Respectfully disagreeing is okay in my book.
Any impartial observer agrees that the “nothing was done” argument simply isn’t true.
With that said; what would have been “full” action?
That’s a rare stawman from you Mufasa. My comments were explicitly in context of the red line comment, not ME action as a whole.
Aragorn.
How so?
My apologies. That was never meant to be directed at you specifically.
It was a comment directed at the narrative that nothing was done in Syria, when in fact plenty was, (and still is) being done. (Short of committing thousands of troops and/or nuking the place for morbid).
My question about what constitutes “full action” was a genuine one.
I have found it extremely difficult to find and/or read what specific actions needed to be taken in Syria.
When people state that “nothing” was done it’s in response specifically to the “Red Line” which regardless of what Obama intended to convey was interpreted by many including foreign states to convey the threat of direct military action.
There is plenty that could have been done short of “nuking” Syria or even deploying ground troops for that matter. Look no further than Libya for an example. Now you may argue that deposing Assad given the ISIS foothold in the area would not be a prudent decision which I would be somewhat in agreement with. The atrocities committed by the Assad regime and their blatant disregard of international law (or just standard human decency) makes it an extremely difficult issue to ignore just for the sake of pragmatism. If this truly was an impractical option then it supports some of the critics arguments that this “Red Line” should not have been drawn in the first place given the ISIS foothold and chemical weapons stockpiles in the region.
I tend to suspect that solution should have settled somewhere in the middle. I do believe that the Red Line should have been drawn, the risk of allowing unmitigated chemical weapons warfare(especially to the level wielded by the Assad regime) and just the straight moral requirement of preventing such atrocities is enough for me. Deposing Assad and replacing the regime with a stable democracy would of course be ideal but based on our difficulties in Iraq and without international/local support I don’t think this would have been a realistic option.
What I suspect could have been done to retain our credibility, prevent Russia from directly supporting the Assad regime and cease chemical attacks by the regime would have involved limited attacks against the regimes military or personal assets short of outright destruction. The intent would be to severely damage the regime but not cripple it in its own struggles against ISIS. Russia of course has a substantial interest in maintaining the regime so I believe the same chemical weapons removal we saw carry out could have been negotiated with Russia as a means to the end of our military involvement in the state.
Sig; I don’t know how much we are actually in disagreement.
However; it also points out the screwed up “math and physics” of the ME where 2 + 2 can often lead to -55.
In other words; leaving a military apparatus strong enough to fight off ISIS and other rebel groups is one most likely strong enough to wage war against the Syrian population.
Also; as I have been clear on; I will never heap praise on a dictatorial thug like Putin; with no democratic constraints; who kills any opposition and runs his Country like a Mob Family…I will never praise him nor his actions over that of an American President…ever. (So there is no misunderstanding; I do NOT think that is something you even implied).
I bring it up for those who insist that "we did nothing/Russia did everything/Russia is now “running the show”.
Any “true” Allie doesn’t buy into that narrative one iota and recognizes Putin for what he is.
All of these “pseudo allies/allies of convenience” (like Pakistan)…perhaps.
It also is worth emphasizing international support (in which I agree with your assessment).
Under the BEST of circumstance this is extremely difficult to get; and is even more so (if not impossible) when it comes to the Middle East; as every nation State and terrorist group is fighting for preeminence in the region.
[quote=“sig805, post:45, topic:221224, full:true”]
When people state that “nothing” was done it’s in response specifically to the “Red Line” which regardless of what Obama intended to convey was interpreted by many including foreign states to convey the threat of direct military action.[/quote]
No foreign state believes being disarmed under threat of force is “nothing,” and no foreign state would like the same to happen to it. More importantly – and more to your point – we know with certainty that whatever the actual chances that Obama would become the first president since Wilson to be denied a request to use force by the legislature (and note here that Obama openly remarked that, like Wilson, he would consider himself free to use force regardless), Putin/Lavrov and Assad believed the threat of direct military action to be credible – this being the explicit assumption under which Lavrov literally rushed to offer us something that might dissuade us from war. There is utterly no question as to whether or not the threat was taken as credible by its intended recipients: it was. If any would-be genocidaire watched Assad/Putin surrender millions of pounds of (highly prized) Syrian weaponry in an explicit effort to avoid the latter’s becoming a target of American airstrikes…and concluded that airstrikes threatened by American presidents do not represent credible threats…then he took the wrong lesson. But despite the tens of thousands of op-ed inches tossed into the abyss of the contrary, that isn’t a lesson anyone actually took.
You could say bystanders learned the following: under the right conditions (i.e., where relevant American interests don’t lie clearly along only one axis), if one invites the ire of the Americans and then offers them a deal with sufficient appeal, one may spare oneself the attention of the American military at the cost of whatever was offered up instead. But this is a fine lesson from our perspective, and everybody already knew it anyway.
…Or perhaps they didn’t. Exactly two presidents have held office under the general geopolitical conditions that obtain today. Two of the three or four defining features of this era are renewed WMD proliferation and supranational Salafi jihadism. If the lesson above is the one they took from the Syrian crisis under Obama, then this is an infinite improvement over the one offered to them by his predecessor: “the POTUS will issue all manner of threats, but nothing of consequence will happen to you if you choose to increasingly approach (Iran) or overtly achieve (DPRK) nuclear weapons status. Well, that’s not quite true – in the wake of your first nuclear test, we might stop try to stop your Inner Party from importing cigars, champagne, and Mercedes. Oh, and we might bumble our way ass-backwards into pretending (via various deliberate obfuscations relating to aluminum tubes that are actually meant for conventional 81-millimeter rockets rather than rotor centrifuges, Nigerien yellowcake forgeries, liars seeking to win German visas, and so on) that it’s actually your great rival who has a large, active WMD (and, most importantly, nuclear) program…whereupon we will oust him, removing your great regional rival and installing in his stead a ruling class that just so happens to stand on the same side of the centuries-old religious civil war as you do. And oh, what the hell, we’ll midwife AQI, and therefore ISIS, while we’re at it.”
By contrast, “you’ll have to rush to give me millions of what I want or else risk being bombed” is the very picture of strength and credibility.
[Quote]
I tend to suspect that solution should have settled somewhere in the middle. I do believe that the Red Line should have been drawn, the risk of allowing unmitigated chemical weapons warfare(especially to the level wielded by the Assad regime) and just the straight moral requirement of preventing such atrocities is enough for me.[/quote]
Of course it should have been. These red lines exist whether presidents spell them out or not. We have an unambiguous interest in WMD deterrence, everywhere. The explicit “red line” threat was issued only months before the Al Bayada attack; it’s likely that the intelligence community had specific reasons to suspect chemical weapons were moving throughout the country. The president tried to deter Assad from doing what everybody knew to be a possibility. It was a worthy attempt to constrain the behavior of an actor whose entanglement in various competing American interests made him a serious problem not easily solved. Deontologically it was solid – as any attempt to diminish civilian death is.
Per a consequentialist evaluation, it was even better. It led directly to the disassembly of one of the world’s last three or four significant stockpiles of schedule 1 chemical WMD. It also saved thousands of innocent lives.
[Quote]
Deposing Assad and replacing the regime with a stable democracy would of course be ideal but based on our difficulties in Iraq and without international/local support I don’t think this would have been a realistic option.[/quote]
Correct. Under no sane interpretation of reality would American interests be better served today by more chaos and greater American involvement in Syria.
There is an enormous problem with this: strikes limited enough to pose no serious risk of creating the kind of American-manufactured vacuum Iraq taught us to avoid would do actual damage to our credibility. We bomb a couple installations, Assad emerges well and alive from the moderate scattering of dust, and American might has been beaten.
Conversely, we could erase the motherfucker from the map. In which case…well, you know.
Given the options available and conditions obtaining, it would have been lunacy to opt for greater involvement in the SCW by launching either credibility-threatening or chaos-inducing (take your pick) strikes upon Assad’s forces rather than accepting Syrian chemical disarmament explicitly predicated on Syrian and Russian belief in the credibility of the American threat.
I wish there were a supercomputer capable of going back and showing (royal/universal) you what might have have happened had you been in power and made alternative decisions. Having studied Syria and the region (literally) closely for years now, I know to a moral (note: not absolute) certainty that you would not come away with an outcome remotely as positive (vis-a-vis American interests) as this one. This was some wisdom and some luck and most of all a decided – and refreshing – unwillingness to bow-leggedly bumble our way into needless calamity. To the (enormous) extent that this is a new direction in which Obama chose to take American foreign policy, he has been an unmitigatedly successful leader.
Edited.
Haven’t read the whole thread, but in the end, history and morality are always on the side of the expansion of negative rights through the diminishing of positive rights and the expansion of person hood.
Adding people to the human umbrella, be they the wrong class, race, or gender, or be they slave, small, deformed, dumb, or otherwise “defective”. Preventing coercion against people and including more individuals as people is always the right side. And history in the long term bends to that narrative. In the middle east there is exactly 1 country that even remotely plays for that goal.
Despite the essay long responses that show up on this thread you are correct that there is fairly little that we are in disagreement on. A few basic assumptions or opinions at the heart of each argument is what ultimately steers the final conclusion in a different direction.
With regards to Putin the argument isn’t that they helped remedy the situation in a way that suits our interest or even common human interest so much as it is that they extended their own political agenda which runs contrary to ours(although with regards to the chemical weapons removal it happens to align). With the exception of maybe some in the Trump camp most everybody is in agreement with your assessment of Putin.
I do find it interesting that there wasn’t the same international support against Assad as there was in Libya, I suspect this is largely due to Russian interest in the regime and not wanting to poke the bear.
Like you said it is a difficult situation to properly address, any action taken is at risk of straying off into unforeseen or undesired consequence. I just happen to believe that the actions taken by the current administration may have been the best/least risky in the short term but ultimately will be more detrimental in the long.
No foreign state believes being disarmed under threat of force is
“nothing,” and no foreign state would like the same to happen to it.
More importantly – and more to your point – we know with certainty
that whatever the actual chances that Obama would become the first
president since Wilson to be denied a request to use force by the
legislature (and note here that Obama openly remarked that, like Wilson,
he would consider himself free to use force regardless), Putin/Lavrov
and Assad believed the threat of direct military action to be credible
– this being the explicit assumption under which Lavrov literally
rushed to offer us something that might dissuade us from war. There is
utterly no question as to whether or not the threat was taken as
credible by its intended recipients: it was. If any would-be genocidaire
watched Assad/Putin surrender millions of pounds of (highly prized)
Syrian weaponry in an explicit effort to avoid the latter’s becoming a
target of American airstrikes…and concluded that airstrikes threatened
by American presidents do not represent credible threats…then he took
the wrong lesson. But despite the tens of thousands of op-ed inches
tossed into the abyss of the contrary, that isn’t a lesson anyone
actually took.
A couple distinctions I’d like to make regarding this segment,
The disarmament that occurred was specific to their chemical weapons arsenal but it did not threaten the existence of the regime. By Russian/Syrian accounts they were already winning the war on the conventional front so the removal did not pose the same threat that direct US military intervention would have. In essence they gave up a weapon that they were already not supposed to use, and by committing the attacks in direct violation of our demands they gained credibility to use such weapons despite the overtly stated or implied restriction from the US/West in doing so.
To sum up the logic here, Assad gave up the vast bulk of their chemical weapons stores but gained credibility in their use of WMDs or disregard of US/Western demands as well as gained direct Russian military assistance/protection.
I would also dispute the idea that Russia/Syria “scrambled” to find a solution to prevent US military intervention. They are plenty capable of drawing the conclusion that if they continued chemical weapons attacks it would draw US military intervention. I would almost guarantee that they had this in mind well ahead of the attacks and had the Russian intervention in their back pocket as a contingency. Ghouta was not the first recorded use, it seems apparent that the prior events were likely probes to gauge the western response.
I’ll try and respond to your other comments a little later, for now I’d like to go spend a little time with my daughters.
[quote=“sig805, post:50, topic:221224, full:true”]
No foreign state believes being disarmed under threat of force is
“nothing,” and no foreign state would like the same to happen to it.
More importantly – and more to your point – we know with certainty
that whatever the actual chances that Obama would become the first
president since Wilson to be denied a request to use force by the
legislature (and note here that Obama openly remarked that, like Wilson,
he would consider himself free to use force regardless), Putin/Lavrov
and Assad believed the threat of direct military action to be credible
– this being the explicit assumption under which Lavrov literally
rushed to offer us something that might dissuade us from war. There is
utterly no question as to whether or not the threat was taken as
credible by its intended recipients: it was. If any would-be genocidaire
watched Assad/Putin surrender millions of pounds of (highly prized)
Syrian weaponry in an explicit effort to avoid the latter’s becoming a
target of American airstrikes…and concluded that airstrikes threatened
by American presidents do not represent credible threats…then he took
the wrong lesson. But despite the tens of thousands of op-ed inches
tossed into the abyss of the contrary, that isn’t a lesson anyone
actually took.
A couple distinctions I’d like to make regarding this segment,
The disarmament that occurred was specific to their chemical weapons arsenal but it did not threaten the existence of the regime.[/quote]
Neither the “red line” nor the disarmament that followed it was intended to threaten the existence of the regime. The deterrent was designed to address WMD non-proliferation and denormalization. Our response to its being violated did make use of overt threat. The matter ended up logically following along non-proliferation lines, and it did so in such a way that explicity required that Putin/Lavrov and Assad have faith in the credibility of our threats.
In other words, it is not a criticism of the Framework to observe that it didn’t threaten the existence of the regime. The threat was logically, necessarily prior, and it underlay Putin/Assad’s stance in negotiations. At that point, the interests entailed by the “red line” were infinitely better served by the Framework than by any of its alternatives.
As for whether or not any of this was existential: to directly threaten the existence of the regime at that point (and by “threaten” I mean actually prepare to attack in such a way that might collapse the Syrian government, such as it was) would have been disastrously stupid, and it is unlikely to the point of impossibility that we would be in a better position vis-a-vis Syria today had we actually done anything of the sort. Not one – literally not one – of the available alternatives to disarmament would have been even remotely likely to better serve American interests, and if after what happened during the first decade of this century Obama had chosen to create another power vacuum in a Salafi-embattled Middle Eastern country, these threads would be about a lot more than they presently are.
However, Putin and Assad clearly didn’t want to take the risk. Beyond the fact that nobody fighting a civil war really wants the most powerful military in the world launching even limited strikes against his military targets, it isn’t lost on either of them that the slide from limited strikes to unlimited strikes is kind of like the slide from advisers to ground troops: shorter and easier than might appear at first glance. Greater American involvement in the war would have materially increased the probability of Assad’s eventual deposition (and, possibly, brutal death), even if that involvement were begun under more prudent auspices.
[Quote]
By Russian/Syrian accounts they were already winning the war on the conventional front so the removal did not pose the same threat that direct US military intervention would have.[/quote]
Those accounts are inaccurate. Or I should say that they’re reductive. The reality was complicated. The Russians were warning that Assad was going to lose the entire country at the end of 2012/opening of 2013. In May, the Israelis were openly preparing to bomb chemical sites in the event of a rebel victory (perhaps the Israelis’ concerns can be instructive hereabouts: the importance of Syria’s massive and precariously-situated schedule 1 chemical stockpile is downplayed as a matter of routine on PWI [because Obama], even as Bush’s incomparably-catastrophic WMD-centric adventure in Iraq is apologized for or waved away). Assad’s army and militias retook some territory as 2013 wore on, but the war was at best ambiguous or stalemated by the latter half of the year, and the consensus leading up to that point was that Assad was teetering or at least in grave trouble. Al-Nusra had by then not only taken territory but also begun coalescing into something like an actual government, setting up health care facilities and getting oil pumping up out of the ground they’d won.
In any case, again, we didn’t want to tear the house down.
[Quote]
In essence they gave up a weapon that they were already not supposed to use, and by committing the attacks in direct violation of our demands they gained credibility to use such weapons despite the overtly stated or implied restriction from the US/West in doing so.[/quote]
They did something they weren’t supposed to do and were punished for it. This was a new chapter in the story of WMD non-proliferation since 9/11. Before Obama tried diplomacy, Bush told the Iranians to stop or else: they built more centrifuges, and nothing happened (other than, you know, our inventing an active WMD program and imputing it to their great rival, boosting Iranian regional interests in a way that Iranian leaders never could). Bush told the DPRK to stop or else: they built and tested their first nuclear weapon. We slapped them pathetically on the wrist, tried to stop their Inner Party from importing nice watches and expensive liquor.
[Quote]
To sum up the logic here, Assad gave up the vast bulk of their chemical weapons stores but gained credibility in their use of WMDs or disregard of US/Western demands as well as gained direct Russian military assistance/protection.[/quote]
Russia didn’t intervene until years later. It had nothing to do with this.
Yes, if we’d been openly warring with Assad since 2013, Russia wouldn’t have stepped in in 2015. That would have been infinitely worse for us. We didn’t want it. We were right not to want it. This isn’t some kind of mistake we made.
Putin wants to keep his client afloat so that Russia can among other things continue to be GDP-competitive with California. We don’t want another Iraq (the midwife of ISIS as it exists today, mind you). In order to avert the former we’d have needed to risk the latter. We made the right decision. And we got millions of pounds of schedule 1 chemical WMD out of ISIS’ breadbasket in such a way that proved the credibility of our threat vis-a-vis Assad and Putin. And we saved thousands upon thousands of innocent lives. As has been shown, in the context of this new era, what I’ve just described is the very picture of strength and credibility. And wisdom. And a refreshing reluctance to bumblingly back ass-first into calamity.
[Quote]
I would also dispute the idea that Russia/Syria “scrambled” to find a solution to prevent US military intervention. They are plenty capable of drawing the conclusion that if they continued chemical weapons attacks it would draw US military intervention. I would almost guarantee that they had this in mind well ahead of the attacks and had the Russian intervention in their back pocket as a contingency. Ghouta was not the first recorded use, it seems apparent that the prior events were likely probes to gauge the western response.[/quote]
They absolutely scrambled to it. Lavrov made his proposal almost instantaneously in the aftermath of Kerry’s remark.
There is no evidence they had any of this in mind – and much evidence that they didn’t. This was the consensus among western analysts: Ghouta had been a C&C or technical mistake. It was never meant to be a devastating event. Syrian action was specifically being tailored small and low in order to avoid triggering Western intervention.
From a simple logical perspective: Assad couldn’t have known the Framework would work. Kerry could have said “no” to that question to begin with (and the timeline of events – look it up if interested – makes it absolutely certain that Lavrov seized an opportunity rather setting in motion a plan). Talks could have gone nowhere. Assad would’ve been risking damage – and possibly, over time, outright destruction. And in the wake of a material and obvious atrocity like Ghouta, Putin could not have stopped us from getting intricately and overtly involved in the war (which we didn’t want to risk doing anyway).
Edited and edited again.
A wise choice.
By the way, I appreciate the way you approach this kind of stuff, even where we disagree.
I have hashed and rehashed this particular material a lot lately, and I write professionally about certain areas of the ME, which means I have to make sure not to retread or offer clues to stuff I’ve written elsewhere. It gets kind of exhausting and severely limits what I can say. However I’m pretty sure I was the one who commented on your post to start this off, and I owe you the chance to respond to the above. So, post away, I’ll read and respond if appropriate, and then I’ll try to leave it there.
Thank you for that post, @smh_23.
We all should be on guard about confirmation bias, myself included. All too often it seems as though we are not searching for “truth”; but for whatever fits into our narrative.
It just never seemed “right” that the President; his Administration; and our Military and Intelligence Agencies had done, and were doing “nothing”; and that “changing the calculus” had been interpreted in ways to fit someones own bias and interpretations.
With that said; I simply did not have the knowledge to articulate my “feelings” with the facts.
I think your post provided those facts.
I’m not naive…as the saying goes “one man’s facts is another man’s fiction; and one man’s Religion is another man’s delusions”. I will probably believe what I will believe, and so will others.
I guess we’ll have to live with that.
However; as I said at the beginning of this thread; Time and History may prove that an action or series of events is 1) as wrong as people thought 2) correct (because with time we learn the reasons WHY a course of action was taken…or 3) as with some events in History, remain muddled in controversy.
1 Like
Sorry about the delay here, I haven’t had too much time to dedicate with a thorough back and forth debate on your analysis. What I will try and do is address your remarks in a somewhat concise manner and let you have the last word. Hopefully this will sum up my opinion and you can provide some insight as to your position or possibly change my opinion with regards to the underlying principles. Contrary to many that stroll the interwebz I don’t enjoy arguing for the sake of argument, if someone presents a logical argument that contradicts mine I tend to adjust my viewpoint accordingly.
You could say bystanders learned the following: under the right
conditions (i.e., where relevant American interests don’t lie clearly
along only one axis), if one invites the ire of the Americans
and then offers them a deal with sufficient appeal, one may spare
oneself the attention of the American military at the cost of whatever
was offered up instead. But this is a fine lesson from our perspective,
and everybody already knew it anyway.
We’ve been dancing around this point with regards to what the Assad regime gave up in relinquishing the bulk of their chemical weapons stores and I’d like to clarify that my position on such isn’t that this is inconsequential for the regime under normal circumstances but that given the “vaguely direct” red line threat this was not of nearly the same consequence as otherwise. To put it shortly by publicly stating the red line we were in effect increasing the potential severity of the consequence of crossing it.
Furthermore I’d like to make clear a somewhat fundamental understanding of mine with regards to international military related diplomacy. The ability to project a nations agenda by military means or otherwise gunboat diplomacy is determined by two fundamental factors
- Military capability
- Their willingness to utilize said military capacity (this is compounded with the use of WMDs and is evermore influential in modern times. As a slight aside every nation is aware that the US posses the ability to wipe them off the map, the only debate is whether we will.)
Based on this I see that Assad reduced their own military capability but gained SIGNIFICANT credibility in their willingness to exercise their military capabilities (again strengthened by the fact that it was in direct conflict with our spoken demands). Now you are probably thinking that whatever credibility gained was certainly outweighed by their loss of capability but there is another variable that needs to be introduced which is Russia.
At this point we branch off into two similar but somewhat distinct interest, those of Assad and those of Putin.
With regards to Assad I would say it is safe to assume that they were in near constant communications with Russia regarding the civil war and specifically with regards to their use of chemical weapons[CWs]. The regime understood the assumed and overt consequence from the west of utilizing CWs and would therefore preemptively look for Russian support to counteract the western response. I know that the direct Russian military support did not come until much later but it seems a very logical assumption that either diplomatic or military support was assured to the Assad regime prior to their use of CWs. After the attacks the Assad regime then had the credibility with regards to CWs use in dealing with domestic threats and Russian backing(at least to their knowledge) in dealing with foreign threats. Perhaps more consequential is the possibility(or in my opinion) of broader significance that Russia was more or less pulling the strings of their puppet regime.
For Putin the situation seems to have a much greater likely hood of success with regards to their own interests. I see 3 potential outcomes,
-
US/Western military action is not directly exercised. (Despite the eventual CWs removal the common assumption seemed to be that military action would be taken, by not engaging it discredited our stance of utilizing force and therefore weakened our future capability of imposing any such deterrence. Even under your statement that Russia/Syria scrambled to find a solution, the ultimate appearance is that Russia enabled Syria to subvert a US imperative.)
-
Full force US military intervention is utilized without regard to Russian involvement. (Russia would lose a key ally in the region but the US would likely be involved in another longstanding and unstable military occupation reducing our military capability.)
-
US military intervention is utilized with Russian involvement. (Russia could keep their ally in Assad but US would retain both Military capability and credibility, essentially a wash for Putin.)
Outcome 3 is of course along the lines of what I originally proposed to Mufasa, I am aware however that it does have the potential to spin off into outcome 2 if Russia doesn’t want to play ball. I believe you also stated that limited attacks against the regime would instead threaten our credibility if they left the regime standing however that’s why I proposed involving Russia in the CWs removal as an exit option for us.
The takeaway wasn’t so much that any 3rd world dictatorship could disregard US/Western demands with limited consequence but more so could rely on a partnership with Russia to mitigate said consequences. This happens to fall in line with another viewpoint of mine that Russia is currently conducting a widespread and concerted effort to undermine US credibility abroad and return the world to the cold war balance where US/Western demands could be negated with Soviet influence.
By contrast, “you’ll have to rush to give me millions of what I want or
else risk being bombed” is the very picture of strength and credibility.
I’m also curious as to your reasoning behind seeing the Ghouta attack as a C&C issue? I believe I posted previously about the 3 possible reasons for the Assad Regime carrying out the attacks; C&C, Challenge of US demand, sheer necessity. A C&C failure just didn’t sit right with me, considering the regime had undertook previous CWs attacks on a smaller scale it seemed this was all a building up or a gradual push of the red line.
Also CWs attacks of this scale don’t just happen accidentally, are your suspicions along the line of a rouge general acting out of line?
They can, in fact, happen accidentally. Contrary to what people imagine, a chemical weapons attack of this sort is not simply a matter of pulling a trigger. You have to literally mix chemical agents, and if you’re the Syrian regime you have to do it near the front line. Thus, C&C requires electronic communication – and electronic communication can be intercepted. Which brings us to (some of) the evidence:
[Quote]
In the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people. Those conversations were overheard by U.S. intelligence services[/quote]
[Quote]
U.S. and Israeli communications intercepts reveal chaos inside the Syrian regime that night. When the reports of mass casualties filtered back from the field, according to the officials briefed on the intelligence, panicked Syrian commanders shot messages to the front line: Stop using the chemicals.
Calls came in to the presidential palace from Syrian allies Russia and Iran, as well as from Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group whose fighters were inadvertently caught up in the gassing, according to previously undisclosed intelligence gathered by U.S., European and Middle Eastern spy agencies. The callers told the Syrians that the attack was a blunder that could have profound international repercussions, U.S. officials say.[/quote]
And so on. (The German BND cited some other specific relevant evidence as well, if you are interested in investigating further.)
You are approaching this whole thing in a level and straightforward way, so this doesn’t refer specifically to you, but: I hope it becomes clearer, as we increasingly deal with detailed empirical reality (intercepted cables and phone calls, for example) rather than know-nothing NY-Post-style bozobabble, that anybody who is intimately familiar with this (or any) concatenation of geopolitical events can identify PWI’s plentiful and blissfully-ignorant cartoon horseshit for exactly what it is. I keep trying to tell people this: world politics really are complex systems. There really, really is stuff you need to know, and stuff you need to follow day in and day out. When somebody excretes some fan theory as to why the Syrian regime used sarin to kill so many at Ghouta, and it’s built of this juvenile failure to understand how the world works in the most basic of ways, the ignorance is as easy to spot as when a guy who’s never watched a professional football game – and I mean a guy who doesn’t know the difference between a false start and delay of game – tries to sound like he knows what he’s talking about while his coworkers discuss Minnesota - Green Bay.
Anyway, I’d like to respond with a somewhat different, wide-angle take on your other post. I’ll do so when I get the time. Thanks for the responses.
I’d like to say here that I am very much enjoying this back and forth between sig and smh. I have not had any time to post substantively, but sig has done me a favor as my own views have been much better articulated by sig than myself thus far, and as such his position essentially mirrors my own at this moment.
To me one of the primary consequences of this is the appearance that sig speaks of in his 1st potential outcome, and in general that is what I see when I look at this situation. It is true that typically more than appearances are at play in geopolitics, but appearance is very important for a variety of reasons that I am sure are agreed. It does seem that loppar’s posts regarding perception abroad in Europe and elsewhere bear that out.
Mufasa, you can probably look at sig’s answer as to what we should have done, and it would be close to mine. I still do not have time to post significantly on these subjects right now.
This is spot on and perceptive. In fact it’s one of two loosely-related points I was referring to above when I said that I wanted to post a more general wide-angle response to Sig. I even had Loppar specifically in mind. His informed viewpoint as a European working among ME citizens adds incalculably rich and interesting detail to PWI, and I find his analysis as smart and valuable when I disagree as when I agree. However I think in a more general sense that it’s an enormous mistake to privilege popular perception over objective reality when the two diverge. I also think that there is far too much confusion on the concept of interests (e.g., what’s good for us vs. what’s good for Putin vs. what’s good for Assad; the extent to which these are neither congruent nor wholly mutually exclusive; which of them we are in the business of caring about; and whether or not we actually care about what’s best or worst for another set of actors vis-a-vis what’s best or worst for us).
I plan to write an at least semi-organized and detailed post about this stuff. First, I owe actual work to an actual entity that pays me to do things for it, so I’ll return to this as soon as I can.
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They can, in fact, happen accidentally. Contrary to what people imagine, a chemical weapons attack of this sort is not simply
a matter of pulling a trigger. You have to literally mix chemical
agents, and if you’re the Syrian regime you have to do it near the front
line. Thus, C&C requires electronic communication – and electronic
communication can be intercepted. Which brings us to (some of) the
evidence:
By accidentally I’m hinting along the lines of “Oops we loaded the wrong shell…” not being possible which is exactly what you are stating.
The FP piece seems to mirror my own uncertainty as to where control might have potentially broken down. The ultimate question of mine would be if Assad was privy to the attacks and if not where along the chain of command did the violation occur.
Huh? You said that “CWs attacks of this scale don’t just happen accidentally.” I showed that the available evidence very clearly suggests that this chemical weapons attack at this scale (your words, and the operative ones) absolutely did happen accidentally. This has been the IC and analyst consensus from just about the beginning, and the facts support it.
That’s the point, and that’s what a C&C error is: for whatever technical or human reason, what was ordered and what happened were different, and they were different enough that regime military communications conveyed immediate panic. This, plus the immediate Russian calls to Assad, plus the timeline of Kerry/Lavrov correspondence during the second week of September 2013 – it all bears dispositively on our discussion about the extent to which the Framework represented some kind of step in a calculated Syrian/Russian strategy. It didn’t represent any such thing: this is the necessary implication of the available evidence. The Ghouta atrocity as it actually happened was a mistake, not a deliberate element of some wider plot to begin massacring thousands of civilians as if the specter of Western intervention in the civil war weren’t no thang, and the Framework proceeded from an urgent attempt to clean up that mistake under the unambiguous Syrian/Russian belief in the credibility of the American military threat. We’re dealing with the simple factual record (i.e., intercepted phone calls, explicit public remarks, objective chronology, official documents) at this point: none of this is really open to much interpretation, and its implications proliferate throughout the rest of our discussion. As I just wrote to Aragorn, I’ll get to that as soon as I get the chance.
Edited for clarity.