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.

 

WAR-LITE?

What is war for?  Perhaps this brief interregnum before the missiles fly would be a good time to consider that question.

The principal, inevitable consequence of war is destruction, of human life and property.  All the other abstract products of warfare are several quantum leaps behind destruction in impact and resonance.  But let’s look at them.

War can produce (1) conquered territory (2) weakened or eliminated enemies (3) strengthened or strained alliances (4) fear and (5) respect.

Conquered territory, to remain conquered must be held, and territory can be held only with boots on the ground.  President Obama’s proposed Syrian punishment begins and ends with the First Principle, no boots on the ground, so this war (or war-lite) will not enlarge any secured real estate.

Will a few “demonstration” attacks weaken our enemies in the Mideast and, increasingly, all over the Muslim world?   Not seriously, nor, according to Administration hawks like Secretary of State John Kerry, are they intended to.  The missiles, bombs and rockets will not eliminate many enemies they do not directly kill.  In fact, on the conventionally accepted formula of counter-insurgency, "kill one guerilla, create 10 more," they will actually grow the number of people so disaffected from the United States that they are willing to take up arms against us.  Converts from this exercise?  Do you expect many?  I don't.

How about our diplomatic alliances?  Again, it appears the counter-production will far outweigh the positive effects of our (restrained) assault on Syria.  Any damage done to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and his largely anti-Zionist populace may be welcomed by many in Israel and accepted in France (at least at the top-of-government level), but the rejection of joining the hunt by the British Parliament has already strained relations between Washington and London, and, polls suggest, the widespread disapproval across Europe, and although there are no analogous polls there that I’ve seen, likely even stronger opposition across Asia and the Middle East signal, the US is neither winning friends nor positively influencing people with its conception of “punishing” the Syrian regime for its almost certain, and certainly awful crimes.

Henry Kissinger the soi-disant descendant, I would say diminishment, of Metternich, used to propose his “madman theory:” that we could get great results from the fear people and states would have of an America capable of insane levels of violence and destruction.  Perhaps, that might once have been true, at least in the “olden times,” of Thomas Hobbes, when life was “nasty, brutish and short,” (a little like Kissinger himself.)  But today, life is globally connected, and people who were once willing to dine happily on the sausages of conquest, now can't avoid seeing with their own eyes war’s sausage-making process.  They get to hear, first hand, through instant or almost-instantaneous words and pictures what war really means.  It speaks well for mankind that this tends to reduce their respect, if not their fear, of the promulgators of ultra-violence. 

Thus, unless a nation is willing to commit to all the responsibilities of post-war, occupation of conquered territory, paying for as well as supervising the rebuilding of states, and the re-establishment of rule of law against the scattered, highly motivated forces of “insurgents,” always present in the transition period after war “officially” ends, the bottom line for wars since 1963 (i.e. since Vietnam) has been consistently written in blood-red economic ink.

Again, take it step by step: war is supposed to increase or secure territory, weaken enemies, strengthen alliances, and induce fear and respect (of as we once long ago put it, the Cheney-Rumsfeld dream of “shock and awe.”)  Raise your hand if you believe this formulation works.

The extreme skepticism, even among nations regarded as our best friends, towards America's claimed intelligence and evidence that allegedly prove that President Assad or his commanders ordered the chemical mass murder in the Damascus suburbs should alert us to how little respect the US presently commands.

In Washington the Obama Administration is claiming that they are proposing something quite different from all-out war, a kind of war-lite. We will attack only a few places for only a short time, aspire to no territory, no regime change, not even a re-balancing of power among the contending forces on the soon-to-be-bouncing Syrian ground.

Again, this seems to me a quaint notion, because “lite” or not, this is going to be war “LIVE.”  Already Israeli radio has announced its plan for real-time coverage, and Israeli TV will also be watching.  And so will the American networks and newschannels, already salivating over their expected jump in audience ratings, and the global newschannels which represent the eyes and living rooms, desktops and mobile phones of China, Japan, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, Australia, Iran, Turkey, Germany, France, Russia, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, and, oh yes, Syria.  They will all be tuned it, real-time or damn close to it.

And what they will be watching will not look like war-lite, it will look like war, and unmistakably war of choice, war of the strongest against the weaker, bullying.  Few will be rooting for the big guys.

Let me propose a video analogy.

Everyone, especially anyone who witnessed or lived through it, agreed: Hurricane Andrew was a Storm of the Century, the biggest, baddest hurricane in the weather service record books.  The problem was how to communicate that on video.

All the conventional images for a “hurricane,” palm trees bending, street signs shuddering, traffic lights swinging like pendulums in the wind, even windows shattered, while shutters dangled from their hinges, or roofs torn off homes, flying like corrugated razor blades, were already “used up,” offered countless times on TV as images of lesser storms.  The only way to show the scale that put Andrew off the conventional charts would have been a long, sustained aerial shot of house after house, block after block after block of roofless homes, and no one in conventional TV news (and what is more conventional than TV news?) had the patience, or the confidence in the audience’s patience or attention span to show that.

So audiences had to “take our word for it,” that Andrew was like no hurricane we’d ever seen for size and violence.  Many may have acceded, but few felt it in their guts.

Communicating scale is video’s greatest weakness.

And this weakness cuts both ways.  So, for President Obama’s apparent plan for something less than war on Syria, -- once the video pictures of the first, second or third cruise missile landing, the first or second house imploding, neighborhood cowering, hospital receiving room spilling over with blood and terrified humanity hit the cellphone, tablet, computer and TV screens of the world  -- it is not going to look “restrained.”  It will not feel to billions of viewers like “war lite;” it will look like war. It will look like the US inflicting “punishing” violence on some other country, both because it can and because the America wants to show that it can.

If the President thinks this will win over hearts and minds through its "restraint," I fear he is kidding us, and worst of all, kidding himself.

The deadly “secret” of war is out, everywhere: the principal consequence of war far is destruction.  Period.

Blood red ink all around.

 

 

  

 

SYRIA, WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

“Well, this time we’re really mad.” That seems to be gist of the message President Obama has charged Secretary of State John Kerry with giving to the world.

After a widely suspected chemical attack on Syrian civilians earlier this summer, almost certainly on orders from their murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad, reportedly killed between 100 and 150 people, The Obama White House said we were pretty steamed, and told Assad we were finally going to start arming his enemies in response. But we did not do so.

Just as we did not do anything to Assad after 2 years of his desperate attempts to hold onto power had produced an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths and more than a million refugees.

But now, Kerry says, things are different: now we know Assad ordered what we know was a chemical weapons attack that we know has killed upwards of 1000 civilians, who like the 100,000 dead who have preceded them are disproportionately women and children.

The proof, journalists have been told, will be found in “sigint,”digital messages with traceable sources and signatures that will establish, it was Bashar and his henchmen who put the poison gas into play.

Could this be the opportunity the Securicrats have been waiting for?  Is this when the surveillance capability which I accept cannot be undone can be used to benefit American security (if it is really being threatened)?  Could just the kind of message mining the NSA says it occasionally, accidentally uses to tap the communications of Americans be used righteously, to protect the innocent (even if they are not Americans) against their oppressors (even if they have never proposed oppressing America)?

If the NSA et al can really produce evidence that will convince reasonable people that the Syrian regime has indeed broken one of the world’s most serious laws and taboos, against using chemical weapons for mass attacks against civilians, that would be an important accomplishment.  And it might even provide a proper predicate for a serious response against those responsible.

But the US Government’s “proof” had better be good. As my brilliant friend George Kenney points out today in Huffington Post: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-kenney/syria-air-strikes_b_3814293.html

"From the reporting it seems ineluctably clear that chemical weapons were used. That's a tragedy. But it remains far from clear who did it. None of the many insurgent groups are saints; to be honest, with the fighting going against the insurgency in recent months there would be far greater incentives on their side to use chemical weapons, in the hope of triggering western intervention, than there would be on the part of Syrian government forces."

But assuming, the charges against the Assad regime stand up, some hard questions still remain, like why would we respond?  To defend international law? To defend Syrian lives? Or would we be acting to defend our “credibility, “ to make good on President Obama's "red line" warnings?  As today's NY Times editorial puts it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/opinion/responding-to-syrian-atrocities.html?hp&_r=0

"Presidents should not make a habit of drawing red lines in public, but if they do, they had best follow through. Many countries (including Iran, which Mr. Obama has often said won’t be permitted to have a nuclear weapon) will be watching."

This sounds a little like Dr. Seuss' Horton Hatches the Egg raised to geo-strategic levels: "I meant what I said, and I said what I meant, and an elephant's faithful 100%."

Yes, it is a good thing for our allies and our enemies to know we are steadfast. But it is a better thing, if what we propose to do makes sense.

So what is that President Obama is considering?

Here is what the NY Times says we can expect:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/world/middleeast/syria-assad.html?hp

“a limited military operation — cruise missiles launched from American destroyers in the Mediterranean Sea at military targets in Syria.”

The Washington Post has a bit more detail,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/kerry-obama-determined-to-hold-syria-accountable-for-using-chemical-weapons/2013/08/26/599450c2-0e70-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html?hpid=z1

adding that “long-range bombers” may also be used for “no more than two days “ to hit “military targets not directly related to Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.”

Like what? Well, Army Chief of Staff Martin Dempsey told Congress in June, “Potential targets include high-value regime air defense, air, ground, missile, and naval forces as well as the supporting military facilities and command nodes.”

But the Post says the attack under contemplation would be something, “far smaller and designed more to send a message than to cripple Assad’s military and change the balance of forces on the ground.”

Clearly the Times heard the same ideas with slightly different words: “not a sustained air campaign intended to topple Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, or to fundamentally alter the nature of the conflict on the ground.”

So, the American government wants the world to know that making good on the President’s word means sending a message and a punishment to President Assad, but nothing more. Take that! Take your un-toppled self and un-crippled military and carry on. Carry on with an unchanged balance of forces in an unaltered conflict and just restrict yourself to killing without chemicals, the old-fashioned ways.

Huh?

If, as Secretary Kerry said, Assad’s gassing his own people to keep power is a “moral obscenity,” then what is our killing a few of Assad’s soldiers (and almost inevitably, his people,) while keeping the arch-murderer in power and still dominating a majority of Syria’s citizens and territory?

It sounds like that’s America’s objective: to keep things as they are. Show a little might. Kill some Syrian Muslims. Intimidate some Iranian Muslims. But do not change the unrelieved awfulness of Syrian reality today.

 

Is this because we think, facing reality in a world and particular case of nothing but bad options, that this is all we really can accomplish?  If so, keeping that a “secret,” is another example of “old world thinking.”  Better to explain what we can and cannot do, and why, than simply to leave the globally visible results (the explosions will be seen on all-the-world’s TV, computer and tablet screens) to be interpreted unaided.

 

Our plan of action seems to be all about limiting risk, not in itself a bad thing. But if the limits, using only “stand-off” weapons, whether they be missiles, or drones, of bombers flying high (as in Kosovo and Serbia to keep pilots safe,) exacts a cost in targeting accuracy (as it did in Kosovo and Serbia,) it may not be so well received among the people on the ground or the people watching it all at home. 

The Kosovo precedent was, in a way, great for us – a war with no casualties:  none; no  American lives were lost in the campaign to free Kosovo.  But the idea of risk-free military action is a dangerous one, and to outsiders may seem both brutal and cowardly.  This is already how much of the world already perceives our military strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, America killing “because it can.”

We limit our targeting in both those places, too, and claim “good intelligence,” implied allied consent, and legal justification for everything we do, but much of the world hates us for it.

And wouldn’t you, if some foreign force meted out its brand of justice in our backyards, or even our boondocks? And wouldn’t you hate it even more if what the outsiders called justice were just geo-political posturing to protect its “word,” while changed nothing, while practically guaranteeing, of not enabling future crimes by the oppressor, and future repetitions of violent correction, further wastes of our blood and treasure?

If we choose force, death and destruction, shouldn’t it be to change something, to end, not prolong violent conflict.

Unless we cannot realistically expect to do better. 

So, tell us, if we can use our spy tech to track Assad’s messages, can we also use it to track the man himself?  If we can trace the communications of the Syrian chain of command to prove that carries out war crimes, can we not to target enough significant links in that chain to disassemble it?

Or are we just sticking to the pre-precision warfare rule of law, that killing “leaders” is unacceptable, while killing their forces and their victims is not?

Decapitation and not punishment is what needs to be done to the Assad machine if we mean to effect change.

Playing pattycake for 2 years while Syria has imploded in government-dominated violence has not worked. Quite the contrary, it has ceded the battlefield to forces that see themselves as either enemies of or betrayed by us.  Making our slaps slightly harder will not change the hearts and minds of those now fighting in Syria, nor will it save Syrian lives or stabilize Syria’s neighborhood.

But can America do that?  And if we can’t what can we do and how? If we decimate and thereby bring under control the Syrian government’s war machine (military and internal security), can we then quiet and reorganize a chaotic battleground state overrun by several different fighting forces, some of them unalterably opposed to any peace on American terms.

As Syria’s neighbor Iraq (and Libya and Yemen) eloquently demonstrate, it is much easier to create a state of war than it is to end one. And, make no mistake, after, and in part because of, our own 2 years of passive acceptance, Syria is in an advanced state of war, where every inch of ground is controlled or contested by force.

The disasters in those 3 states (and the continuing troubles in Egypt and Tunisia) show the rule of force must be ended before rule of law can start, and that almost always demands the application of greater force. We say peace, freedom and stability for Syria is our ultimate goal, but what risks will be run for that goal? Stand-off force cannot hold ground.

Almost unheard of these days in Washington, there seems to be a solid consensus, from the White House to the Congress, to the American people, that we want to keep our “commitment” completely risk-free. We do not want to get involved in Syria’s Civil War. Me neither. But, face it; nothing far short of that is likely to work.  And, even one American cruise missile means we are involved.

We may deny it, call it an isolated “punishment,” “surgical” and clean, but that’s not what the world watching the explosions is going to think. They’re going to say, the US is involved in murder, in destruction. And they are going to ask, for what? “Sending a message,” delivering a punishment, sounds a lot like, what were John Kerry’s words? Oh yes, “a moral obscenity.”

No, if we’re going to use the bullet, we’re going to have to bite the bullet. If we’re going to shoot at the beast, we have to kill the beast. If the only way to end war is to use war, we should, and then, with help from allies, with support from local participation, against some very determined foes, we must also be prepared to win the peace. Which, we should acknowledge in front,  is likely to involve a lot of time, a lot of costs, and some serious risks, including if we are honest, (even if for a limited mission over a limited period of time,) somebody’s boots on the ground.

If domestic politics, or the limits of our military strength, forbid that, the White House should say so.  Honesty about the relationship between policy and reality is something every government owes its people.   Bluster or weasel words or half-measures are not likely to work, as domestic politics, much less as foreign relations.

 

SOME MAXIMS FOR 21ST CENTURY WARFARE

 

First, let me confess, I have never served in the military, never fired a gun, never killed anything larger than a mouse (except for one terrible accident when I was about 8 years old when, mischievously tipping a big oil barrel to see what I could spill out of it, I was caught in the act, and in dropping my side of the tilted barrel, caught a curious piglet beneath it. It is one of the worst memories of my life.  So in addition lacking any warrior experience, I am squeamish.

Nevertheless, in a 50+ year career in journalism, I have seen warfare and its consequences (on the streets of New York, Newark, and Kent, Ohio, as well as in the Balkans, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Rwanda, and have spent a lot of time talking with troops and their commanders.

Not enough to make me an expert, but more than enough to conceive these ideas.

1)    Power Projection Is Over:  Wikipedia says that power projection and force projection are the same thing, and that “soft power” can also be successfully projected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_projection

This is, to me, very confused thinking.

Power projection, once upon a time, meant the ability of a distant state to control other states.  The apex of power projection was the era of colonial empires, when the economies and polities of distant, usually African, Asian, Middle Eastern or Latin American nations, and the daily lives and ultimate fates of their people could be controlled from places like London, Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Moscow and, yes, Washington.

Force projection is a lesser capability.  It can intimidate, punish, oppress its targets, but it, as we have learned to our sorrow, cannot control them.  One way of looking at force projection is that it is power projection without empire, since force projection does not imply the durability or the continuity of power projection.  For its targets the difference between force projection and power projection is the difference between a sock in the jaw and life in prison.  For its projectors, the limited power of force projection was nicely summed up by American fighters in Vietnam (or Afghanistan): “We control the day; they control the night.”  

Soft power, which eschews brute force, conveys influence, which can have both durability and continuity, but neither controls nor intimidates or oppresses.  The soft power of “rock and roll, blue jeans, Coca Cola,” is impressive, whether you see it as liberating or annoying, but it, even in its state-directed iterations of diplomatic alliance or exclusion or economic sanctions allows it targets to choose their outcomes.   

What power projection controlled was not just territory, but equally important, communication.  The armies of empire had superior firepower, but, more important, they knew, both strategically and tactically, what they were doing.  By and large, their victims did not.  Imperial fleets could move with speed and stealth, outpacing both warnings and preparations.  Once landed, imperial troops could overpower territories and kill or corral their inhabitants and move on, before their next targets knew they were in danger.

And control of communications was a 2-way street.  Not only were power projections‘ victims ignorant of their future, the projectors’ folks back home could be kept completely in the dark about the crimes and brutalities being committed in their names.

Which brings us to maxim #2:

 

2)    There Are No More Secret Wars:  Back when power projection worked, wars were a secret to their victims until it was too late, and they could be kept secret from disapproving citizens of colonial powers until the state decided otherwise, or until the disapproval was of faits accomplish, which are harder to argue against, and much harder to undo.

Now, like God’s sparrows, not a bomb or missile falls unobserved, and news of the damage done can be communicated both locally and globally, instantaneously.  For the would-be projectors of power or force, even their most incurious or controlled news media must now contend with other media voices, with other, likely often opposing, points of view, and with an anarchic world of video-capable mobile phones, cameras, computers and satellite links to tell the world of every death, every burning building.

As the Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden cases make obvious, secret attempts to project power or force can be revealed to the world, not just after the fact, but in the planning or even pre-planning stages.

As I have said before, as long as institutions involve human beings in conceiving or executing their plans, the betrayal of secrecy is not just possible, but predictable.

The cruel depredations of perhaps the world’s last empire, the Soviet bloc, its oppression, corruption and bureaucratic paralysis, were so well known that it was rejected by its own people, and shunned by the rest of the world. 

Now, with all the world witness to our projections of force in Iraq and Afghanistan (and our airborne killings in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and our connections to coupsters in Honduras and Egypt) and the threats of force against Iran regularly made by belligerent blowhards in Congress, there is a widespread sense of, “There, but for the grace, or lack of interest, of the Pentagon and the White House, go I.”

In addition to the projection of power, force or influence, there is their opposite, the projection of repulsive arrogance.  This kind of arrogance and ignorance can only be remedied by my Third Maxim.

 

3)    WHERE YOU CANNOT TELL FRIEND FROM FOE, DO NOT GO:  I was going to propose as my Third Maxim, There Are No More Short Wars, but the exception proves the rule promulgated above.  The US military did conduct short, successful wars in Grenada and Panama in the 1980s.  What made these “incursions” short and successful was not just that they occurred before the globe was digitally interconnected but because in both cases, our troops, and almost all the citizens in both places knew who the “bad guys” were.  In Panama, there were few remaining supporters of the corrupt and criminal regime of Manuel Noriega, while in Grenada, the Stalinist Bernard Coard was almost universally seen as an oppressive, vicious usurper who had overthrown -- and unforgivably, killed -- the perhaps unsteady, but still widely-liked, Socialist Maurice Bishop.  In neither place did American forces face popular or dogged opposition, and we were in and out too fast for particular factions to use us to target their political or personal rivals or enemies.

Would that had been the case in either Iraq or Afghanistan!  In both of those places, we invaded in support of allies, most of whom had been out of their countries for years or decades before we projected our forces.

They told us who our enemies were, when in reality, they were theirs.  Think of Ahmed Chalabi conning ignorant fools like Paul Bremer and his boss, Donald Rumsfeld into disbanding the Iraqi Army, which they defined as “Baathist,” while most Iraqis defined as “ours.”

Then there were the “night raids” launched in Iraq and Afghanistan against people who were fingered by “our friends” for what frequently turned out to be very private beefs. Every household we overturned, every prisoner we took and held, often for years at a time, did indeed become our enemy, for reasons we gave them.

Now, the latest Inspector General’s report from Afghanistan chronicles a waste of billions given to people we knew or later learned were already against us.  And still the dollars spill across the country where they cannot be traced, much less monitored, because it is completely unsafe for Americans to go beyond Kabul.  Because we don’t know who is on which side, and a misjudgment can mean death.  Which leads us to the Fourth Maxim, which is actually the first and foremost rule of warfare in our time.

 

4)     IN TODAY’S WARS, THE VISITING TEAM NEVER WINS:  The former advantages that made Power Projection work, an outsider’s preponderance of firepower and control of communications no longer work.  Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warns, budget cuts may force him to reduce the US Navy’s aircraft carrier battle groups and the size of Army and Marine forces.  So what?  Those carrier groups are primarily useful for force projection, which is, as I’ve argued, something we should be reducing anyway, and the days of massed troops overrunning opposing hordes on big battlefields is as dead as the harquebus and halberd.  In fact, these days, with remote-controlled, satellite guided munitions, any mass of forces is simply an inviting target.  Enemies will no longer mass against us.  It’s much easier and more effective to pick us off with small groups, carrying portable, often “improvised” (meaning home-made, not put together spur of the moment) weapons.

Massive numbers of soldiers are now chiefly useful for military occupations (as Rumsfeld tragically refused to recognize when he invaded Iraq).  Even the small, mobile forces Rumsfeld championed there served principally to drag us deeper into the briar patch.  Once there, we discovered that occupation is a thankless, often hopeless task, which, one devoutly hopes, we will avoid in the future.

And the thing about occupations, and about power or force projection, is that they are temporary.  Everyone knows that: especially the home team, whether they be our enemy, our friends, or just innocent civilians.  In Afghanistan from the day the war began, the Taliban have been telling the people they live among, or within arms’ reach of, “The foreign forces will leave one day.  We will not.”

It’s not hard to draw the conclusion inherent in that formulation, and Afghans, whether horrified or pleased by that prospective outcome, live every day in its shadow.  That’s why so many of “our friends” prove perfidious.  They want their children to survive.

Everywhere we have projected power since the 1990s, our control of events has disappeared as soon as our troops have left.  In Bosnia and Serbia and Kosovo, in Iraq, Somalia, and soon in Afghanistan, the projection of force leaves only one certainty behind: the rule of force, usually the force we fought to defeat.

The cost in blood and treasure and in America’s international reputation has been catastrophic.  The benefits to ordinary people are very hard to find.    

WAR IS EASY; PEACE, NOT SO MUCH

WAR IS EASY; PEACE NOT SO MUCH.

 

War is all about one thing: force.  Whoever applies force most successfully rules.  Period.  End of story.

Peace is the perfect opposite of war in this: it, too, depends on one thing, the subjugation of force to governance, and, hopefully, rule of law.  Unless and until all of the use of force within a country is brought under the command and control of government, there is no peace.

When, after defeating the government and army of Saddam Houssein, American peacemakers declined to force the Kurdish pesh merga militias to subordinate themselves to the government in Baghdad, they guaranteed and legitimized the resistance of Sunni and Shi’ite Arab militias to state control, not to mention smaller mosque or mafia-based paramilitary units.  What the international forces (i.e. the US) wouldn’t do, the al-Maliki government in Baghdad couldn’t do, and this failure to subdue the many centrifugal armed groups in Iraq is what has turned that once rich and functional country into a ruin.

In Libya, the triumph of a congeries of international and local forces over the government and army of Muammar al-Qaddafi was also followed by no effective regulation of those various heavily-armed local fighting groups by a legitimate central government.  Instead, Tripoli is the isolated capitol of a dysfunctional pseudo-country overwhelmed by internecine blood-letting.

Back in the day, when armed force was a prerogative of the state, peace was relatively easy to obtain.  One side just had to defeat the other and install its own or puppet governance.

Today, defeated governments rarely control all the armed forces within their borders.  In fact, as a government nears defeat, it usually disintegrates into a chaos of superseding loyalties to sectarian or ethnic concepts or to local tribes, clans, imams or mob bosses, each with its own paramilitary force. Under these conditions, the law of war: force wins, rules, and governments obey the gunmen. 

Another good example of what happens when American and international forces declare peace and go home is Bosnia, whose wretched state was well described recently by NYTimes columnist Roger Cohen. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/19/opinion/global/roger-cohen-enough-of-the-daytonians.html?hp

Oddly, Cohen leaves undescribed the American decisions, enacted through the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995, which helped make Bosnia the mess it is today.

Peace a la Dayton was declared but not enforced, and so power in Bosnia was allowed to revert to the self-same warrior bands that had plunged the place into mutual murder in the first place. The UN “Peacekeepers” had neither the mandate, the will, nor the resources to subdue, much less disarm the Bosnian Serb, Croat or Bosniak (Muslim) Nationalist militias, many of them made up of underworld strong-arm squads.  Across Bosnia, they retained their wartime control of most of the “entity’s” constituent areas.  All the UN administration achieved was the creation of militia/mafia-controlled nationalist political parties to give the warriors’ absolute power a civil mask.

Mafia control of politics meant corruption-dominated governance, steeped in hyper-nationalism, insuring a fractured, multiply mutually antagonistic citizenry and a duplication, or in Bosnia’s sad case, a triplication of thieving, conniving government jobs.  Bosnian citizens were cowed but not fooled.  They knew what the international peace had brought them, and so did foreign investors, who declined to pay for the inefficiencies and extra costs of Bosnia’s criminarchy, and stayed away.  Today, Bosnia is not so much a failed as a faux-state  Still split into ethnic parts, Bosnia exemplifies the pathologies of its people, mutual hatred and self-loathing.

Peace in name, but with outlaw forces still in considerable control of government, also disfigures Bosnia’s original attackers, the governments of Serbia and Croatia, whose reputations with their own peoples and potential investors are stained by well-documented criminal impunity and administrative corruption.   

The real impetus of Dayton, never admitted and rarely suggested by critics, was the preservation, not of peace, but of the status quo.  The genealogy of American Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s Dayton deal was out of Metternich by Kissinger, an anachronistic, academic exercise in “balance of power” self-delusion, in which Slobodan Milosevic was to be America’s regent of regional stability.

The rush to conclude a treaty was to head off a humiliating military defeat of Serbian forces by a joint Bosnian-Croatian army, trained and armed with the help of the United States.  As the delegates convened in Ohio, this force was rolling up the Serbs across all of northern Bosnia.  Within weeks, it seemed likely, Milosevic’s military and their Bosnian Serb surrogates would have their backs to the Sava and Drina Rivers, without nothing less than a full withdrawal from Bosnian territory in store.

Holbrooke knew enough about Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Bosnian President Alija Itzetbegovic to doubt the results of endowing them with a post-war victor’s independent powers.  Better, he thought, to cede regional place to a Milosevic in debt to the US for his political survival.  So Holbrooke bought Milosevic, not as a failed politico turned war criminal, but as a respectable former client of Kissinger Inc. --when he ran Tito's National Bank his personal Kissinger adviser was Laurence Eagleburger -- and as America's "regent" in the Balkan region. He proved exactly as successful as the Shah of Iran had been as our -- actually Kissinger's and his pathetic smudged copy, Brzezinski’s -- regent in the Gulf region.

Somehow, Holbrooke ignored Slobo’s much greater debts to the Serb nationalists and organized crime leaders who had done his bidding in Bosnia.  Once he made “peace” in Dayton, his killers transferred their lusts for blood, plunder and ethnic triumph to Kosovo, and reining them in, just because his partners from Washington were asking him to, just wasn’t in the cards. 

After 10,000 Kosovars had been killed and 800,000 displaced by Milosevic’s security forces and associated “irregulars,” it took almost a year of US and NATO bombing (sometimes of civilian and diplomatic targets) to conclude yet another uneasy “peace” and a brace of new corrupt and mob-compromised oligarchies to the Balkans.

Yes, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo all have regular elections and civilian governments now, and the beginnings of normal regional relations.  But behind this mask, people who actually live there will tell you, are governments dominated by a few billionaires and a few organized crime gang leaders.

In Afghanistan, our real allies, the people who have staked their families and their futures on the dream of a modern, democratic state shudder as a justifiably impatient Obama rails at an unjustifiably corrupt and inept Karzai and heads for the exit, beyond which lies a false and murderous peace that an international consensus seems to think is “good enough for them.”