. Whether it is better now – or, more importantly, ten years from now – than it was when Qaddafi was brutalizing the country is arguable. What we do know is that innocent lives were saved. Whether there were unintended consequences which nullified the good which was done is as yet unknown. As Zhou Enlai said about the French Revolution, it’s too soon to know.
[MP replies: No it isn’t. Libya is destroyed.]
It is incorrect to say that we stay away when there is no national interest involved. We had no such interest when we sent troops to Somalia. There is no national interest served in giving food aid to North Korea. Our support for Israel has led to the Arab oil embargo, 9/11, and countless other difficulties. A cold-eyed realist would have thrown them under the bus long ago. However, the idea of abandoning them to serve our narrow self-interest is unthinkable.
At least since President Wilson, the tension between idealism and Realpolitik has been a hallmark of American foreign policy. Neither extreme is desirable.
Our use of military force for humanitarian ends will not always be successful. Somalia wasn’t. The question is whether it is better to try, knowing that sometimes you will fail, or whether you shouldn’t expend any effort at all in the face of absolute evil.
I’ve always agreed with the notion that you shouldn’t criticize until you can walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. (You’re a mile away, and you have his shoes.) Imagine that you’re not a keyboard commando, but are the President of these United States.
You’ve just witnessed 1400 innocent people gassed to death. You know that your inaction would lead to many more. You also know that the consequence of this would be to spend the rest of your life agonizing after seeing the next set of videos which comes out of children coughing their last breath. You have within your power the ability to do something which may – or may not – prevent another gas attack.
The difference between the Presidency and the digital equivalent of ink-stained wretches is that only the President is accountable for the consequences of his action or inaction. However, because he is a synechdoche for us all, his agony is our agony. I couldn’t live with myself if I could have done something which may have worked but didn’t, and neither should you.
The conundrum faced by President Obama is described by Adam Smith in a Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Imagine you just found out that a million Chinese died in an earthquake. You might think for a few minutes about the capricious nature of human life, and then go back to watching the Simpsons.
Imagine you found out that one of your toes would be chopped off tomorrow morning. You would spend the night in torment and fear of becoming Mr. Nine Toes.
Imagine you were given a choice: a million Chinese lives or your toe. Given the responsibility for the consequences of one’s choice, nearly everyone would give up the toe to save the Chinese.
Smith asks what explains the disparity between one’s reactions (agony over the toe, insouciance over the earthquake news) and one’s choice. He answers his question by saying that men are intrinsically moral beings, and when one is responsible for the outcome of one’s decisions, the tendency is to let self-interest be trumped by some greater good.
The calculus of whether to get involved or not is only one dimension of the issue. Abandoning bedrock principles such as saving innocent lives should propel us to take risks in difficult and opaque situations. Failing to do so not only jeopardizes those lives, but shames us by eliminating that quality which is most admirable about our species.
These comments…I did. I laughed. Your visually impaired correspondent is quite the nattering nabob of Nevilletism.
Such sententious selective rationalization must be as wondrous to conjure as it is to read. The expedient battery of here, but not theres and this, but not thats were as fascinating to behold as a flight of seraphic cruise missiles. Is that you, Justice O’Connor?
P.s. The 3:54 comment prior to this last binge of bathos cited nonproliferation and American credibility as the reasons for Syrian (but not Libyan) involvement. Now the ricochet to “agony” as the impetus. I’ll return tomorrow to see where Sandy alights next.
Not so. Non-proliferation is an element in Syria because of the presence of chemical weapons, which are absent in Libya. American credibility and the agony of using military force is present in both.
However, it is always nice to see Spiro Agnew remembered.
Regrettably, you will not see anything different tomorrow, as I have said enough. Hence I will end my sententious sermonizing with an explanation of how the Coolidge effect – or the phenomenon that male potency increases commensurately with the number of sexual partners – got its name.
Mr. and Mrs. Coolidge were touring a farm separately. Mrs. Coolidge noticed that the roosters mated with alarming frequency. She asked her guide how many times a day this occurred.
“Oh, maybe eight or nine times a day.”
She told her guide: “Tell that to Mr. Coolidge.”
When President Coolidge was informed of this, he asked if it was all with the same hen.
“Oh no, Mr. President, it’s all with different hens.”
“Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”
100,000 people have died in Syria, slaughtered by both sides. (Yawn.)
At least a million dead in Congo. (Wonder who’s on Leno tonight?)
Limbs sheared away en masse in Liberia. (Goddammit! We’re out of beer??)
Pol Pot wipes out all of his nation’s intellectuals, enslaves the rest. (“Burn, baby, burn, Disco Infernoooo…!”)
800,000 hacked to pieces in Rwanda. (“I gotta find Bubba!“)
Wait: did you say gas? 1,400 people?????
As in the immortal words of PJ O’Rourke:
If we do have morals, where were they while Bosnians were slaughtered? And where were we while Clinton dithered over the massacres in Kosovo and decided, at last, to send the Serbs a message: Mess with the United States and we’ll wait six months, then bomb the country next to you.
Syrian opposition fighters released a Belgian and an Italian whom they had held hostage since April. The two arrived in Italy on 9 September. The terms of their release have not been disclosed.
The Belgian, Pierre Piccinin, told Belgian press that he overheard three rebels, one of whom identified himself as a Free Syrian Army general, talking about the gas attack on 21 August. He said the rebels said the Syrian government did not execute the attack or any attack. The rebels said it was the rebels who executed the attack in order to trigger Western intervention.
…The Belgian was still in captivity when he overheard the conversation. This adds weight to the contention the case against Asad is fraudulent because Piccinin says he has been a strong supporter of the rebel movement. He said since he has been covering the Syrian uprising, the “revolution”: has turned into something very dangerous.
http://www.kforcegov.com/Services/IS/NightWatch/NightWatch_13000194.aspx