What To Do About Syria

[Ben]

Forget about Syria for the moment. What's goin' on w/ John Kerry.

John Kerry’s face looks different: Exhaustion, illness, Botox?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...illness-botox/

[Ben]

Calling Off America’s Bombs

http://www.project-syndicate.org/com...ffrey-d--sachs

[VictoriaVeil]

Forget about Syria for the moment. What's goin' on w/ John Kerry.

John Kerry’s face looks different: Exhaustion, illness, Botox?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...illness-botox/

IDK, but better question, Why put Kerry the Sec of State on the Sunday Morning Talk Shows instead of the VP Biden, Last I checked (admittedly its been a while) Sdec State should be working with foreign nations...

[trish]

Sorry, but I’m still not able to approve of U.S. military action in Syria. Yes, gassing civilians is horrible and immoral. But so is shooting them. Bombing Syria (actually using Tomahawk missiles costing several hundred U.S. grand a piece) in an attempt to degrade its capacity to use gas will cause little damage to Assad while undoubtedly killing and maiming more people. Wouldn’t it be better to spend that money feeding and transporting refugees? Building hospitals? I do not believe that degrading Syria’s capacity for delivering such weaponry will deter anyone else who might want to use gas in the future. We ourselves gave gas to Saddam Hussein to use in his war against Iran. We do not have the moral high ground here. Neither do I believe the action will be restrained to a one-time-only mission. McCain has already proposed language that makes tipping the scales of the civil war in favor of the rebels a primary goal of U.S. interference. I do not believe the rebels, themselves would refrain from gas attacks had they the capacity. Nor am I convinced we should unreservedly be on the side of rebels. Certainly many of them are anti-western radicals. Finally, it seems almost certain to me that military interference in Syria will invite more terrorist attacts against the U.S. and the allies.

Tonight’s PBS News Hours ended (as it often does) with a role call of the recent dead (U.S. military) killed in Afghanistan. The faces of six young soldiers in uniform filled the screen each in succession. We are looking forward to finally pulling out of that quagmire, and as far as I can tell we left is worse off then entered nearly a decade ago.

Yes, when a leader gasses his own people, or simply shoots his own people, or runs them over with tanks, it is incumbent upon the world to respond to the outrage. But answering with another outrage is not a moral solution. Messages can be written in ink as well as blood.

[Ben]

IDK, but better question, Why put Kerry the Sec of State on the Sunday Morning Talk Shows instead of the VP Biden, Last I checked (admittedly its been a while) Sdec State should be working with foreign nations...

I agree.
I'm not a fan of either Biden or Kerry. But Biden seems more congenial.
Or maybe they should just, well, screw it all and play poker on their iPhone like crazy McCain.
They're debating whether or not to use deadly force in Syria and McCain is playin' poker. Unreal. So, that's what we pay our Senators to do: play iPhone poker -- ha, ha!

[Ben]

[Ben]

Interesting interview w/ Patrick Cockburn of The Independent:

[Stavros]

IDK, but better question, Why put Kerry the Sec of State on the Sunday Morning Talk Shows instead of the VP Biden, Last I checked (admittedly its been a while) Sdec State should be working with foreign nations...

It might just be my perception from far away, but I believe John Kerry and Chuck Hagel have brought a more strident -aggressive?- tone to foreign and defence policy since replacing Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta. I don't know who is driving foreign policy making on Syria, I think Kerry, with his attempt to bring the Israeli's and Palestinians together, decided he can do something Mrs Clinton could not. There may even be some attempt to deal with the image Kerry had -generated from his Presidential bid- that he is dull, dithering and diluted....?

[Stavros]

Sorry, but I’m still not able to approve of U.S. military action in Syria. Yes, gassing civilians is horrible and immoral. But so is shooting them. Bombing Syria (actually using Tomahawk missiles costing several hundred U.S. grand a piece) in an attempt to degrade its capacity to use gas will cause little damage to Assad while undoubtedly killing and maiming more people. Wouldn’t it be better to spend that money feeding and transporting refugees? Building hospitals? I do not believe that degrading Syria’s capacity for delivering such weaponry will deter anyone else who might want to use gas in the future. We ourselves gave gas to Saddam Hussein to use in his war against Iran. We do not have the moral high ground here. Neither do I believe the action will be restrained to a one-time-only mission. McCain has already proposed language that makes tipping the scales of the civil war in favor of the rebels a primary goal of U.S. interference. I do not believe the rebels, themselves would refrain from gas attacks had they the capacity. Nor am I convinced we should unreservedly be on the side of rebels. Certainly many of them are anti-western radicals. Finally, it seems almost certain to me that military interference in Syria will invite more terrorist attacts against the U.S. and the allies.

Tonight’s PBS News Hours ended (as it often does) with a role call of the recent dead (U.S. military) killed in Afghanistan. The faces of six young soldiers in uniform filled the screen each in succession. We are looking forward to finally pulling out of that quagmire, and as far as I can tell we left is worse off then entered nearly a decade ago.

Yes, when a leader gasses his own people, or simply shoots his own people, or runs them over with tanks, it is incumbent upon the world to respond to the outrage. But answering with another outrage is not a moral solution. Messages can be written in ink as well as blood.

I think you are right to express the outrage most decent people feel when they see victims of chemical warfare -or any kind of violence for that matter. I think that the problem with the discussion on chemical warfare is that it operates from a position in which the horrors of the First World War led to the international conventions that banned them -yet the USA dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan in 1945; used Napalm and Agent Orange in Vietnam, and chemical weapons have been used by 'terrorists' such as the Syrian rebels earlier this year in Aleppo, and by Aum Shinrikyo on the Japanese subway system in 1995; and yet I understand that white phosphorous is only banned (in 1980) as a weapon of war if fired into civilian areas -in other words it may be legal to use it 'on the battlefield' -so that Israel in Operation Cast Lead in the winter of 2008-2009 could claim its use was 'not illegal', even though it also regularly identifies civilian areas as the battlefield and phosphorous bombs were dropped in refugee camps in Gaza -the IDF has also ripped up olive groves and plum orchards that stood for thousands of years on the West Bank because they claimed terrorists were using them as cover for attacks on the IDF, et etc.

None of this should mitigate our concern with the use of chemical weapons, but it does skew the argument, as if regular warfare, or acts of 'ethnic cleansing' were in some way less urgent. The shredding of the human population -accompanied by mass rape- in Darfur in the Sudan did not lead to any military intervention there; indeed, what would happen if the international system decided that the use of rape -already a crime under international law- as a weapon of war marked a 'red line' beyond which no state could hope to pass without being challenged?

More to the point, as with my reply to Victoria above, I don't understand what is driving Obama's foreign policy on Syria. The Obama presidency was supposed to pull back from military confrontation and offer considered diplomacy as an alternative. This, talk of 'Red Lines' and the absurdity of the Nobel Peace Prize, was a gift to anyone wanting to provoke an alternative, contradictory reaction. Yet the Russians claim the USA lied to them when they supported the Security Resolution authorising the use of air power against Qadhafi to pre-empt his attack on the Bengazi and eastern Libya -because the result was widespread bombing resulting in regime change. And it must be said, that when the USA takes -or appears to take- the position that the so-far 'alleged' chemical attack in Damascus was a 'Red Line' incident without waiting for any independent confirmation, you have to ask if this is indeed a 'punishment attack' or part of a wider strategy to so weaken the Syrian government that it is 'bombed to the conference table'.

Perhaps Hagel and Kerry, no doubt prompted by Saudi Arabia -Qatar I believe is re-thinking its position- pushed Obama for an aggressive response, one that would also make it clear to the Russians and Iran that the USA retains force as an option; while Obama is still cautious -clearly, if Obama wants Congressional approval and can wait, the 'urgency' of a response to the chemical attack was not that intense that it could not wait.
Ever since the assassination of Ambassador Stevens, there has been a claim the Obama Presidency is a soft touch for terrorists; an administation that has backed off from retaliation, that is letting other people push the USA around without responding. McCain, walking into Congress this week, dismissed the Russians and Ban Ki-Moon as 'irrelevant', and with it the whole of the UN, an echo of the narcissistic violence espoused by George W Bush, Dick Cheney and John Bolton, the very stance that lost the Republicans the election and became part of the events that discredited the USA. McCain's role in provoking the Obama administration is not based on clear strategic thinking about Syria, it is driven by a belief that the USA must continue to show Russia and Iran that it will respond militarily when it wants, where it wants, and to whom it wants.

Such aggression may speak the language understood in Moscow and Tehran as McCain sees it, what it doesn't do is address the disarray among the rebels in Syria or the apparent strength of the Syrian government, because I don't think McCain is that interested in Syria at all, it is part of an attempt to undermine the different path Obama wants the USA to take. I don't know what happened with Hillary Clinton and the Russians when the Syrian crisis began, I am not sure how keen Obama is on violence as a US response, but I do think that Rouhani is keen for some rapprochement with the USA, and that a change in Iran is one of the keys that can unlock this dilemma, as Iran is a key backer of the Syrian government. To talk face to face with Putin may be difficult, right now even pointless, but as I said in another post, does Obama have the courage to go to Tehran and talk face to face with Rouhani? Yes, Israel, McCain and his friends would go berserk, but sometimes it takes a bold move to break an impasse -much as Sadat's visit to Israel in 1977, the outcome of which was an historic peace treaty brokered by a Democrat US President.
There are precedents to follow.

[thombergeron]

It might just be my perception from far away, but I believe John Kerry and Chuck Hagel have brought a more strident -aggressive?- tone to foreign and defence policy since replacing Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta. I don't know who is driving foreign policy making on Syria, I think Kerry, with his attempt to bring the Israeli's and Palestinians together, decided he can do something Mrs Clinton could not. There may even be some attempt to deal with the image Kerry had -generated from his Presidential bid- that he is dull, dithering and diluted....?

I think that's pretty accurate. Clinton was a diplomatic machine. She spent most of her tenure on the road, negotiating face-to-face with foreign leaders. Panetta quietly ran DoD from the background, preferring soft-power solutions.

Also remember that both Kerry and Hagel are veterans. Both volunteered to serve and come from families that emphasized military service. Neither is true of Clinton or Panetta.

Tough to say that this change of tone was an intentional move by Obama, since it seems that Kerry was his second choice for State after Susan Rice, who I think would have been more of a soft-power diplomat.