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?