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?

 

NOT SYRIA, NATS' BASEBALL

Baseball writer Steve Goldman posted today on the Washington Nats painful season.

http://www.sbnation.com/mlb/2013/9/6/4701542/davey-johnson-mike-rizzo-bryce-harper

I felt compelled to respond, and to take a break from Syria.

Steve opens with a shot at one of my favorite NYC hardball scribes, the Daily News' Bill Madden, (whose biography of George Steinbrenner is an outstanding read.) I start with that.  Then, oy, the Nats.

First, let me say, I love Bill Madden, but his judgment on Davey Johnson …disqualified from Hall of Fame consideration because of this terrible Nats’ year… is just absurd.  If Red Schoendienst is in (deservedly, I think), Davey deserves to be.  He was at least as good a second-sacker, not with the glove, but certainly better with the bat, and has had a better career as a manager.

Now, the Nats:  I agree Davey has not done a good job this year, but agree more strongly that the real fault lies with Mike Rizzo and the cards he dealt his manager.

Steve Goldman oddly forgets to mention Rizzo’s dismissal of his 3 capable bullpen lefties (in favor of Zach Duke, no less) which hurt badly for the first half-year.  For the future, Krol looks promising and Abad serviceable, but this is something that must be addressed before next season. 

Was Soriano a good investment?  Maybe.   Was he a big mistake? Not in himself, but as part of the shabby treatment of Drew Storen, it was disastrous.  In short, was last year’s bullpen (except for its last inning) better than this year’s.  Absolutely.  Debit that to the GM.

Notwithstanding Dan Haren’s recent resurgence, he killed the team for the first half of the year, and probably should have been replaced in the rotation by late May.  But, again unaccountably missing from Goldman’s analysis is Taylor Jordan, who gave the Nats virtually nothing but well-pitched starts after Ross Detwiler went down.  With “National Det,” both Johnson and Rizzo saw their dreams rather than the obvious – he was not the same guy as last year after April, but it took a month or more of sticking with him to prove the point.

Why did it take more than half a year for Denard Span to hit like Denard Span?  Some questions do not have answers.  But would an everyday outfield of Michael Morse, Bryce Harper and Jayson Werth been better than Harper-Span-Werth?  I think so, even if Morse had gotten hurt here as he did in Seattle and been replaced by Tyler Moore.  I also think, not signing Adam LaRoche and moving Morse to 1B (after making the Span deal) would have been better than 2 years of LaRoche, a great glove, but whose year last year was an obvious “career year” outlier in a remarkably steady playing lifetime. This year is the “bad year” outlier; next year should be just average (.260, 25 HR, 90 RBI), over which a full-time Tyler Moore might be an improvement.

Espinosa’s glove carried him, deservedly, past his sell by date.  Rendon’s second half slump has been worrying, but for me at least, not frightening.  I still think he’s a potential  .300 hitter, if only an average glove. A guy I want to see is Zach Walters of the 29 HR power, if scary 38 errors at Syracuse.  Maybe he or Rendon should go to 3B with bad shoulder = bad throws Ryan Zimmerman moving to 1B.

Steve Lombardozzi is a great utility guy, but if he can be traded for something more valuable, there’s a kid named Josh Johnson, who showed OK defense, hit .300 with no power at SS for both Harrisburg and Syracuse, who might fill the 5^th infielder role.

And speaking of minor-leaguers not on Goldman’s radar screen, how about CF Billy Burns?  If Eury Perez makes sense as a September pinch-runner  (he went 23 for 31 stolen bases at Syracuse), doesn’t Burns (who swiped 74 in 81 attempts at Potomac and Harrisburg and out-hit Perez) make more sense?

Young pitchers?  There seem to have been no fewer than 4 at Harrisburg.  Nathan Karns we saw.  The good news is, after his so-so stint in DC, he pitched even better in AA than before his call-up.  Caleb Clay sounds like another Taylor Jordan, not overpowering stuff, but league-leading control, below 3.00 ERA, and lots of consistency at Potomac and Harrisburg.  The hard-throwing hopeful is A J Cole (brought back from Oakland in the Morse deal.) High A-AA combined, 10-5.  And finally, a prospective closer named Aaron Barrett..26 saves at Harrisburg, 7 more at Syracuse.

It’s true there was little pitching, no starters, of interest in Syracuse, but that’s because the Nats, like a growing number of teams, stashed their best prospects at AA.

And with the rest of the schedule loaded up within the NL East, it ain’t over till it’s over.  If we can cream Miami, Philly and NY (as we should) and face down Atlanta (as we haven’t) and one of the 2 Central Division non-winners totally collapses (the longest shot imaginable), …..??

Hope springs eternal (and falls in September?)  

 

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.

 

SYRIA MISSION: GETTING CLOSER

LISTEN CAREFULLY

It was a parody of parry and thrust today as the President pledged directly that his plan for Syria did include “boots on the ground. This is not Iraq, and this is not Afghanistan,” he added.

Then, the White House sent its top 3 executors of the threatened American military action in Syria to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Although both Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey also spoke, it was Secretary of State John Kerry who parried and thrusted solo, disagreeing with himself on that delicate “boots on the ground” issue.

In explaining why he and President Obama would prefer a Congressional that did not take the [BOTG] option “off the table,” Kerry volunteered some hypothetical situations in which military necessity might require the use of US ground forces -- to keep Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile from falling into the wrong hands, or to keep the Al Qaeda-linked al-Nusra brigade from capitalizing in the aftermath of the US attack.

One might guess that President Obama offered similar “hypotheticals” to suggest what potential dangers he would not ignore in his closed door meeting with top Republicans like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, John Boehner and Eric Cantor, during which he won their support.

But the Senate Hearing Room was out in the open, covered live on TV, and there, Secretary Kerry’s perhaps too-detailed defense of his Commander-in-Chief’s prerogatives had put his boots, hip-deep into, um, trouble.  He had just, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza said  “opened the door” to the very quagmire many Senators rushed to say they were determined to prevent: ground warfare, fighters injured, killed or captured, rescue missions, and finally, the need to hold and build from whatever successes the military mission to Syria might have won.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/3-big-takeaways-from-todays-syria-briefings/2013/09/03/f5e98616-14df-11e3-b182-1b3bb2eb474c_video.html?hpid=z2

No, no, no, you’ve got me all wrong, the backtracking diplomat pleaded. And then he made his summary statement, “There will be no American boots on the ground, with respect to the civil war.”  Cillizza said Kerry had flip-flopped, had been for boots, ”before he was against them,” and that this reversal would drive the coming news cycle.

Cillizza seems to have been incorrect on both counts.  First, Kerry’s final words do keep the door open, since they pledge only, no ground forces “with respect to the civil war.”  And second, the news cycle immediately picked up on the likely Resolution text itself.

So, yes, fighting in the civil war is out, but what about ground troops with respect to “the objectives of the United States” in Syria, which the actual Resolution text printed by the New York Times, http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/782949/senate-resoultion-on-syria-military-force.pdf says are to “(1) respond to the use of weapons of mass destruction by the Syrian government… (2) deter Syria’s use of such weapons…and (3) degrade Syria’s capacity to use such weapons in the future.”

None of that mentions “civil war.” 

Here’s how the Resolution draft put the boots question: LIMITATION. The authority granted in section 2 does not authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces on the ground in Syria for the purpose of combat operations."

"Combat operations?" Would Special Forces ground troops inserted into Syria as Forward Air Observers, considered pretty necessary if our munitions are to hit the right targets to fulfill our “objectives,” be considered part of “combat operations?  What about other Special Forces who might be needed on the ground to properly place explosives to achieve maximum deterrence and degradation of Syrian chemical weapons systems at minimal risk of some kind of civilian-killing disaster?  Are they combat forces?  And what about the troops sent in to protect and support them?  They might meet “resistance,” as they go about their mission.  Does that make it combat, and thus forbidden?

According to the Washington Post’s Anne Gearan and Ed O’Keefe, aides who were writing the resolutions said it was understood that it would “permit the deployment of a small rescue mission in the event of an emergency.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-says-he-is-confident-of-congressional-backing-for-strike-on-syria/2013/09/03/aeee7e60-149e-11e3-a100-66fa8fd9a50c_story_1.html

Or perhaps those tasks are already spoken for, not by ground troops, but by folks already inserted by the CIA, as "helpers" for the 50 or so "trained" guerillas the White House told the NY Times had already been sent into Syria? Or maybe, our "trainees" will do it themselves without "on the ground" supervision?  Wanna bet?  Either way, they fulfill the letter of the Resolution.

But, how much does all this verbal analysis matter.  Once the Congress ‘opens the door” for military action in Syria, how much control can (and should) it have over the President’s ability to deal with “changing circumstances?”

Many readers on the Constitution say, the Commander in Chief runs warfare, and even though the President and all his men insist they are not going to war, whatever it is, once it’s underway, it’s the President’s doing, beyond Legislative interference.

My guess is, the Senate has “forced on the President,” a “LIMITATION” that may not limit anything, should things go either dangerously wrong, or opportunely right in Syria.  And my guess is, they are pretty pleased about it.

It’s only what the sports announcers would call “a partial score,” but notwithstanding the day’s “unforced turnovers,” The President is on his way to “victory.”

 

MORE ON WAR-LITE? A DIALOGUE

Reader Ken Dreyfack raises 3 interesting questions in his comment on my recent post WAR-LITE?

"1. So, you're saying, other than expressing moral outrage and verbal condemnation, it's better to do nothing? As I understand Obama and company, they're saying that the US can either launch a few Tomahawks, as a mostly symbolic gesture, or just shut up and move on.
"2. The notion that sending a few missiles amounts to war - or war-lite - strikes me as a rhetorical slight of hand. Would you say that the US went to war when Reagan and Clinton launched air strikes on foreign lands during the 80s and 90s?
"3. One possibility you seem to exclude is that the spectacle does not show up on television. If the targets are Syrian military airfields and control centers, I don't understand why that will necessarily appear in prime time anywhere."
 
Let me address them in reverse order.

3.  First of all, I think the likelihood that Syrian state television will be putting forth all its best effort to record on video any damage done by American weapons is very high.  They've done a pretty comprehensive job of "covering" for the state's particular interest the damage it wants to show which it can blame on its various rebel opponents (and not showing what it may not want its people to see).

On the other side, independent video recordings made with high and low-quality cameras and mobile phones have kept the world's television channels and YouTube very well supplied with video of the violence on all sides in Syria.  That they will be making and communicating pictures of the American attacks is, in my estimation, all but certain.

2.  Global video news channels were few and their coverage primitive when Presidents Clinton, GHW Bush and Reagan ordered their military assaults on Iraq and Afghanistan (Clinton), Panama (Bush, Sr.) and Lebanon, and Grenada (Reagan).  Today, there are literally dozens of television news channels with points of origination and view as diverse as Russia, Iran, China, and Qatar as well as the old standbys in Germany, France, the UK and US.  But this just represents an escalation in the global exposure of warfare and its effects.

What makes this a new age in communication are the digital video networks which link mobile phone and tablets and computers, which enable "amateurs" to "cover" whatever they see.  They have kept the civil war in Syria alive in human consciousnesses around the world for 2 years now.  You have also seen their video from Egypt and Tunia, Bahrain and Yemen, Iran and Iraq.  Their power and influence are only growing.  As I like to say, today almost everybody has the opportunity to know something about almost everything.  This global blanket of video communication, married to video's difficulties in properly presenting scale means that, to billions of people, war-lite (no matter how carefully modulated) looks and feels very much like war.

1.  Finally, as to what President Obama's options might be, beyond a few stand-off attacks for a few days, or doing nothing and moving on, they are admittedly few, and difficult, and all present higher risks than war-lite.  But they might actually produce results the US could take pride in, and might actually be received positively by much of the world.

They begin by turning off the megaphone.  Blaring red-lines to intimidate the likes of Bashar al-Assad or pacify the likes of Bibi Netanyahu was always bad policy.  As I noted a couple of posts ago, nowadays the so-called message in red-lining is intercepted and overheard and reinterpreted a few hundred million times before its reaches its intended recipient, and its major impact is in painting the red-liner into a self-made corner.

Telegraphing our explosive punches before we deliver them, as loud John Kerry has been doing this week serves every bit as little purpose.

War in the era of almost universal communication is best done quietly.  Believe me, the noise will begin soon enough.

Instead of broadcasting invitations to the Syrian military to base its troops in schools, mosques and historic or cultural monuments, we should be quietly using our intelligence and surveillance capabilities to locate President al-Assad, and those strategically near and dear to him.  We should then, when we are ready, and not a moment before, attack him, as precisely as we can, which means, not with Tomahawk missiles or Predator drones, and certainly not with bombers flying at 15,000 feet or higher (as we did in Kosovo) to keep them safre from Syria's formidable air defense system, but with Special Forces, whose boots and weapons and forward air control systems need to be on the ground for a short as it takes to get decapitation of the Assad regime done, with bombers and ground attack planes, taking, alas, possibly fatal risks, and quite possibly some losses, but achieving a much higher level of targeting accuracy.

We should co-ordinate our attack, after it has started, as best we can, with anti-Assad forces on the ground, dropping them weapons and providing them with intelligence sufficient to intensify the pressure on Assad.  We should do as little excess or collateral damage as possible to Syria and Syrians, but may want to consider expanding our higher-risk, but higher-accuracy assaults beyond the Assad team to the rebel factions inside Syria we believe are terrorist-linked (to al Qaeda or Hezbullah or the Iranian al-Quds force.)   

As far as these secondary targets are concerned, selectivity of victims and minimization of civilian losses should take precedence over speed.  It will take time to mobilize and organize our real or potential friends in Syria, and there are plenty, and we can enable them to take care of their rivals who are also our enemies at a tempo of our choosing.

Job One is eliminating Assad and Company, whose many war crimes and crimes against humanity eminently qualify them for real, if brief and contained war.  This is something we can do, but only at an elevated risk of losses on our side.  Leadership almost always involves risk-taking.  Piddling risk brings piddling gain.


 

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.