Just a quick roundup of just some of the reactions that I’ve come across in my web surf this morning….
From the President’s 15 minute speech:
Because these weapons can kill on a mass scale, with no distinction between soldier and infant, the civilized world has spent a century working to ban them.
Then there are the children. Of course what Assad did is heinous. But there’s something selective in the president’s outrage. Assad has killed tens of thousands of people. He’s killed many more children with knives, bullets and bombs than with gas. Perversely, he may keep right on killing more children even as some phalanx of inspectors is shipped in to verify that this untrustworthy last-ditch offer from Russia and Assad is “enforced.”
By what moral calculation will it be an achievement to stop Assad from gassing children while he remains free to kill them in countless other ways? By what moral calculation does a dictator get to gas the first 1400 victims without paying with his life, so long he promises not to do it again?
Most Americans aren’t paying close attention to the civil war in Syria. They don’t know that more than 100,000 Syrians have died, and that chemical weapons account for less than 1 percent of those casualties. It’s borderline perverse to use descriptions of pain, suffering and death to justify an intervention that would leave the cause of more than 99 percent of these deaths untouched. As Time’s Michael Crowley tweeted, “The images of children crippled by conventional bombs were sickening, too.”
To put it simply, if it is “the images of children writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor” that motivate our intervention in Syria, why should we care whether the children were attacked with gas or steel?
Obama claimed, for example, that US “troops would again face the prospect of chemical warfare on the battlefield,” if nothing was done about Assad’s actions. He said, “it could be easier for terrorist organizations to obtain these weapons and to use them to attack civilians”; and he claimed “al-Qaida will only draw strength in a more chaotic Syria if people there see the world doing nothing to prevent innocent civilians from being gassed to death.”
But none of these arguments makes much logical sense. Countries don’t use chemical weapons against the US because: a) most don’t have them; b) they are rather ineffective as a war-fighting tool; and c) countries rightfully fear the repercussions of using banned weapon against the United States for reasons that should be obvious to a president who said the American military doesn’t do “pinpricks”. Responding or not responding to Syria’s use of chemical weapons likely won’t change that calculus.
In addition, the desire of nihilistic terrorist organizations to obtain weapons of mass destruction will be little affected by the world’s reaction to Assad’s behavior. Groups like al-Qaida sought such deadly tools before the Syrian civil war, and they will seek them after. Indeed, the reference to al-Qaida in Obama’s speech was nothing but a domestic dog-whistle, intended to scare Americans about the price of inaction. It glosses over the fact that an attack against the Syrian regime would inevitably hinder its war-making abilities – and make it more likely that radical jihadist groups would gain the upper hand in the Syrian civil war.
Obama’s speech was filled with just these sorts of contradictions. On the one hand, he argued that “if fighting spills beyond Syria’s borders, these weapons could threaten allies like Turkey, Jordan and Israel”, but then said later that “neither Assad nor his allies have any interest in escalation that would lead to his demise. And our ally, Israel, can defend itself with overwhelming force.” Well, which is it?
He said that “as the ban against these weapons erodes, other tyrants will have no reason to think twice about acquiring poison gas and using them.” But he also pointed out that 189 countries have signed up to the Chemical Weapons Convention, which suggests that the broad consensus against the future use of chemical weapons is perhaps stronger than Obama is suggesting.
This was somewhat par for the course in a speech where Obama, in one breath, declared America is an “exceptional” nation and, in the next, promised the US would act with humility. What was perhaps most troubling about Obama’s presentation is the questions that were left unanswered.
What if Assad goes back to gassing his people with chemical weapons? Will the US further escalate? Why are the horrors of children killed by chemical weapons qualitatively different from the horrors of children killed by artillery or machine guns?
Finally, what is the justification for condemning one violation of international law (the use of chemical weapons) with the violation of another (fighting a war in Syria without a UN security council mandate)? Does this set a troubling precedent for conflicts down the road?
To be sure, there are reasonable answers to these questions, but in failing even to try to answer them, and instead, raising red-herring issues and making dubious claims – such as, attacking Syria will “make our own children safer over the long run” – Obama offered the American people a confusing and ultimately misleading rationale for military action.
This is baffling:
Even though I possess the authority to order military strikes, I believed it was right, in the absence of a direct or imminent threat to our security, to take this debate to Congress. I believe our democracy is stronger when the President acts with the support of Congress. And I believe that America acts more effectively abroad when we stand together.
This is especially true after a decade that put more and more war-making power in the hands of the President, and more and more burdens on the shoulders of our troops, while sidelining the people’s representatives from the critical decisions about when we use force.
It has Matthew Waxman scratching his head:
My first question is to what he’s referring to here, or which part of the past decade. President Bush undoubtedly held very broad views of war powers, but the two major wars embarked up during his presidency, in Afghanistan and Iraq, were clearly congressionally authorized, and Congress has played a significant role in pushing their wind-down. The 2011 Libya intervention, by contrast, was not congressionally authorized, and the Obama administration adopted the view that the War Powers Resolution did not apply to the operations there (which, unlike the contemplated Syria operations, aimed to help bring down a regime). The Obama administration has also resisted the idea that Congress should re-examine the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which has been interpreted to apply in geographically broad ways that may or may not have been intended by Congress at the time it was adopted.
My second question is why, if he believes it’s problematic that more and more war-making power has been put in the hands of the President to the exclusion of Congress, President Obama also adopts the position that he possesses unilateral constitutional authority to act in this case.
Put aside the fact that Congress explicitly authorized the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while Obama did not seek congressional authorization before launching his war in Libya — or that dozens of nations joined us in Iraq and Afghanistan, while in Syria we have . . . France.
Marc Thiessen again:
While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, it takes a special kind of chutzpah to plagiarize your predecessor while attacking him at the same time.
Moreover, we know the Assad regime was responsible.
We do?! Hat tip: Nan G on this Fact Check:
THE FACTS: The Obama administration has not laid out proof Assad was behind the attack.
The administration has cited satellite imagery and communications intercepts, backed by social media and intelligence reports from sources in Syria, as the basis for blaming the Assad government. But the only evidence the administration has made public is a collection of videos it has verified of the victims. The videos do not demonstrate who launched the attacks.
Administration officials have not shared the satellite imagery they say shows rockets and artillery fire leaving government-held areas and landing in 12 rebel-held neighborhoods outside Damascus where chemical attacks were reported. Nor have they shared transcripts of the Syrian officials allegedly warning units to ready gas masks or discussing how to handle U.N. investigators after it happened.
The White House has declined to explain where it came up with the figure of at least 1,429 dead, including 400 children — a figure far higher than estimates by nongovernmental agencies such as the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has counted only victims identified by name, with a current total of 502. In his remarks, Obama more generally accused Assad’s forces of gassing to death “over 1,000 people, including hundreds of children.”
MataHarley has also expressed her doubts as to who is responsible for the cw attacks.
1: Everything the Media is missing in Syria and
2: The newest one I just posted by History of the Iraq War author (I have his book too), Yossef Bodansky…
… I guess you could say I not only have doubts as to Assad’s perpetration of CW deployment, but I’m far more convinced each day that passes that this is the doing of the more nefarious characters in the opposition.
On the difficulties of running inspections…
how will the destruction of the Syrian chemical arsenal work anyway?
The language coming from the Syrians and Russians suggests that Syria’s arsenal will not be moved out of the country. Rather, UN inspectors are somehow supposed to take control of tons of chemical agents in the middle of a war zone. It is unclear what then follows–will the inspectors somehow have to incinerate tons of these agents safely or will they simply camp out around the chemical-weapons sites indefinitely?
How this works, in practice, is almost impossible to imagine. Western intelligence agencies do not even know where all of Assad’s chemical-weapons stockpiles are located. Remember how much trouble UN inspectors had in verifying Saddam Hussein’s compliance with UN resolutions in the 1990s? The difficulties will increase ten-fold in Syria where the chemical-weapons arsenal is scattered across a large, dangerous battlefield. Saddam, it turns out, didn’t really have WMD; Assad does, and they won’t be easy to find.
The only way that Syria might fulfill its obligation to disarm is if it faces a credible threat of military action. Will Russia agree to a Chapter VII resolution at the United Nations that would authorize military action to compel Syrian compliance? Doubtful, but possible. Even if the UN does authorize action, what are the odds that Obama will act given the bipartisan resistance in Congress to any strikes? The House and possibly the Senate as well were already set to reject the authorization for the use of force. This “deal” is being peddled as a way to avoid a vote altogether. But if the U.S. is not seen as willing to strike Syria, what incentive does Assad have to comply with the terms of any disarmament deal? The most likely scenario is that Assad will agree to something in principle and then fudge on the implementation, knowing that Washington will have lost interest by that point.
The best thing that can be said in favor of the Russian deal is that it does offer an alternative to the immediate humiliation of Congress repudiating the president and refusing to authorize Syrian action.
Chemical Disarmament Hard Even in Peacetime:
Spread far and wide across Syria, the chemical weapons complex of the fractured state includes factories, bunkers, storage depots and thousands of munitions, all of which would have to be inspected and secured under a diplomatic initiative that President Obama says he is willing to explore.
But monitoring and securing unconventional weapons have proved challenging in places like Iraq, North Korea and Iran — even in peacetime. Syria is bound up in the third year of a bloody civil war, with many of the facilities squarely in battlefields.
“I’m very concerned about the fine print,” said Amy E. Smithson, an expert on chemical weapons at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. “It’s a gargantuan task for the inspectors to mothball production, install padlocks, inventory the bulk agent as well as the munitions. Then a lot of it has to be destroyed — in a war zone.”
“What I’m saying is, ‘Beware of this deal,’ ” Dr. Smithson added. “It’s deceptively attractive.”
~~~ experts said, large numbers of foreign troops would almost certainly be needed to safeguard inspectors working in the midst of the civil war.
“We’re talking boots on the ground,” said one former United Nations weapons inspector from Iraq, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he still works in the field on contracts and did not want to hurt his chances of future employment. “We’re not talking about just putting someone at the gate. You have to have layers of security.”
Destruction and deactivation of those weapons could then take years.
The Obama administration is skeptical about whether this approach might work. A senior administration official called securing chemical arms in a war zone “just the first nightmare of making this work.”
A Pentagon study concluded that doing so would take more than 75,000 troops. That rough estimate has been questioned, but the official said it gave “a sense of the magnitude of the task.”
Another riddle centers on arms movement. As President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has lost territory, or has feared that rebels could seize the lethal stockpile, he has consolidated his chemical weapons, administration officials say. Thus the old estimate that intelligence agencies offered — of 42 separate chemical sites — may no longer hold true.
“We only know a good deal about 19 of them,” said another senior official who has been briefed on the intelligence. Thus, doubts could fester on whether Mr. Assad had turned over his entire arsenal.
Specialists in ordnance disposal and demilitarization say any effort to account for Syria’s chemical weapons would require huge investments of resources and time, and the likely assumption of battlefield risk. The United Nations already has 110 chemical inspectors stretched thin around the globe, and their ranks would have to swell.
“I suspect some casualties would be unavoidable,” said Stephen Johnson, a former British Army chemical warfare expert who served two tours of duty in the Iraqi desert. “The question you have to ask is whether the benefits would be worth that kind of pain.”
These are not, experts noted, theoretical issues that may arise, but hard realities.
“Whichever country would be sent in there to try to get the accountability and do the security, and maybe eventually get to the destruction — they will be a target for someone, for one group or another,” the former United Nations weapons inspector said. “Because no matter who you are, you get mortared somewhere by one of the parties.”
With Obama’s address to the nation still to come, the game was not over, but the betting money had swung decisively in the other direction.
At that precise moment, a stray comment by Secretary of State John Kerry — a comment no more significant or meaningful than the more fulsome discussions Obama reportedly had with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit — catalyzed an abrupt Russian reversal. It apparently catalyzed more than that, since Syria appears to have conceded that it possesses chemical weapons, something they were denying when a strike looked imminent.
How could a threat, which when credibly imminent was producing defiance suddenly produce a breakthrough when it seemed least credible? Why would Putin and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad “buy” a non-strike when they were about to get it for free?
One possible answer, offered to me by Joshua Rovner of Southern Methodist University in a private debate among academic security specialists, points to the twin role of reassurance and compellence (threat) in coercive diplomacy. As I have explained before, for coercion to work, you have to simultaneously threaten bad outcomes if the target defies you and promise good outcomes if the target acquiesces. Coercion can fail if the target doubts either side of that calculus. Perhaps, my friend speculates, Kerry’s stray comment provided the needed reassurance that was hitherto lacking.
That may be part of it, but the facts better fit another explanation: Putin and Assad pounced on the stray comment because they knew that on Monday Obama was what in business is known as a motivated buyer. Obama needed a way out from the political defeat that he was facing, so he was willing to pay as high a price as he ever was to avoid the embarrassment.
What is the price? As Middle East expert Michael Doran of the Brookings Institution explains, the most tangible result of the last 48 hours is that Obama is now a partner with Putin and Assad. Putin and Assad have bought not merely an indefinite delay in airstrikes (something they were getting anyway), but also explicit partnership with Obama and tacit rejection of the “Assad must go” plank of Obama’s Syria policy. Note that despite all of the moving rhetoric in Obama’s address about the horror of what the Assad regime did, Obama pointedly did not repeat his long-standing assertion that “Assad must go.”
Got any good links to other articles in wake of the President’s confusing case for Syria last night? Drop ’em in the comments section.
A former fetus, the “wordsmith from nantucket” was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1968. Adopted at birth, wordsmith grew up a military brat. He achieved his B.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles (graduating in the top 97% of his class), where he also competed rings for the UCLA mens gymnastics team. The events of 9/11 woke him from his political slumber and malaise. Currently a personal trainer and gymnastics coach.
The wordsmith has never been to Nantucket.