“I accept that Britain can’t be part, and won’t be part, of any military action on that front but we must not in any degree give up our utter revulsion at the chemical weapons attacks that we have seen and we must press this point in every forum that we are a member,” – British prime minister, David Cameron, up-ended by something called democracy.
Tag: Syria
Marching As To War? Ctd
A reader quotes my post from yesterday morning:
For me, the administration hasn’t even begin to present a coherent, let alone a persuasive argument. The congressional debate is absolutely the best forum for this debate to take place – just as the House of Commons was in Britain. If the Congress votes no – which, given the current arguments, it obviously should – then the president should accede to the wishes of the American people as voiced by their representatives. If he were to do that, the kind of transformation Obama promised in America’s foreign policy would be given a huge boost.
Perhaps I am giving too much credit to our president, but for a while I have been wondering if that wasn’t his endgame all along. He is marching well in step with his predecessor, jumping through every hoop to plead the case for war. However, he is doing it in such a way as to fail to convince a war-weary public of its necessity, rightness, goals and likelihood of success. Could it be that he is seeking an end result in which (a) the U.S. does NOT get involved in another quagmire, (b) the power of the presidency to wage war at will is curtailed, and (c) both (a) and (b) are accomplished without any accusations of “weakness” from the right wing?
If so, meep meep.
If so … And I sure hope that’s the case. What I fear is Obama’s liberal interventionist side (see above), enabled by aides like Samantha Power and Susan Rice and John Kerry. Hagel, who was supposed to push back against these utopians, seems neutered by them. But, yes, it’s always good to look at the longer term view with Obama. If the House turns him down, it seems to me he will be saved from his own predicament. He may even try to go to the UN, especially now that Putin has signaled some readiness to consider a resolution using force. Another reader sees another sign of a possible long game:
You’re missing a meep-meep moment. A few days ago the media generally, and the right-wing media especially, were crowing that this showed how weak Obama was. Now he has the Republican leadership lining up behind him, giving him cover.
Yep, it was a great bait-and-switch. But I just don’t believe that Obama is that sneaky. From all I can tell, he has been simply flailing, and a Congressional vote merely offers him some time to come to his senses. Another doesn’t buy the long-game argument at all:
I guess I’m not surprised, but your editorial fails to highlight the degree to which Obama dragged us into this mess. I find myself incapable of agreeing with either side – I can’t fathom how we could possibly intervene for the better, and I can’t fathom how we could possibly sit this out – but I am stunned and embarrassed by how Obama has handled this.
He seems to have confirmed every single Fox Newsy critique of his foreign policy in one fell swoop: by flip-flopping, he comes across as indecisive; by setting a red line, then
letting Assad march right across it with no consequence to date, he has weakened the United States in a way I never thought imaginable. He has done so by hanging Kerry out to dry; by letting this decision be made by a Congress he knows will do anything it can to undermine him; by sending a signal to Israel, Turkey and Jordan that the US can’t/won’t act even when it promises it would; by allowing Cameron to fail so spectacularly, and, a decade after Bush, having once again only one single military ally, this time France, he makes us look like a smack-talking weakling.
And this is all coming from someone who not only enormously respects Obama, but also agrees with him policy-wise, almost down the line, and certainly in this arena. Had Obama made a strong case for intervention and decisively taken out Assad’s air force, which, by the way, seems like a very capable goal and a very effective one vis a vis the way in which he is terrorizing his population – I would have been on board. Had Obama decided that it wasn’t worth the risk, the capital, whatever, I could have been convinced. I really see no good options, and therefore no incorrect ones.
But this weak, dithering refusal to make a real decision – again, I am stunned. He has punted this decision to the fools in Congress – something I totally could support had he not suddenly decided to do this at the last minute, after being smeared in Britain – and has walked back his own self-imposed red line. He has sent a message to Assad (and Iran) that, hey, do what you want, and we’ll try to maybe figure something out, but we don’t really have the will. Its just a fucking disaster – and so out of character with who I thought this man was. I didn’t think it would be possible for him to piss off Samantha Power, John McCain, the irresponsible pacifists and the right-wing military crowd, all at the same time – but lo and behold, here we are.
And if you don’t think, however this plays out, that this won’t be one of the main talking points in November 2014 when the Republicans up their numbers in Congress, you are out of your mind. The only winner here: Hillary Clinton and her team, who had been itching to get into Syria months ago, and who now have the distance they need from Obama to win back the neo-connish Dems and turn her policy rightward.
What a fucking mess.
I guess I was lucky not to have watched this fucking mess unspool while I was on vacation. The last thing it suggests is any coherent strategy from the president. Maybe it will shake out for the better – but Obama should have the balls to insist that we cannot stop WMD use in Syria or nuclear development in Iran just as we could not repair Iraq’s sectarian conflict. Another criticizes Obama on a different front:
I’m in much agreement with your post “Marching As To War?” – with one caveat. While I certainly agree with you on the importance, if action is to be taken, of Obama getting congressional approval, I am extremely concerned with something Obama isn’t doing: taking any steps towards an international consensus.
Even Bush got a first UN resolution, a confirmation that everyone agreed that if Iraq had WMDs, they had to give them up. Even Bush established a “coalition of the willing” to demonstrate it wasn’t just the US. (Though the “coalition of the willing” still set a dangerous precedent on the use of force against a country that was not really threatening the security of other countries.) The whole development of international law norms has been to deter countries from doing exactly what Obama is doing.
Somehow I don’t see the US doing this if, say, Russia committed atrocities in Chechnya or China gasses some dissidents. But this is a terrible precedent to hand to the likes of Putin or a Third World dictator. If the US attacks Syria, I completely expect that to be the comeback given when a friendly government and friendly oil concessions are installed in some African nation by Russia or a neighbour after, say, a massacre they can vaguely plausibly claim involved war crimes or even genocide.
I hate to describe Obama as worse than Bush on anything, but he’s going that way on this issue and unfortunately it seems the congressional leadership is too terrified of being seen as soft on terrorism that they’ll back his play even though their constituents don’t.
One more reader:
I wanted to share with you a link to retired Lieutenant Colonel and former West Point instructor David Fitzpatrick’s recent post on Syria at “The Edge of the American West”, a history blog hosted by The Chronicle of Higher Education. I hope Fitzpatrick’s piece is read and circulated by those with the means to generate discussion and pressure for an official response, because the questions it raises are ones which must be answered not just with regard to Syria. Within them lies the specter of Rwanda and a debate about the application of the UN’s responsibility to protect a mandate. At the same time, Fitzpatrick’s questions also demand examining our response to other conflicts, conflicts like the still-ongoing genocide and war in Darfur, which had already claimed between 178,258 and 461,520 lives based on figures published in The Lancet three years ago.
The President has consistently demonstrated he feels the United States has a moral imperative to act in these situations. He said as much in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, and said as much with regard to Darfur as a candidate for President in 2007, as you can see in [the above video].
With his power as Commander in Chief, I don’t think he’s wrong to feel a moral responsibility to intervene if he believes intervention stands a chance of making a substantial positive difference. (I do disagree with him on whether he ought to act on this felt responsibility.) But, as an Iraq War veteran, I think he also has a responsibility – to his subordinates in the military who will carry out the mission, and to the nation itself – to answer questions like the ones Fitzpatrick raises, and to explain why situations like the ones in Syria or Libya demand forceful American intercession, and why that same America allows situations like the one in Darfur to persist and even worsen. Every member of Congress ought to ask one another the same questions as they prepare to vote on a Syria resolution, and every member of Congress ought to thoroughly explain their answers to their constituents.
One final remark. I left the Marine Corps in 2006. These days I am a graduate student who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin. Yesterday, as I listened to John Kerry equivocate in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee regarding an agreement to prohibit deploying troops on the ground in Syria, I have decided to share Fitzpatrick’s post with my students, who are just beginning a semester of immersion in the Vietnam War. In years past our conversations in class invariably include the enduring echoes of Vietnam in America, so Fitzpatrick’s post seems apt.
I also remember visiting my parents on my Iraq post-deployment leave in October 2004. While I was in home I voted absentee in that autumn’s election. With two years remaining on my enlistment and desperately hoping my commander-in-chief (and especially his cronies Cheney and Rumsfeld) would be voted out of office, I nonetheless couldn’t bring myself to cast a ballot for then-Senator Kerry. Despite the outcome of that election, I have never regretted that decision. Every so often, since the day he voted for the Iraq war, this Vietnam veteran has opened his mouth and reminded Americans why he had no business being elected President in 2004. Secretary Kerry seems to be the living embodiment of “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt,” for surely a fool is a man possessing Kerry’s wealth of experience and a dearth of comprehension of that same experience.
(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
About Obama’s Other “Not-War”
Patrick Cockburn reports that “Libya has almost entirely stopped producing oil as the government loses control of much of the country to militia fighters”:
As world attention focused on the coup in Egypt and the poison gas attack in Syria over the past two months, Libya has plunged unnoticed into its worst political and economic crisis since the defeat of Gaddafi two years ago. Government authority is disintegrating in all parts of the country putting in doubt claims by American, British and French politicians that Nato’s military action in Libya in 2011 was an outstanding example of a successful foreign military intervention which should be repeated in Syria.
Putting in doubt? It makes you want to cry. Ed Morrissey points out the obvious:
To call this a cautionary tale for Syria is to engage in artful understatement. This outcome should send up red flags, warning flares, and grab the focus of people around the world. Our last intervention turned Libya from a brutal dictatorship that at least cooperated with the West on some counter-terrorist efforts into a failed state where terrorists operate openly and oil revenue is up for grabs. That outcome in Syria would be an utter disaster for the Middle East, and eventually for Turkey and Europe.
Profile In Courage Watch
The latest from Christie:
Governor Christie called the use of chemical weapons by Syria “intolerable for civilized society” but would not give his opinion Tuesday about whether the United States should respond militarily. “I’m going to leave that to the people who represent us in Congress to make that decision, Christie said, adding he has great confidence that Sens. Robert Menendez and Jeffrey Chiesa and the rest of the state’s delegation will “do what they think is right for America.”
Why Did Assad Do It?
That’s the question that still nags at me. He was making progress against the rebels, and had used small amounts of poison gas in the conflict perhaps fourteen times before, according to British intelligence. UN inspectors were very close by. It simply makes no sense for Assad to have raised the stakes so massively – when it was in his interests to keep whatever CWs he used to small and isolated incidents far away from global attention.
The Obama administration hasn’t answered this question. No one has offered a persuasive answer. But German intelligence just might have:
Germany has followed France and the US in suggesting that chemical weapons had been used to intimidate the rebels and capture territory in a crucial battle for Damascus, especially to the east of the capital. There is a twist: “It could also be the case that errors were made in mixing the gas and it was much more potent than anticipated,” Gerhard Schindler, [the head of the BND external intelligence service], said.
The mistake may have been by some incompetent Hezbollah operator, or because Assad panicked, or both. The point is: we don’t know. Until we do, beyond any reasonable doubt, we should not go to war. You do not go to war because of your enemy’s mistake. You do not go to war because your enemy cannot admit such a mistake.
Remember Iraq? We went to war because of a mistake: we assumed Saddam’s WMD bluffs were true. They weren’t. Would it not have been prudent to wait until we knew everything? Does not a grave matter like this demand getting every single piece of evidence right? Or are we really back to 2003 all over again?
Washington vs The American People
One of the most astringent events of the last fortnight was the decision of prime minister David Cameron to allow a parliamentary vote on the possibility of a new war in the Middle East. He lost. He lost because the people of Britain absolutely, positively do not want another bank-breaking, inconclusive, morally fraught war in the Middle East. A new poll in the Independent this morning confirms the depth of the popular opposition:
Only 29 per cent agree that the US, without Britain, should launch air strikes against the Assad regime to deter it from using chemical weapons in future, while 57 per cent disagree. 80 per cent believe that any military strikes against Syria should first be sanctioned by the United Nations, while 15 per cent disagree with this statement.
So around 80 percent of the British people – the country closest to the US – oppose what Obama is now so foolishly proposing. 80 percent. How about Americans – those who actually pay for their president’s wars in money or blood or both? The WaPo-ABC poll reveals that
nearly six in 10 oppose missile strikes in light of the U.S. government’s determination that Syria used chemical weapons against its own people. Democrats and Republicans alike oppose strikes by double digit margins, and there is deep opposition among every political and demographic group in the survey. Political independents are among the most clearly opposed, with 66 percent saying they are against military action.
I cannot remember a war in which the public in the most affected countries is so opposed. And that opposition is not likely to melt in a week or so – certainly not if many people listened to John Kerry yesterday. And that poll is about the abstraction of “strikes” – and not about the open-ended war to depose Assad that the administration actually proposed in its own resolution. Mercifully, Americans are not as dumb as many think:
Only 32 percent said Obama had explained clearly why the U.S. should launch strikes. Back in March 2003, as the Iraq War started, 49 percent said that President George W. Bush had compellingly made his case for what was then at stake.
So Obama has much less domestic support than Bush, no backing from the Brits, open hostility by the UN for immediate war, and an obviously conflicted administration. This is a war even less likely to succeed than Iraq and even less popular. It is as if Obama decided to turn himself into Bush – and throw his second term down a rat-hole in the Middle East.
And yes, this is a proposal for an open-ended involvement in a sectarian civil war in the Middle East. Read it:
Senate Foreign Relations Committee – Syria AUMF
What we have here is a commitment to degrading the military resources of Assad and an utterly unenforceable attempt to limit that campaign only to prevent the use of chemical arms. If you have never seen a loophole that big before, gaze into it some more. It is so vast you could fit Iraq into it.
The prohibition on “boots on the ground” is also an obvious lie. Even the Senate can’t honestly echo the deceptive propaganda from the White House. So its formulation says:
The authority granted in section 2 does not authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces on the ground in Syria for the purpose of combat operations.
Another loophole you could drive a battalion through. They could be there for intelligence, for training the rebels, for arming them, for providing air cover, and for guiding them politically. So can we get real and admit that the US already has boots on the ground, and probably a lot? The president has already slipped and told us of the covert war he is already waging. This is part of the undemocratic madness of the military-industrial complex. It does what it wants to do. And every president, it seems, acquiesces. Even this one.
But the White House has given us a chance to make our voices heard. The Congress is the best place for such things, and the House is the most responsive to popular opinion. We can still stop this new war. But time is running out.
(Photo: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the topic of ‘The Authorization of Use of Force in Syria’ September 3, 2013 in Washington, DC. By Win McNamee/Getty Images)
What Will Going To Congress Accomplish?
Garance wonders whether congressional authorization will create “a more aggressive or protracted intervention than what we’d have seen had the president not sought Congress’s buy-in”:
[I]f Obama gets congressional approval, he’ll be getting it in what is likely to remain a fairly open-ended way, as part of a strategy with bigger aims, and owe his legislative success in part to the support of the most hawkish members of Congress. Is there any doubt they will continue to pressure him to act under the authorization they will have granted him, and that his White House requested? And that the forces gunning for intervention, once mobilized, will have a momentum of their own?
Chait argues that Congress voting against authorization might deter Assad from further use of chemical weapons:
Imagine that Congress votes not to authorize Obama’s plan. Then further imagine that Bashar al-Assad, emboldened, carries out another chemical attack. The media coverage would be far more intense. And members of Congress who voted no will have to answer for the carnage that will appear on television screens across the world. If the first vote lost by a relatively narrow margin, Obama would probably then call for a second vote and stand a good chance of winning.
The prospect of that happening may itself deter Assad. And when Republicans complain that Obama’s gambit of asking for a congressional vote is a way of shifting responsibility onto Congress, they are, in a sense, correct. Obama will own the consequences of action with or without Congress’s approval. But if it disapproves, Congress will own the consequences of inaction. And those might ultimately prove higher than it is willing to bear.
That Sickening Feeling
I’ve spent much of the day reading, reading and reading all I can about the events in Syria that I missed while on vacation. The more I read, the more opposed I became to what seems to me a potentially disastrous new war in the Middle East. And yet the more I absorbed the full incoherence of the argument for another utterly unpredictable war (you’ve probably read William Polk already but if not, do), and the more the arguments of John Kerry fell apart upon Senate inspection, and the more a look-back at the past two weeks revealed truly staggering policy confusion and doubt in the administration, the more it seemed that momentum was, incredibly, for another war.
And today’s media coverage felt like Iraq replayed as in a bad dream. The liberal internationalists, in an Ahmandownpour of self-righteousness, cannot wait to jump into another sectarian war we cannot control and would be unable to win. The neocons are still – staggeringly – being booked on television! Bret Stephens and Jennifer Rubin actually pulled out yet another Munich analogy this week (seriously, it’s always Hitler with them) – only to be backed up by the blithering bore who is, alas, our current secretary of state.
The liberal elites are particularly amazing to behold. I watched Anderson Cooper tonight and I may have missed it, but I couldn’t find a single guest opposed to this war, even as most Americans emphatically oppose it. Even O’Reilly was more even-handed (I kept flicking back and forth). We got to listen to Ryan Crocker tell us that we have to intervene and at the same time that the potential replacement for Assad is probably just as foul as the dictator. And we got Fouad Ajami – another pro-Iraq war “expert” who was exposed as an eloquent bullshit artist during the Iraq fiasco – telling us – yes, he said this – to trust the “Syrian people”, as if they exist, as if the sectarian divides and hatreds are not re-fueling as we speak, as if he has no shame and no record. It really as if Iraq never happened, as if the US still had the resources to fight an0ther, brutal and scarring sectarian conflict in someone else’s country on someone else’s behalf who will eventually ally with our foes. It is as if the Bush-Cheney administration never happened. It is as if the “surge” worked.
Obama has long straddled the line between protecting the interests of the American people against Jihadists and extricating the country from two disastrous, budget-breaking, morally crippling wars that all but exhausted America’s deterrent power. This is not an easy balance, and he deserves a break in a truly vexing period of eroding US prestige and power. And Obama hasn’t squandered American soft power, whatever the neocons think. They did that by executing those very failed wars in utterly failed states. Having used our military might to no avail, we now threaten it and are somehow surprised we aren’t taken seriously. This, in other words, is not Obama’s real gamble. His real gamble was in stating he would prevent chemical weapons use in Syria in the first place, when he cannot without endorsing another Iraq-style occupation.
So now we are treated to the argument from “credibility”. Enough with the arguments about credibility! The United States would benefit by nothing more than accepting the fact that we do not have the power to control that region and shouldn’t die trying. Our credibility is threatened not when we stay out of other people’s civil wars, but when we make threats we cannot enforce. I am emphatically not dismissing the Rubicon of chemical weapons, and am as appalled by their use as anyone. But if we cannot resolve the question without entering another full-scale, open-ended war on the basis of murky intelligence about WMDs, then we should resign ourselves to not resolving the question. Repeat after me: American power is much more limited than our elites still want to believe.
Our choice right now is between enabling Assad to stay in power and murder and gas more innocents or entering an unknowable conflict with no clear goals and no vital national interest at stake. If we do the latter, we will prove either that we bombed Assad and he survived or that we bombed Assad and we got al Nusra in charge of the chemical arsenal. If we are truly worried about the spread of Assad’s chemical weapons, we should ensure he keeps a tight lid on them and prevails in the civil war. That’s the goddawful truth we want to avoid and Obama thinks he can elide. He cannot. Get your Niebuhr back out, Mr President.
It is, of course, a vast tragedy that innocent Syrians – men, women and children – are being slaughtered and shelled and now gassed in a deep, sectarian conflict that feeds on cycles of revenge. I understand the moral impulse to try to stop it. I am not blind to the evil in Assad’s mafia family, just as I wasn’t blind to the foul stench of mass murder among the Saddam clan. I also understand the prudential reasons for trying to live up to the red line Obama so foolishly drew. But I learned from Iraq that establishing the evil of a foreign dictator does not mean we should go to war with him. Assad has already massacred 120,000 people in the region we call Syria, and we are not, we are told, going to act decisively enough to remove him from power. Either we lose face by choice or we lose face by walking backward into inevitable defeat. Better to lose face now by choice.
As for Obama? I wish I understood better. But the point of Obama’s entire presidency – something bigger than just him – was to resist the impulse toward what Obama once called “dumb wars.” Dumb wars are often acts of hubris; and when a country has the kind of massive military power the US now wields, every problem looks tempting. Everything the president has said and done has suggested he understands this. And yet in Libya, he gave in to the hysteria because of an alleged, planned massacre that never happened. Has it occurred to the president that someone might have noticed how you trap the US in yet another debilitating, bankrupting quagmire? As for the intelligence, show us. All of it. Prove that the rebels could never have done this. Give a reason why Assad would have suddenly raised the stakes this high in a war he was winning. I’m not interested in educated guesses. Unless this case is proved beyond the slightest reasonable doubt, the Congress has a duty to say no. After Iraq, America deserves no less.
And when you come at this fresh, one thing strikes you. The very notion that a great power like the United States should be involved in any way in resolving the differences between Shia Alawites and Sunni Muslims in the eastern Mediterranean is simply an absurdity. Maybe Obama has realized that too late and is now seeking Congressional support. But if he gets it, it won’t last. It will be followed by a thousand “Benghazis” on Fox News and elsewhere. If and when the civil war makes the dispersion of chemical weapons a threat to us, we can intervene to protect ourselves. Until then, Obama needs a steely form of resistance to the siren call of understandable moral concern. That’s what statesmanship sometimes requires in weighing the long-term interests of this country and its people against the immediate moral necessity of preventing evil. It requires seeing the evil you cannot end more clearly than the evil you can.
I learned that in the brutal decade after 2000. Did anyone else in Washington?
(Photo: U.S. President George W. Bush (R) speaks next to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (C) and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz (L) during a visit at the Pentagon March 25, 2003 in Arlington, Virginia. Bush asked Congress for a wartime supplemental appropriations of $74.7 billion to fund needs directly arising from the war in Iraq and the global war against terror. By Alex Wong/Getty Images.)
America Has Little Appetite For War
Pew finds that Americans fear another quagmire. Benen breaks down the numbers by political affiliation:
Larison comments:
Democrats are not rallying behind a president from their party on this issue. This is not what happened when Clinton ordered military interventions in the ’90s, but it is consistent with the reaction of Democrats to Obama’s wars in Afghanistan and Libya. Most Republicans might be expected to support hawkish measures, but Syria they have been almost as reluctant to intervene in Syria as everyone else.
Drum thinks the president “has a helluva sales job ahead of him.” Cohn believes support could go up:
As recently as five months ago, polls showed that a plurality or majority of Americans would support strikes on Syria if Assad used chemical weapons. It’s unclear whether even the most effective public campaign could lead a majority of the public to support an upcoming attack on Syria. But prior support, even if only in theory, suggests that the public might become substantially more supportive if they’re more aware of Syrian behavior and the Obama administration’s limited objectives.
The Congressional Leadership Backs Obama
Boehner supports the president’s decision to attack Syria:
Cantor, Pelosi, and Reid have also voiced their support for intervention. Only McConnell isn’t onboard yet. Dreher sighs:
Unless there is a rebellion in the Congressional ranks, in both parties, we are going to do this thing. We are going to bomb Syria to make Syria safer for al-Qaeda and other Islamists. This country never, ever learns.
Benen, on the other hand, argues that passage still isn’t a sure thing:
[W]ith Boehner and Cantor endorsing the president’s position, GOP lawmakers will obviously have to consider whether to embarrass their own leaders while also embarrassing the president. They might very well do this anyway, but at a minimum, it should give rank-and-file Republicans pause. Indeed, if there’s a contingent within the caucus that’s inclined to follow the leadership’s call, and there’s a similarly sized element of House Democrats who’ll follow House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) lead, then the odds of the chamber approving a resolution are probably slightly better now than they were a few hours ago.
The Fix is counting votes. Meanwhile, Galupo bets that any acts of bipartisanship won’t last:
If, as I suspect, a majority of Republicans vote aye on a strike against the Assad regime, they might feel emboldened to confront Obama on the domestic front. If politics stops at the water’s edge of foreign policy, as the cliché goes, Republicans will have earned a measure of good will from the media, and even, to a lesser extent, from the Obama administration itself. With Syria behind them, Republicans could thus reenter the budget and debt ceiling debates with renewed resolve: Okay, Barack; we’re on this side of the water’s edge again.
The Dish 