Obama acknowledges the danger of getting sucked deeper and deeper into a conflict:
Jeffrey Goldberg also reports that last week John Kerry pushed for US airstrikes on Syrian airfields, only to be rebuked (mercifully) by the Pentagon:
At a principals meeting in the White House situation room, Secretary of State John Kerry began arguing, vociferously, for immediate U.S. airstrikes against airfields under the control of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime — specifically, those fields it has used to launch chemical weapons raids against rebel forces.
It was at this point that the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the usually mild-mannered Army General Martin Dempsey, spoke up, loudly. According to several sources, Dempsey threw a series of brushback pitches at Kerry, demanding to know just exactly what the post-strike plan would be and pointing out that the State Department didn’t fully grasp the complexity of such an operation.
Dempsey informed Kerry that the Air Force could not simply drop a few bombs, or fire a few missiles, at targets inside Syria: To be safe, the U.S. would have to neutralize Syria’s integrated air-defense system, an operation that would require 700 or more sorties. At a time when the U.S. military is exhausted, and when sequestration is ripping into the Pentagon budget, Dempsey is said to have argued that a demand by the State Department for precipitous military action in a murky civil war wasn’t welcome.
If this is true, it reveals again how John Kerry is still trapped in the mindset of his generation. Even Kerry – Vietnam vet – is arguing for exactly the kind of small intervention that metastasized into the Vietnam disaster. And remember he backed the Iraq War as well, however ludicrously he tried to spin it in 2004. Meanwhile, Hussein Ibish objects to the comparison of Syria to the quagmire in Iraq:
The Iraq war was about unilaterally engineered American regime change. The intervention in Syria will be about helping Syrians themselves ensure regime change on their own or come to the point where they can actually negotiate a new post-dictatorship modus vivendi.
Rather than a long-term occupation, as in Iraq, this will involve major aid to specific rebel groups, including arms and other materiel intelligence, command-and-control assistance, no-fly zones, and possibly a real confrontation with the Syrian Air Force and air defenses. But what it will not mean is American “boots on the ground.” As in Libya, the ‘Pottery Barn’ rules (“you break it, you own it”) will and should not apply in Syria. We can help Syrians get out of the mess they are in, but we cannot and should not dictate their future.
Ibish’s arguments – among them, that my opposition to intervention in Syria or Iran is based on some kind of crude non-interventionism – evaporate upon close inspection.
On Iran, I simply don’t believe their nuclear capacity is a real threat to the US. They have more than 200 Israeli nuclear warheads pointed right at them and would benefit much more from keeping their arsenal just on the brink of becoming operational (like Japan) than doing something crazy. More to the point, if our goal is eventual rapprochement with Iran’s people who support the nuclear program, then making this issue the non-negotiable element is to alienate the very future generation we will need. On Syria, whether we have boots on the ground seems largely irrelevant to me. Any attempt seriously to arm the Sunni Jihadists would require exactly what Ibish says – and what he describes is a huge military operation, as the generals told Kerry. We have no idea where that might lead, but if we succeed in changing the dynamic of the civil war, we very much will own the result. And that result could be a massacre of Alawites and Christians in Syria, unpredictable reactions from Iran and Russia, and involvement of the US in the Sunni-Shia regional war.
And please, if we have learned anything at this point it is that the word “Syrians” confuses as much as it clarifies. The reality is a country at war with itself, splintered by sectarian passions and history’s endless grudges and now recent atrocities requiring revenge. I’m with the president in the interview above – and much less worried that we might actually slip into another clusterfuck in the Middle East than I was before I heard him explain the strong limits he has placed on the operation.
More Dish on intervention in Syria here, here, here, and here.
The Dish 