INVITING IRAN TO PISS ON OUR TENT

Here is one of the cruelest facts of life:  You only get to make peace with your enemies.

Here’s another:  Peace means an end to organized violence.  You do not have peace while the perpetrators of organized violence are not restrained (see Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Mali etc etc etc).

This, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with America’s insistence on excluding Iran for the negotiations to bring peace to Syria ongoing in Montreux.

As Ian Black reported in The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/21/us-russian-co-operation-key-hope-progess-syria-peace-talks

“The Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, stated on his website his belief that the talks have little hope of success. ‘Because of the lack of influential players in the meeting, I doubt about the Geneva II meeting's success in fighting against terrorism ... and its ability to resolve the Syria crisis,’ Rouhani said. ‘The Geneva II meeting has already failed.’” 

So long as Iran continues to supply fighters (some Iranians, but many more Hizbullah warriors from Lebanon) in support of Syria’s criminal President Bashar al-Assad, there will not be peace.  Excluding the Iranians from the peace talks does guarantee their failure, since it all but takes away any reason for Teheran to restrain either Assad or Hizbullah.

America offers 2 quasi-rationales for the exclusion: (1) the Iranians have not committed in advance to the goal of the conference, the transitioning out of power of President al-Assad and his government, and (2) the presence of the Iranians would trigger a boycott by our favorite rebel group, the Syrian National Coalition (SNC).

Both points have their flaws: (1)  the Iranian position is more or less the same as the Russian position, but the Russians have not been booted from the talks, rather their participation is considered one of the keys to any potential success; and, (2) the SNC by itself can contribute to peace, but cannot come close to assuring it, as it remains out-gunned and out-organized by the rest of the rebel movement, the radical Islamist forces, many allied to Al Qaeda, who have rejected the talks from the moment they were proposed.     

Negotiations only succeed when all the controlling stakeholders can derive some benefit from them.  Excluding a necessary stakeholder to keep a less crucial one on board makes no sense.  Our rebels need and benefit from peace too much to pull out, no matter what they threaten.

So, who are the stakeholders here?  (1) The wretched Syrian government and its 1%ers, the Assad family and its closest associates; (2)  The Syrian rebel forces; (3) The Syrian people, most of them bullied by, but not loyal to any of the contending forces; (4) Assad’s regional supporters, almost all of them Shi’ites, of whom Iran and Hizbullah are the most important; (5) Assad’s regional opponents, almost all of them Sunnis, of whom Saudi Arabia and Qatar are the biggest funders of the rebels; (6) global kibitzers like Russia, the United States and its allies in Western Europe.

What benefits might convince each of the stakeholders to make and sustain peace? 

(1) For Assad and the other beasts of his herd the prime benefit of agreeing to peace and giving up power would be that they will not only be allowed to live, they might be guaranteed immunity from prosecution, judgment, incarceration and loss of all their worldly goods. As if this opportunity were not enough in itself, the Washington Post editorial board says it might seem more valuable were it more aggressively threatened by the Obama White House.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/on-syria-obama-administration-is-leading-to-failure/2014/01/22/90b040b2-8390-11e3-9dd4-e7278db80d86_story.html?tid=up_next

More on this exercise in facile fatuity later.

(2)  The benefits for the anti-Assad forces are both obvious and, alas, fatally incomplete.  “Peace” declared in Switzerland will not become peace in Syria until the SNC’s fellow rebels, their Islamist rivals in rebellion, are subdued, and, as events in Iraq next door daily illustrate, subduing the jihadis will be hard to do.  But like including the Iranians, subduing the Islamists is not a choice, but a necessity to peace.

(3)  Making “peace” pay real-life dividends for the Syrian people will demand not just freeing them from Assad’s homegrown tyranny and the equally overbearing, mostly foreign, Fundamentalist threat, but freeing themselves from their ruinous addiction to sectarian conflict.  Syria’s majority Sunnis must convince their opponents in the Alawite, Shi’ite, Christian and Maronite communities that they are willing to live civilly, even harmoniously, alongside them, that bygones from this brutal war will indeed be bygones.  In many ways this is a more complex, maybe even more difficult task than defeating the Islamists.  But again, necessary.

(4)  The promise of a Levant ruled by law, and based on inter-communal co-operation would relieve Assad’s allies, Iran and Hizbullah of a conflict that has grown ruinous in blood and treasure.  It also might lead to a future in which both the Iranian government and Hizbullah’s leadership could use their strengths of political and social organization to grant their peoples infinitely better lives, safe from foreign threats or local violence. 

(5)  Peace in Syria would not guarantee, but would certainly make more possible, both a wider peace and even a stable region.  The blessings of peace in Syria would be constantly communicated to the peoples of the rest of the Arabic-speaking world by vigorous and competitive news media, hopefully growing a regional constituency for rule of law and civility.  The chief bankrollers of the Syrian rebellion, Saudi Arabia and especially Qatar are much happier being merchandising states than militarizing states, and a Mideast without war plays directly to their strengths and interests.  The removal of the semi-Shi’ite Alawites from power in Syria, the retreat of Hizbullah back to Lebanon (and even better, back to more civil, less brutal political competition within Lebanon), and the predictable advantages of Sunni majority power in Syria would more than offset having to play live-and-let-live with the Shi’ite triumphalists in Nouri al-Maliki’s government in Baghdad. Selling out their temporary allies-in-regime change, buying them off, or helping kill them, would not, I’m betting, be a big problem for either the Saudis or the Qataris.

(6)  The reduction in bloodshed, and progress towards stability would be the biggest payoffs from peace for almost everyone, from the Syrian people who would no longer be dodging daily bombs and bullets, to the regional rulers in Riyadh and Doha, and the global powers in Moscow and Washington who could go back to making money and self-congratulatory pronouncements.  Another important benefit, for Putin, Obama, Hollande, Cameron and the royal, military or democratic leaders of the Islamic world from  ending the conflict in Syria would be the opportunity to join forces in eliminating the irreconcilable guerillas.  No one in any of these governments and almost no one in their countries would mourn their demise.  

(7)  What benefits could convince Al Qaeda and its allies to call off their war and seek the true triumph of jihad, personal religious purity and discipline?  Probably, there are none, which is why they rejected the peace talks and why they must be defeated. 

But, let’s be honest here.  Worthy as these goals may be, they simply cannot be realized without Iran’s assent.  One monkey, the old saying goes, can stop the show, and in the Mideast, Teheran is the headquarters of one hellacious combination of peace-stoppers.

The opportunity to improve their chances to be accepted into the community of peace-makers, and allowed to prove through actions that they are a nation worthy of respect and equal economic and political treatment has proved quite alluring to Iran in the context of its nuclear ambitions.  If Teheran can be convinced that similar benefits would accrue to them and their people, and their allies from Beirut to Bahrain, Iran might rehabilitate itself to everyone’s profit.

The diplomatic negotiation which may well have put Iran on a path to nuclear restraint was called Geneva I.  The people who have put together, and then tossed Iran out of, this week’s conference in Montreux call it Geneva II, for the same reason the folks who play football in New Jersey’s Meadowlands call themselves the New York Giants and Jets: marketing.

But as the humorist Finley Peter Dunne wrote, “Politics ain’t beanbag;” and peace-making ain’t football.  Branding the conference in the name of the city where a watch-makers convention (really!) displaced the diplomats to the smaller town an hour’s drive away won’t accomplish anything.  Real give and take, even with our enemies, is the only way to make peace a best-selling product.

Oh, yes, -- I mentioned the WaPo editorialists and their suggestion that Barack Obama can force humanitarian concessions (even the Posties don’t think he can force real peace) “by presenting Mr. Assad with the choice of accepting them or enduring U.S. airstrikes.”

As if bluffing a guy into giving up just one of his still supreme arsenal of weapons means you can bluff him out of power itself.  This is just self-inflating, self-deluding crap. 

For the editorialists who, I’m sure, would also recommend that Obama back up his bluff, if it were called, I have my favorite 3-word question, the one policy-makers and conference table commanders never seem to ask themselves, “And then what?”

Lob a few bombs, kill off a bunch of bad guys, and then…??  Wasn’t that Don Rumsfeld’s prescription for Iraq?  Not even the Post’s own eternal optimists would buy that sack of ignorant shit a second time.  Or would they?

Better to try to find a deal that meets almost everyone’s need to think it got them something good.

 

UPDATED!! HERSH CHOPS DOWN A CHERRY (PICKING) TREE

Sy Hersh has done it again, published a devastating report on what he calls the manipulation of intelligence by the Obama Administration to support its short-lived plan to intervene militarily in Syria and to delude Congress and the American public on real and dangerous question of who might have used, and who might still retain CW capability there.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/2013/12/08/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin

The piece, published by the London Review of Books (a.k.a. LRB) on December 8, was called to my attention by stalwart reader Tobe Berkovitz of the Boston University School of Communications (and my revered brother-in-law).

In his report, Hersh, citing sources within America’s military and intelligence communities, makes at least 5 important assertions.

1)     That military forces loyal to President Bashar-all Assad are not the only ones in Syria capable of manufacturing the lethal chemical weapon Sarin, and arming munitions with it.

2)     That President Obama cherry-picked the intel to create a falsely air-tight public case against Assad.

3)     That Obama and his representatives misled the American news media into thinking the Administration had real-time evidence that tied Assad’s forces to the war crime, rather than deductive assumptions based on back-tracking communications intercepts which could, at best, suggest rather than prove the Administration’s case.

4)     That, even after Administration sources corrected this mis-impression (in response to angry charges from Syrian rebel allies that the US had stood by and watched the build-up to the chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians), major organs, including specifically the Washington Post, continued to sell the Administration’s “rock-solid” case against Assad.

5)     That the net-net of Obama’s eventual policy, to collaborate with the Russians and, later the UN, to disarm the Syrian government forces of their chemical weapons, could be to leave the Al-Nusra Front, allegedly closely allied with Al Qaeda, as the only sarin-capable forces in the Syrian war zone.

 

Below are some crucial citations from Hersh’s piece, but I urge you to real the whole, scathing report.

1)  “Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin.…  [B]y late May, the senior intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in Syria, al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), also understood the science of producing sarin. At the time, al-Nusra was operating in areas close to Damascus, including Eastern Ghouta,” [the area from which the sarin attack is believed to have come.]

2) “[I]n recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present, I found intense concern, and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence. One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a ‘ruse’. The attack ‘was not the result of the current regime’, he wrote. …  The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.”

3)  “A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening. … A keyword or two would be selected and a filter would be employed to find relevant conversations. ‘What happened here is that the NSA intelligence weenies started with an event – the use of sarin – and reached to find chatter that might relate,’ the former official said. ‘This does not lead to a high confidence assessment, unless you start with high confidence that Bashar Assad ordered it, and began looking for anything that supports that belief.’ The cherry-picking was similar to the process used to justify the Iraq war.”

4)  “A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded to the complaints. A statement  to the Associated Press said that the intelligence behind the earlier administration assertions was not known at the time of the attack, but recovered only subsequently: ‘Let’s be clear, the United States did not watch, in real time, as this horrible attack took place. ... But since the American press corps had their story, the retraction received scant attention. On 31 August the Washington Post, relying on the government assessment, had vividly reported on its front page that American intelligence was able to record ‘each step’ of the Syrian army attack in real time, ‘from the extensive preparations to the launching of rockets to the after-action assessments by Syrian officials’. It did not publish the AP corrective, and the White House maintained control of the narrative.”

5)  “While the Syrian regime continues the process of eliminating its chemical arsenal, the irony is that, after Assad’s stockpile of precursor agents is destroyed, al-Nusra and its Islamist allies could end up as the only faction inside Syria with access to the ingredients that can create sarin, a strategic weapon that would be unlike any other in the war zone.”

A footnote:  Seymour Hersh’s report in length and style strongly resembles past reports published by The New Yorker.  So far, I haven’t heard back from Hersh as to whether this article had been offered to the New Yorker before its publication by LRB.  I hope to be able to update you on this issue.

UPDATE:  Eliot Higgins, on the Foreign Policy magazine website, offers a refutation of (one part of) Seymour Hersh’s report, that the munitions used against civilians could have been made and launched, not by President Assad’s military, but rebel forces, most-likely the Al Qaeda affiliated Al-Nusra Front.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/12/09/sy_hershs_chemical_misfire#sthash.XL8Zj7ty.xt8pYKWy.dpbs

Most of Higgins’ evidence is culled from YouTube videos, and raises a lot of good questions, although his challenge to MIT expert Ted Postol seems pretty labored to me.

“Theodore Postol, a professor of technology and national security at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Hersh that the Volcano is "something you could produce in a modestly capable machine shop" -- in other words, a weapon the rebels could make. Postol also stated that various organizations' flight path analysis of the Aug. 21 Volcanoes, which put the point of origin of the munitions at a Syrian military base more than nine kilometers away from the impact locations, were "totally nuts." Postol's analysis, Hersh wrote, had "demonstrated that the range of the improvised rockets was 'unlikely' to be more than two kilometres." 

All of this is presented as an argument that perhaps the Syrian government wasn't responsible for the Aug. 21 sarin attack, despite the claims of U.S. President Barack Obama's administration. But during my ongoing discussions with Postol's colleague, Richard M. Lloyd, Lloyd has told me he believes the evidence collected so far would suggest the Volcano has a range of at least 2 to 2.5 kilometers. It's worth noting that some examples of the larger Volcano rocket have been recorded with a basic nose cone, which increase the range of the munition by more than one kilometer.”

 

But, if I’m remembering correctly, the Administration’s analysis claimed the sarin-filled missile had been fired by Syrian troops based 9 km away.

More troubling is Higgins’ expert’s argument that Al-Nusra lacks the capability to build weapons of the sort used in Eastern Ghouta.

“I asked chemical weapons specialist Dan Kaszeta for his opinion on that. He compared the possibility of Jabhat al-Nusra using chemical weapons to another terrorist attack involving sarin: the 1996 gassing of the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

‘The 1994 to 1996 Japanese experience tells us that even a very large and sophisticated effort comprising many millions of dollars, a dedicated large facility, and a lot of skilled labor results only in liters of sarin, not tons,’ Kaszeta said. ‘Even if the Aug. 21 attack is limited to the eight Volcano rockets that we seem to be talking about, we're looking at an industrial effort two orders of magnitude larger than the Aum Shinrikyo effort. This is a nontrivial and very costly undertaking, and I highly doubt whether any of the possible nonstate actors involved here have the factory to have produced it. Where is this factory? Where is the waste stream? Where are the dozens of skilled people -- not just one al Qaeda member -- needed to produce this amount of material?’"

 

It does make one want to ask Sy’s sources what made them confident that Jihadist rebel groups were sarin-capable.

But, as I noted earlier, Higgins, whose piece is headlined “St Hershe’s Chemical Misfire,” concentrates on the ballistics question, real and important, but just a fraction of a report that concentrates on the Obama Administration’s alleged “manipulation” of intelligence.  Of that, Higgins says only this, in his closing paragraph: “Hersh rightly expresses concern about the way in which the U.S. government's narrative of the Aug. 21 was built.”

“Rightly,” indeed.  Hersh says the Administration cherry-picked its evidence, misdescribed its methodology, and may well have misjudged the whole situation.  Video clips of various missiles, valuable as they are, are only part of the evidence for part of the story.

And thanks to David Isenberg for pointing me to the FP report.

 

 

 

 

OBAMA ACCORDING TO THE TIMES -- INDECISIVE, RESOLUTE OR JUST POWERLESS?

The New York Times has devoted a few thousand words of description and analysis of what they call President Obama’s “indecision” about what the US should do in Syria.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/world/middleeast/obamas-uncertain-path-amid-syria-bloodshed.html?_r=0

Their “close examination… starts with a deeply ambivalent President,” and ends with a once-secret State Department judgment: “We are headed toward our worst case scenario: rebel gains evaporating, the moderate opposition imploding, Assad holding on indefinitely, neighbors endangered, and Iran, Hizbollah, and Iraqi militias taking root.”

Actually, what the Times’ sources, “dozens of current and former members of the administration, foreign diplomats and Congressional officials” describe is a President not so much indecisive as resolute in resisting calls to put what his most warrior-ish advisor, Hillary Clinton called, “American skin in the game.”

It must be noted that the closest the former Secretary of State has ever gotten to the front lines of “the game” of war was her imaginary episode of being “under fire” at an airport in Bosnia.  It must also be said, the biggest swatch of “skin” Mrs. Clinton, and it would seem the Times’ other uniformly anonymous, almost uniformly scornful sources wanted to risk was “arming and training” “the rebels” against the Syrian government of Dictator-President Bashar al-Assad.

Indeed, the conflicting positions among Mr. Obama’s advisors who contributed to this conspiracy of caution range no further than

1)     Who – the Pentagon or the CIA? – should run the arm/train program

2)     Whether the US should train a few dozen, or arm a few thousand Syrians

3)     With or without portable anti-aircraft weapons

4)     Which rebel groups to help, and

5)     When we woulda, coulda, shoulda  done any of the above.

There are 2 things almost everyone seems to agree on.  One is that none of the above options are much good, and the other is the journalists’ iconic irony: “You should have been here yesterday.”

To have had the best chance for any form of American intervention to have produced a good effect, everyone, including me, says, it should have come 2 years ago, in the summer of 2011.  That would have been before the aura of the “Arab Spring” had been mugged by mideastern reality, before the rebellion against the brutal Assad family dynasty had fractured into a dozen mutually-antagonistic paramilitary factions, and before the worst of those militias, the ones devoted to Al Qaeda, or its Islamist fundamentalist goals dominated the more moderate, secular, or western-oriented ones.

But the backers of the “lost chance” theory cannot confidently claim that even early intervention would have created a “nouveau regime” more successful than those produced in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen or Libya.  More American “skin” in those places would not have solved their embedded issues of poverty and illiteracy, national disharmony, religious or sectarian sub-division, tribalism or short-sighted self-interest that currently make all 4 of those Arab states political, economic and cultural sinkholes.  It likely would only have meant more American losses of prestige, blood and treasure.    

That the 2 years since (my and) the anonymians’ “moment of maximum opportunity” have seen a steady worsening of the Syrian situation may increase the nostalgic appeal of interventions aborted, but may also indicate the futility of the proposed “do something” solutions, and the comparative wisdom of Obama’s inaction.  The shift in the balance of power in Syria, back to the entrenched regime and its Shi’ite allies, Hizbullah and Iran, the continued slaughter and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians, and the escalations by Assad into worse and worse uses of chemical weapons, have been terrible to witness.  But they would have been terribly hard, possibly impossible, to reverse.

The bumbling White House process, and the humbling reliance on Vladimir Putin’s Russia that brought things to their present situation, Assad shedding his chemical weapons, probably at the price of being allowed to live and rule for many more days and years, does not mean they represent no improvement over the status quo ante. 

It is hard for anyone, and apparently impossible for the Times, not to smirk at the Administration’s claim that today’s Syria represents, “a successful case of coercive diplomacy. Only under the threat of force,” the Administration argument goes, “has Mr. Assad pledged to give up his chemical weapons program. They argue that this might be the best outcome from a stew of bad alternatives.”

The argument the Times prefers, that “decisive action by Washington, [critics] argue, could have bolstered moderate forces battling Mr. Assad’s troops for more than two years, and helped stem the rising toll of civilian dead, blunt the influence of radical Islamist groups among the rebels and perhaps even deter the Syria government from using chemical weapons,” is but an assertion, a theory.

More based on fact, it seems to me, is one of the few attributed assessments in the whole, long Times story: “We need to be realistic about our ability to dictate events in Syria,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser. “In the absence of any good options, people have lifted up military support for the opposition as a silver bullet, but it has to be seen as a tactic — not a strategy.” 

What may be the scariest aspect to all this is that nowhere in the article, nor in the reported disagreements among such Obama advisors as former and present Secretaries of State Clinton and John  Kerry; former and present CIA directors, Leon Panetta, David Petraeus, Michael Morell and John Brennan, former and present National Security Advisors Tom Donilon and Susan Rice, or UN Ambassador Samantha Power does anyone propose a strategy for Syria or the middle east.

And, other than Ben Rhodes’ quote, the Times makes no mention of this.

But, attached to the article, the Times does have something which speaks volumes.  It is a picture and a caption.  

                Daniel Etter for The New York Times

THE REBEL COMMANDER Gen. Salim Idris, head of the Supreme Military Council of the Syrian opposition.

The head shot of Gen. Salim Idris calls him “The Rebel Commander.”  But the only one who ever made him a General was his former boss, Bashar al-Assad.  And the only ones who made him a “commander” were not fighting in Syria.  Many of them were not even people from the region, but Westerners.  In short, he’s “our commander” more than he’s the rebels’, and the Supreme Military Council he allegedly commands is also hardly inside Syria, but for the most part safely in exile.  Few consider the SMC a particularly important force in the effort to oust the Assad regime.

To suggest that he is a realistic beneficiary of “American skin” is far-fetched.  To state that he is “The” choice is nuts.  Worse, it is false.

To call out Barack Obama for failing to grasp that thin reed, even two years ago is easy to do, but is it worth doing?

And the same could be said for assembling anonymous dissenting voices whose real “game” ain’t in Syria, but in Washington, burning or burnishing present or future Presidencies -- easy to do, but well short of what responsible newspapers do to inform their readers.

MORE SYRIA: ON NICK KRISTOF'S COLUMN

One of my favorite and most faithful blog readers, Carla Ward, asked me about Nick Kristof’s recent defense in the NY Times of his support of President Obama’s once-proposed punishment bombing of President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria.

 

This is what I wrote to her:

 

I'm an admirer of Nick Kristof, a great writer and thinker, in my opinion, and I largely agree with him here.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/opinion/sunday/kristof-hearing-you-out.html?_r=0

We should have opposed Assad much earlier and more forcefully.  Obama's waiting for the "red line" of chemical weapons to be crossed was another example of his feckless passivity and indecisiveness.

He has been, again in my opinion, a disastrous president, if less so than his more aggressive and less-informed predecessor.

But bombing or not bombing, for chemical weapons or just mass murder, are not to me intelligent policy questions. 

Where national foreign policy is concerned the first questions have to be: 

-- What are our strategic goals?  and 

-- What's our plan to achieve them at the lowest possible cost?

It is good, and a genuine achievement to have chemical weapons taken off the Syrian battlefield, (especially with so little cost to American and human lives) but it leaves unanswered more basic questions like,
-- Should Assad be allowed to rule? to live? 

-- What are the available alternatives in terms of governing Syria? 
-- Are they more aligned to our interests? will they benefit Syrians?  

Then there are the even harder, how to questions like 

-- How do we get rid of Assad?  
-- How do we find a better successor? and 
-- How do we stabilize the situation in Syria and in the Mideast region so that the new leader has a genuine chance to succeed?

 Pardon me for not having answers to those questions, but then, I'm not the President.  For Mr. Obama to have asked for a national debate on bombing without even broaching, much less trying to answer these real, and harder questions is another example of why he is such a failed President.

One thing I think is certain: Secretary of State John Kerry's formulation of an "unbelievably small" bombing attack is 

-- unbelievable.  As the President said, "the US Air Force doesn't do pinpricks." 
-- a typically inaccurate (I would say dishonest) description of what would have been a doomed and ineffective gesture, which, if taken seriously, would have mis-framed that now put off debate.
-- a perfect example of a "half-measure," proposed by an Administration which flat didn't know what to do about being caught out on the wrong side of a gratuitous, hopefully never to be repeated artificial red line.

By the way, there are at least 2 more red lines out there waiting for American leaders to stumble across them, having to do with the acquisition of nuclear weapons by North Korea and Iran.  The fact is, if it is willing to pay the cost in sanctions, isolation and opprobrium, a state can, with the necessary (mis)investment of personnel, money and national commitment, learn to make nuclear weapons.  Period.

Opposing states can enforce a high cost on such nouveau nuclear powers, but they cannot, short of war, stop them.

When George W. Bush had to face Kim Jong Il's willful crossing of the nuclear red line, he did the only smart thing: he ate it. Even with a nuke or 2, North Korea hardly poses a strategic challenge to the US, but it has powerful allies like China which would protect it -- again probably with punishments short of war, like changing its policy of helping to finance US debts -- should we take military measures to eliminate the North Korean threat, leadership or country.

Where Iran is concerned, there is a more rational appreciation of the costs of nuclear acquisition than in Pyongyang, and there seem to be real alternatives short of force that might convince Tehran to stay away from nuclearizing its military.  There is also a global consensus that all of them should be exhausted before any kind of forceful confrontation with Iran is considered.

The outlier from this consensus, blustering Binyamin Netanyahu, whose preferred form of warfare is attacking over-matched Palestinian or Lebanese militias and mercilessly bombing civilian populations, would obviously have to think twice before engaging a state as large and well-armed as Iran, for whom one-off air strikes against suspected nuclear facilities like those used against Iraq or Syria would be neither disarming, decisive nor deterring.

And, of Bibi didn't want to do such thinking, it would fall to President Barack Obama to enforce American interests in the region by emphatically leading a "global discussion" against any ill-considered Israeli aggression against Iran. 

 

QUESTIONS FOR PRESIDENT OBAMA

This is so nice, you should read it twice....(pageview count is everything, y'know).

Published today at www.cjr.org, the website of the distinguished Columbia Journalism review:
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/questions_for_president_obama.php

merely copied here (help convince cjr that I am worth publishing!)

1)    Mr. President, what is your strategic goal in Syria? Taking chemical weapons off the board?  Punishing Bashar al-Assad for using them?  Weakening Assad? Regime change?

2)    In the event the balance of power in Syria’s civil war changes, or Assad is defeated, what is the US plan to stabilize Syria without ceding power to Al Qaeda-linked and other radical Islamist militias? 

3)    Is the Russian proposal to place Syrian chemical weapons under international control and destroy them an acceptable outcome for the US?  Or it only good enough as a step towards regime change?

4)    When Russian President Putin put his chemical disarmament idea before you last week at the G-20 meetings, did you take it seriously?  Did you instruct Secretary of State John Kerry to pursue the idea with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in their ministerial-level talks?  Kerry’s first public mention of the Russian proposal seemed to denigrate the plan as unlikely to work.  Were those his instructions?  Was his “one week” deadline part of a White House strategy?

5)    Now, you have asked for a pause in House and Senate votes to authorize military action in Syria.  How long do envision the pause should last?  What outcome could convince you to call off the votes entirely and abandon plans for military action? If the Russian plan can be completed and implemented what effect will this have on future US policy in Syria?  What effect would this have on Russian-American relations?

6)    How important has the threat of American use of force been in moving towards even a temporary solution in Syria? How do you assess the cost of the apparent global disapproval of the US threat to use military force?  Have the rejection of collaboration by the British Parliament, the refusal of the Arab League to endorse a military strike, and poll results in Western Europe and elsewhere opposing US action weakened the United States? 

7)    This has been a crisis heightened by global video communication, from the original “amateur” videos that revealed the horrific results of the chemical attacks to the round-the-world, round-the-clock coverage of your threat and the political reactions to it.  How should US policy be adjusted for this new “wired world” reality?

8)    You said in your speech to the American people that we “know” of actions and discussions among the Syrian military command to prepare chemical weapons for use, and to distribute gas masks to troops to protect them against chemical weapons, German newspapers have quoted German intelligence intercepts that appear in part to contradict your scenario, and point the finger at some Syrian rebels for initiating the chemical attack. What makes you sure your sources are right and the German sources are wrong, and why have you not presented more facts that support your conclusions directly to the American people? .

9)    Secretary of State Kerry has gotten a lot of bad reviews recently for his rhetoric on Syria.  His gratuitous presentation to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of hypothetical reasons for the possible dispatch of American “boots on the ground” created a huge backlash among those who saw this as an invitation to  quagmire, and his negative characterization of the Russian proposal seems to have been swiftly discarded.  Does he still have your confidence?

10)  In your televised speech, you pledged to the American people that there would be no American “boots on the ground” in Syria, but the language of a draft Senate resolution put a limit forbidding only the use of US Armed Forces in Syria.  Do that limitation and your pledge extend beyond the involvement of Armed Forces to forbid the use of CIA personnel or civilian contractors inside Syria? 

11)  Polls show the US public, by a 3-1 majority want you to be bound by the results of any future Congressional votes?  Will you be so bound, or do you feel, as Constitutional Commander-in-Chief you maintain independence to act, even in the face of popular and legislative disapproval?

12)  The former US Mideast diplomatic representative Dennis Ross said recently, if the US doesn’t act on Syria’s chemical weapons, this will convince Israel (and Iran) that we will not act if Iran does achieve the ability to make nuclear weapons, and therefore will heighten the possibility of a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran.  Do you accept Ross’ arguments?  Would unilateral Israeli action against Iran serve American interests?  If Israel attacked Iran, would you support such action? Would you join it?  Or would you try to prevent it, and if so, how?

 

SYRIA: TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES

In the run-up to the Bush Administration’s war in Iraq, we heard a lot of talk about secret intelligence that, it was claimed, verified every justification of combat offered by the President, the Vice President, the Secretaries of Defense and State and the National Security Advisor.  Information of the sort to make NSA Condoleezza Rice believe in the “threat” of Saddam Hussein’s “mushroom shaped cloud,” that convinced Colin Powell there were “mobile chemical weapons labs,” -- secret information that could be announced but not detailed, and certainly not shared with ordinary citizens.

The classified military intelligence that lent sincerity to Donald Rumsfeld’s promises of a short, decisive, cheap,  small force war; the confidential “defector information” used by Dick Cheney and his own secret intelligence operation to sell their assertions of a Saddam-Al Qaeda- 9/11 connection, had to stay secret, we were told, to protect our the secret services’ abilities to know so much.

Every falsehood used to convince the American people we needed to go to war with Iraq was credited to a “we can’t tell you” source.

We all now know that sources the Administration found credible had, in many cases, been previously discredited by respected professionals in other national security services, or disputed by other equally, -- hoo-boy – “credible” long-time expatriate sources, most of them wannabe Big Shots in the New  -- “Thank you, Uncle Sam!!” – Iraq. 

A story credited “foreign intelligence services” about Nigerian yellow-cake for Iraqi nuclear weapons was demolished by an experienced, American diplomat sent to Africa to evaluate it.  For revealing that this secret intelligence was wrong, the investigating diplomat Joe Wilson saw his wife’s stellar intelligence career destroyed by Dick Cheney’s closest aide, Scooter Libby. 

Not only was a highly skilled secret source of US intelligence exposed, secret American intelligence methods could now be deduced by anyone who reconstructed Valerie Plame’s overseas career.  Especially shocking, coming from people who conistently claimed the reason they couldn’t let citizens in on secrets was that they had “to protect sources and methods.”

The Big Secret, of course was that we had no useful sources in Iraq, and our chief intelligence methodology was to accept every sleazeball’s bullshit (if it would help take us to war.)

It is now more than 10 years later.  A “populist” Democrat President has replaced a conservative Republican, and he is trying to convince us to go to something everyone else but him calls “war,” in Syria.

Why must we do this?  The brutal dictator President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad has ordered up a consummate war crime, gassing human beings, and his military has carried out his order and killed some 1400 people.  This act crosses “the world’s” moral “red line,” President Obama declares, and demands “limited and tailored” punishment only the US military can impose.

The logic is clear and simple.  But how do we know the premise is true?  The Administration’s answer is: we have secret intelligence that proves it.  Dana Milbank in his brilliant column in the Wednesday Washington Post skewers Obama’s war-sellers’ addiction to secrecy. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-on-syria-whos-got-a-secret/2013/09/04/9cc5b360-15a8-11e3-a2ec-b47e45e6f8ef_story.html

Milbank notes it is their unwillingness to cite detailed evidence which, perhaps fatally, prevents the Knights of the Obama Table from making a plausible case to an already skeptical public, that this war is a good, or at least, a necessary not-war. 

And most of all, Milbank identifies the central lunacy of the claim, once again, that playing “trust us” protects sources and methods.  Edward Snowden and months of detailed coverage of his revelations have given virtually everyone in the world who cares a clear picture of what our spy services can do, and how they do it. 

Can we actually listen in on conversations among Assad’s co-conspirators?  Is a pig’s tail pork? 

Might our satellites show us Syrian military manoeuvers, even the movement of chemical munitions from warehouse to warehouse and then to the front lines?  Having heard of an ursine visit to my neighbor’s field, I am sure bears do shit in our woods.

As with everything in the ongoing global war over personal privacy and institutional surveillance, most reasonable people would agree, the snooping powers are capable of knowing almost everything. 

Unfortunately, the evidence so far suggests, it is the use of those info-gathering capabilities that cannot be trusted.

Inevitably, it seems, the American Surveillance Machine gathers too much, with too little careful selectivity, and far too little discipline about complying with legal limits (or democratic oversight.)  Often, the Obama security services’ judgments about what is important, much less about what is threatening, or who demands punishment, seem deeply flawed.  Sometimes these judgments seem more about politics than national security, more about self- than nation-protection.  

This is why the law says the FISA Court must hear applications before approving surveillance, and why it is such a serious crime (yes, dammit, crime!) when applications presented to the FISA Judges contain falsehoods or distortions or when surveillance is done without any reference to the FISA process. 

“Protecting” citizens from Gen. Clapper’s record is as wrong and futile as “protecting sources and methods” of his NSA, and all the "Other Government Agencies."   It’s too late, Dudes.  People know.

Which is why people want to know, for sure, what is the intelligence, what kind of sources make you so sure you’re right that America should green-light military violence?

Nothing less than pretty full disclosure is going to gain popular support.  Without it, the whole thing is going to be “your war,” Mr. President, a pretty lonely, pretty weak position for the leader of American democracy to be in. 

 

 

SYRIA: BITS, PIECES, MORE

Some random thoughts on Syria and related topics. 

Did you see Der Spiegel's report of the Trifecta -- a German listening ship off Syria reportedly picked up a conversation between a top Hizbullah guy, and someone at an Iranian Embassy, talking about how Bashar done it? Perfect or too perfect?

Meanwhile, these could be perilous times for Hizbullah. I wonder if, under cover of our attacks in Syria, we or somebody else will take a few swipes at the Big H. Without outside interference they will continue to dominate and distort life in Lebanon, while pressing an essentially sectarian, completely anti-American agenda (three things not to like). Somebody's money (us, Israel, Qatar, Saudi???) could surely buy a Sunni fighting force to do the dirty work. Of course, that would mean/has already meant "our side" arming Al Qaeda.

Obviously, these are also perilous times for Israel, but salutary, if the threat wakens Israelis to their reality -- they are isolated and surrounded. They gotta make peace, if it's not too late already, and they gotta stop screwing the Palestinians to get it.  President Shimon Peres knows this.  He told me as much 17 years ago.  It’s still true.  But things are getting worse, not better, for Israel.

I hope, pray and believe the American attack on Assad will not unleash some kind of Hizbullah/Syrian/Iranian/Al Qaeda attack on Israel.  But it could.  And among Israel’s many enemies there are both chemical and biological weapons, and munitions to carry them, not to mention tons of conventional missiles, rockets and bombs.  I think, right now, those enemies lack the co-ordination or the will to launch significant attacks on Israel.  But they get closer on both fronts every day, month and year.  Only peace can pre-empt these trend lines from reaching a disastrous conclusion.

I've always thought that Syria was supposed to be a more modern, urban and urbane culture than Iraq, with more of a national concept and a favorable balance between modernist/secular moderation and Islamist fanaticism. Recently, several reporters say, the Sunni nuts – Al Qaeda’s al-Nusra front and others, have the edge. This matters a lot. We can't achieve anything more than destruction without substantial inside support of the sort Iraq was never gonna provide.

If, over the past 2 years of warfare, our intelligence agencies have not identified that Syrian support and solidified it, our mission to turn the tide against Assad, while keeping the rest of the region stable, will fail.  The means, either that Assad will survive at great cost to our national dignity, or that Syria will wind up in the hands of our most fanatic enemies, or -- best case -- simply dominated by a different, hopefully less toxic version of the incumbent Nationalist dictator.

Or we can link to a sufficient fighting force and political leaders who will put Syria on a more civilized path, and our push at the tipping point will have been a masterstroke.  It’s a lot to hope for, and makes one wish we coulda (but never that we shoulda, or woulda) given this whole mess a pass. But, if Der Spiegel’s sources are right, a petulant, murderous rage by Bashar al-Assad has pushed us, and his region, to a very dangerous place.

In Afghanistan, (to finish an earlier thought) we have, despite mighty, costly, and sincere efforts, not accomplished much we believe will last. We have found and developed some steady allies who subscribe to the ideals behind our presence – a free economy, a functioning democracy, and a national concept based on religious and ethnic and tribal tolerance.  This, in spite of our many mistakes, including the reckless killing of civilians and recurrent signs of personal ignorance or disrespect for Afghan people and culture.   

But., the most those supporters can achieve, I fear, is a paralyzing, unchanging, balance of power between sometimes corrupt, sometimes progressive, modernizing urbanites, and radically retrograde, fundamentalist tribalists in the considerable countryside.

And what are in Putin's "plans" for after the Syria attack?

Yesterday's House Foreign Affairs Committee hearings offered yet another awkward airing of John Kerry's indiscreet, mindless babblings.  This from

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/09/04/five_takeaways_syria_intervention_hearings

"'With respect to Arab countries offering to bear costs and to assess, the answer is profoundly yes," Kerry said. "They have. That offer is on the table.  Some of them have said that if the United States is prepared to go do the whole thing the way we've done it previously in other places, they'll carry that cost," Kerry said. "That's how dedicated they are at this. That's not in the cards, and nobody's talking about it, but they're talking in serious ways about getting this done.'

"Kerry also gamely insisted that so many U.S. allies wanted to take part in a potential strike on Syria that the Pentagon couldn't find a role for all of them. That seems unlikely, since Turkey and France are to date the only major powers to publicly express a willingness to use military force against Assad. But Kerry may have an elastic definition of "participation." Albania, he said later in the hearing, was willing to provide political support for a strike. He didn't say anything about Albania being willing to do much else."
 
Not since the "glory days" of Leon Panetta's probably unintentionally hilarious "I'm now the Defense Secretary," tour have so many hi-ranking words ranked so low for logic and mental discipline.  Panetta was 75.  What's Kerry's excuse?

So much to worry about.