Politics Middle Eastern power shifts

roach...Shouldnt we also consider at what might happen if the US or the international community does nothing?

I am not suggesting it is an easy decision. I dont know what is going through Obama's head but I know that I am conflicted as one who is generally anti-war but believes that to sit on our hands and do nothing is likely to result in a possible outcome that might be worse than taking action.

Have you considered what is likely to happen if the international community (preferably through the UN, but the US acting with support from France, neighboring Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and others...) does not act. How it might appear both to Assad and the moderate opposition as tacit approval for Assad to continue or expand the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians by any means necessary using both conventional and unconventional weapons?

 

i am not sure that bomb syria/do nothing is the alternative in principle. in political reality, it does seem to me that the initial pronouncements about the us response were not well-considered and have had the effect of backing the administration into an unfortunate position..setting things into a momentum space that seemingly prompted the administration to miscalculate---how i do not know---concerning the security council. now they find themselves having to sell a plan the arguments for which appeal primarily to international law and which is, frankly, more appropriately considered by the un. and action would seem to be best launched on that basis. so the question is: why not just wait for the un inspection team to announce its results? at this point, that seems easily the best way to build meaningful international support and co-operation.

i'm familiar with the slippery-slope arguments that the us has been repeating---yesterday samantha powers essentially did a 20 minute version of your point. and i am not opposed to an action on the grounds that have been being articulated--but i think it appropriate via the un.

and i think the plan as it has been floated is a slap-dash one that it is hard not to read in terms of the realpolitik that shapes american policy toward syria. and there's no coherent way to separate this response to the attack of 21 august from the rest of the policy. and, as i've argued, that policy is to prolong the violence in syria. i doubt seriously that people in the administration/state/pentagon are entirely indifferent to the lives of the syrian people...they'd to think themselves decent folk no doubt...but the tactical calculus is evident and the lack of a sense of options enough to make prolonging carnage seem reasonable to decent people. but it isn't.

there is no need to speed into action based on an ill-considered plan...you know where much of syria's chemical and biological weapons infrastructure is located? same place most of the 4.25 million internal refugees are concentrated as well as the regimes command/control apparatus: damascus. so is this plan really to flatten damascus? what else could it be?

there are other options. it seems to me the opening moves in this case were bad enough that much of the space for consideration of those moves has been erased. that was a mistake. i don't think it was a top-down mistake--i can imagine easily it originated a mid-levels from defense or state and getting instant traction and from there, the whole discourse of "credibility"--that whole, basically narcissistic way of thinking---meant pushing forward with whatever plan was in place as if that pushing forward was the important thing, more important than being coherent.

like i said, the lack of a meaningful political process is a real problem. the us has absolutely not played things well in thinking about how to support elements in the syrian opposition. both these things have come back to haunt. it's not a good situation.

i suppose my basic position then would be: come up with a better idea. move on multiple fronts at once. consider backing off a military response. admit the actual syria policy and figure the consequences of the existing plan: if i can do it from a chair in my living room, people whose jobs it is to do such things certainly can do the same. this is a bad plan. the rush to implementation is a bad move. pushing it through congress while declaring it doesn't matter what congress says or does is a bad idea. not waiting for the un inspection team results is crazy...just stupid. but the other factors seem to make it make sense. it's not being played well. and i don't buy the idea that "response or do nothing" means this response at this moment done this way.

 

roach...I understand your position, or at least most of it, and all I can say is that I've tried to consider the cost/benefit of taking action (preferable with the UN as I have repeatedly noted but w/o if need be) vs not taking action and focusing on the foreign policy implications and the impact on the Syrian people and the region, and not the politics. And based primarily on what I've read about possible outcomes of both sides of the argument, I've come to a different conclusion.

The one point of yours that I dont understand is the suggestion that the US has only been acting on one track. The US has been been a leader (or at the very last an active participant) in the FOS core group and the Geneva I conference. The FOS core group last met several months ago and is meeting again tomorrow.

The plan was to move to a Geneva II that would focus discussions on the details and process of creating an interim government involving both elements of the Assad government and the moderate opposition, but Aug 21 changed that and the opposition groups are unwilling to participate with the representatives of the Assad government w/o assurances that civilians wont be subject to chemical attacks again.

In addition, the US has already given more than $1 billion in a Syrian humanitarian aid.

What more do you think the US should be doing diplomatically or on a track to further support a transitional government?

 

the fact is that all this stuff is happening in a context, and a feature of that context is a broken-down political process, and what seems to be a quite passive approach to working politically with the various rebel groups. the idiocy of the "war on terror" seems to have facilitated this by enabling superficial judgments to be drawn from the history of the revolution outlined in the report i linked earlier---how the various groups responses to the overwhelming violence of the security/military/authoritarian state responses, who they appealed to for funding and weapons and who was forthcoming. this context isn't something that one can just fix, either: it is the result of the past 2 years of choices by the administration--and the west---and russia to the syrian revolution. the absence of a viable, on-going political process at this point makes it quite difficult to not simply juxtapose the planned response on a quite disappointing and brutal policy logic.

the humanitarian aid support is good so far as it goes, but it's not obvious how its being directed or used, particularly given the rather loud early pronouncements that the us was going to support various rebel groups via "non-lethal aid"...

this is a lousy situation. some chickens are also coming home to roost through it. makes me glad i am not barack obama.

 

I agree it is a lousy situation compounded by bureaucratic requirements (ie legislative/regulatory) for delivery of non-lethal aid along with the uncertainty of assurances that it reaches the intended recipients.

There is a new CRS report on the humanitarian response.

But the greater concern, IMO, is the constantly changing make-up of the opposition/rebel groups.

Given both of the above constraints, I think that second track of diplomatic initiative or initiative to support the moderate opposition is moving as well as can be expected.

 

well, the map of the rebel groups looks quite different in the report i linked earlier. and there is a pretty clear explanation for the apparent confusion on the part of the dominant media--one which is, apparently, shared by folk in power, who you'd hope would be outside that fatuous information climate somehow...

 

I dont know how one determines which map or what intel is more reliable. The US (and Israel) bring significant signals/satellite intel but are lacking the human intel on the ground. Sources closer to the scene might have better access to the human intel but are limited in their capacity to capture the "big picture" so it reinforces in my mind the level of uncertainty on the make-up of the opposition groups.

I appreciated the discussion, but I'm out for now...at least until after Congress does it's thing.

 

the jihadi militas are what is known in the biz as blowback.

American threats widen fault lines among Syria's rebels | World news | The Guardian

 

Meanwhile, in a press conference in Cairo over the weekend, America's three top Islamophobes in Congress thanked the military for the coup that ousted the democratically elected president...and blamed 9/11 on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Michele Bachmann, Louie Gohmert, Steve King In Egypt - Business Insider

 

i think i bruised my forehead when i bounced it off my desk after reading that article.

then i started to think a little about it. i'll put my little blurb here:

the confederacy of ultra-right dunces in egypt provide a theatrical moment wherein the authoritarian nature of american neo-fascism is made evident. because theirs is a narcissistic form of identity politics and threats are understood as existential, there is no limit to the repression that they can endorse so long as it originates from a position symmetrical with their own. it's logical that they would endorse scaf.

 

Obama welcomes Russian proposal for Syria to hand over chemical weapons | World news | The Guardian

this is quite a curious turn of events.
kinda deus-ex-machina-like
sadly, i am wrapping up a project so that's where i'll leave it for the moment.

thoughts?

 

Interesting proposal. I am sure it will be welcomed with wide open arms. Obama does not want to be another Bush.

 

Wouldn't things be pleasant if it ended up being that simple.
--- merged: Sep 10, 2013 1:01 AM ---
We should offer to trade Michelle Bachman for Tue chemical weapons.

 

*ahem* "the" chemical weapons.

 

the devil is in the details, of course.
personally, i would be pleased if a deal could be struck---particularly if it's meaningful----simply because the plan as i understood it seemed a bad one.

from what i've seen in net-world, the main people who are really unhappy are aligned with the syrian revolution. they see themselves as increasingly involved in a two-front war, one against asad and another against the foreign jihadi groups--blowback from previous us policy and/or military failures, from the kind of aftermath the action the administration proposes would exacerbate again. they see it as throwing away the lives of the 400 children killed in the gas attack, and a de facto legitimation of the brutality of the asad regime.

but it would allow for considerable face-saving for all the main geo-political players. i suppose that's all that matters in such situations.

if a deal is struck, i hope that the result will not be another period of running away from the complexity of the situation on the ground there.

 

I think that the desire to run away from complexity is probably exactly why this deal is on the table. But I'm cynical.

 

at the moment, the russians are "less than enthusiastic" about a binding un resolution on this alternate deal. i imagine that would tank it.
it's like a sporting event.

meanwhile, more people are dying in syria.
just saying.

 

Fox News suggests that an attack on Syria might be a sign of the End Times.



I am waiting for the next report that Obama is the antichrist.