To point out that ^ is a a ridiculous strategy given Iran’s nuclear program (which can be traced back to the Shah) has come at the cost of over $260 billion in both investment and in lost economic activity is not a personal attack.
I posed the question of what President Khan would do vis-a-via Syria and Assad circa 2017. You stated that you would support Assad and Russia because your preeminent and overriding concern is ISIL. Yet, you believe the U.S. should have bombed Syria in response to the regime’s use of chemical weapons and a nebulous conception of the role that perceptions of “strength” and “weakness” play in world politics. Which one is it? Support Assad or use military force to punish him? The two are mutually exclusive.
Assad relinquished two million pounds of sarin, VX, and mustard gas in direct response to the specter of American military force. It’s an instance of peaceful compellence. See my post above.
Credibility is a nebulous concept in world politics. It’s a stretch to say this particular incident “severely diminished” American credibility vis-a-vis the use of force. In fact, one can make an argument that bombing regime forces after Assad would have damaged the credibility of U.S. diplomacy. After all, why would any state wish to deal with the U.S. in the future after seeing the Assad regime get hit over the head with a club after giving up two million pounds of military grade chemical weapons with the understanding that if he did so, he would not be hit over the head with a club?
Let me clarify that the action in dealing with the Assad regime should have been taken prior to the settlement removing the bulk chemical weapons from Syria. I don’t think anyone could argue that the removal of these chemical weapons was a loss in and of itself and that the arrangement by itself is a major diplomatic win.
The problem still remains that the threat of force was levied against the Assad regime to refrain from the use of chemical weapons and nonetheless chemical weapons were still used. The fact that we may have negotiated a diplomatic arangement after the fact is inconsequential. The result is akin to an individual shooting another and us merely taking the gun away and then saying I told you not to shoot anyone. We still didn’t act directly against the regime except to inhibit their ability to violate our demands in the future.
Put yourself in the position of any 3rd world dictator, their primary goal is to retain power. Now ask yourself did our action or inaction hinder their ability to retain power over their country? Yes they relinquished a military asset(one that they shouldn’t of used to begin with) but they also gained the full force of the Russian military.
Honestly I don’t understand why so many vehemently defend the Obama’s administration handling of the issue. There are plenty of international issues that warrant defending but this is just not one of them. If the threat of military action was not a realistic option than this threat should not have been levied period.
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Indeed, but it was a realistic option. We were going to do it. The chemical weapons deal was made possible by an offhand remark an Obama administration official made in response to a question about whether there was anything that could be done to avert strikes. Strikes were by that time presumed to be a given.
And we know with absolute certainty that two actors believed not only that military action was a realistic option but that it was literally forthcoming: Putin and Assad. That’s the great irony of the popular misunderstanding of the red line: it tested our credibility with Putin, and it told us as a logically necessary product of the way the events unfolded that our credibility with him was pristine (and of course it was: this president has bombed 7+ countries). It told us beyond the possibility of doubt that the people whom we want to take American threats seriously…take American threats seriously, full stop.
There have been plenty of limp, unsubstantiated threats we could analyze vis-a-vis WMD in the Middle East, but they don’t involve this president so nobody pretends they are catastrophic. But I’m writing a longer post about this so I’ll leave this as it is for now.
I respectfully disagree, sig:
People like Assad and Isis are fully aware (or more stupid than I think they are) that one Carrier Group in the Mediterranean could lay waste to the Middle East a couple of times over. And we have proven that we will pick these guys off one-by-one…and that the only thing they will hear is the whistle and click of a Drone Fired Hellfire when they are just seconds away from meeting their Maker.
I can assure you that Assad is not getting restful nights of sleep because Russian planes are flying over his bunker.
People like Assad and Isis are not deterred by threats of force…or even force. They have shown that. This is mainly because 1) they don’t give two shits about their people and what happens to them and 2) they know that we do.
Now you could argue that maybe we shouldn’t give a shit about things like aftermaths and collateral damage…but we do.
The reality is that militarily we did, and have, escalated the Military Pressure on Assad and Isis; but not at the expense of killing thousands upon thousands of civilians and irreparably damaging any semblance of a countries infrastructure.
Now; you can argue that we should kill them all and lay waste to whole middle East.
But by doing so; what would we have accomplished?
Shown how “tough” we are? At what cost?
The thing is, this episode didn’t have much of anything to do with Assad’s ability to retain power over his country. It was about the use of particular weapons whose normalized use is of great and even existential interest to us…and it showed any outside observer that if that observer is forbidden from using such weapons by an American president (which, btw, literally all of them are), and he uses them anyway, then he will be punished either by war or by whatever deal he can toss up in hopes of saving himself from war.
Furthermore, we didn’t really want Assad to lose power over his country at that point. Not whole-heartedly and certainly not as a result of direct American intervention. Talk the talk, sure. Arm the rebels some, particularly the ones who aren’t jihadists so that they might gain leverage and become more powerful and prominent than the Islamist prototerrorist militias (which was always more important to us than helping them really beat Assad), but another American-made vacuum in the Middle East? No, Obama took the correct lesson from his catastrophic failure of a predecessor.
As for the Russian intervention, it came two years later and wasn’t related to this in any kind of direct way.
Ok, now I’ll save stuff for my other post. Just can’t help it.
And I would guess Libya, also, wouldn’t you say, smh?
Syria is one of those “horrible vs. horrendous” decisions that is often made when it comes to the Middle East.
Assad has killed more Syrians than anyone…but these “vacuums” have often proven to be even worse.
Welcome to the Middle East.
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What can we do now? Russia is in control of Syria.
I explained. Had I been Obama and made the red line threat I would have bombed Assad once he broke it and used gas.
BUT a better alternative would have been to back the Assad Regime against Al-Qaeda elements if that is in fact who they were at war with…being that we are supposedly involved in a global war on terror.
Yet he still used gas against his own people. What would you have done had he crossed the red line drawn by Obama? Say “You gave up a lot of gas, go a head and use a weaker form of gas to kill who ever you like, thank you very much.” and that is what we did.
Is that right? What would you have done?
No, show we don’t make idle threats.
I was supporting your point, actually.
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That’s not the point considering that, that was not I was saying it in sum. I made points beyond the $1.7 billion. You chose to ignore the rest of my post, to single out a single statment, out of context.
It’s your fault if you choose not to read or you choose to take what I say out of context. The post you quoted from clearly does not focus solely on the $1.7B. It also doesn’t pretend that the $1.7B doesn’t mean anything to them.
BTW, have you found the official document from the USA where it says, that we will air strike Iran should they break the agreement?
This was you statement, not mine. Where is the proof?
Cool, I didn’t know if you have him blocked and could only see one part of the argument.
Classic…case in point in how these guys “win” arguments. Ignore what is written, take some minor part & make a mountain out of it which is so far from your major point it makes absolutely no sense. Then claim you don’t know what you are talking about while directly avoiding and ignoring direct questions.
The basic facts – name, date, location, casualty count, etc. – about an issue you’re trying (and miserably failing) to debate are not “some minor part,” you buffoon. Your inability to understand this is precisely what makes your posts so uniquely stupid and worthless.
Still no answer…
A prefatory note: this is not merely another entry in some kind of ongoing and mutual exchange. Any chance of a legitimate discussion between you and me ended when, having bleated at me for days in an effort to draw me into yet another addled and useless tour of your inability to understand even the very most basic things about world affairs, you opened the argument with a small masterpiece of oblivious, faceplanting idiocy wherein you proved beyond doubt that despite desperately wanting to argue with me about chemical weapons attacks in Syria, you didn’t (and don’t) know anything whatsoever about chemical weapons attacks in Syria:
This^ post could not have been written had you been familiar with what is literally the most important event vis-a-vis Syrian chemical weapons attacks, the August 2013 assault on Ghouta, which was a sarin attack…and accounts for the overwhelming majority of the ~1,500 chemical weapons casualties to date…and is the hinge event in the “red line” non-controversy about which you were trying to argue with me. Again: the post could not have been written without your being ignorant of all this. Of course, the post was written, so we have dispositive proof of what I’ve been saying for a while now – that you try to lure people into these big disagreements without caring to learn even the rudimentary/fundamental Wikipedia-level details around which the disagreements orbit. The result – a futile trudge through the muck of your ridiculously thorough ignorance – benefits nobody, and your utterly wormish refusal to square your shoulders to your obvious public faceplants adds such a dimension of fecal bitterness to the whole sordid affair that I will usually be opting out from now on.
All of this is to say – and please note that I repeat myself for a variety of reasons not least of which being that you are much too stupid to take even a simple point in a single, adult-sized bite – that this is not merely another entry in some kind of ongoing mutual exchange. I don’t doubt that you will publish some kind of spectacularly dimwitted and illogical response to this post, but there is no guarantee that I’ll respond to your response. No, I am writing this for two reasons: to kick your corpse (you’ve been down since the suicidal excerpt I reproduced above) as punishment for having wasted so Goddamn much of my time on such a nescient and intellectually dishonest nitwit as you; and because other people seem to be both interested in and somewhat confused about this very same topic. In accordance with this latter point, I will (try to) shift my tone toward neutral. Please don’t take this as a softening toward you: I continue to regard you with as much genuine contempt as I can spare for someone so unworthy of attention.
Without further ado…
This you wrote in response to the following question:
[quote]
[smh_23 wrote:]
On September 9, 2013, John Kerry told a reporter who’d asked whether there was any way for Assad to avert American military aggression that he could turn over his chemical weapons.
Five days later, on September 14, 2013, the Russians and Syrians formally offered – as in, signed on to – an agreement composed of a massive weapons confiscation and CWC accession.
Question: why did the Russians and Syrians do this? What were they trying to accomplish or avoid? Under what assumptions were they operating?[/quote]
…And you got it exactly right: Putin/Lavrov and Assad made the offer that became the Framework for Elimination of Syrian Chemical Weapons because they were operating under the assumption that Obama was, as you put it, “going to bomb them” (“them” being Assad’s forces).
Very frankly, this gives the lie to the many nonsensical forms of the argument that Obama did “nothing” in response to Syrian use of chemical weapons, because, of course, the confiscation of thousands of tons of the world’s most dangerous Schedule 1 chemical weapons under threat of force is precisely the opposite of “nothing.”
More importantly, it defeats the many BUT CREDIBILITY PUTIN WEAKNESSssssss objections, because it is a logically necessary implication of the timeline of events that the “red line” affair did tell us something about Putin’s understanding of the credibility of overt American military threats: it told us with certainty that he understands such threats to be credible. This was the animating assumption that underlay his decision to send his foreign minister off to try to save his commercial client from our military might. There is no question about this. It is not some kind of rosy interpretation. It is the unambiguous condicio sine qua non driving the A------> B ------> C progression of events.
Here we pause for an analogy. I despise the popular impulse to think about international relations analogically, but this one fits well enough for this very narrow purpose, and it might give you less trouble than the straightforward factual and logical information I’ve been dealing with up to now. So: a bully is throwing rocks at a child. I tell the bully to stop or else. He throws another rock. I walk up to him with my fist raised. He throws his hands up and begs me not to strike him, offering me his millions upon millions of large, dangerous rocks (it turns out that there are pebbles I could never remove, and we’ll get to those, but for now the stones that by far do the most damage are mine for the taking). What do we know about the bully’s belief about my intention to strike him? We know that his belief was full and unwavering.
That puts to rest the great majority of confusion surrounding the “red line,” and it unquestionably annihilates the popular two-pronged criticism that Obama “damaged our credibility” by “doing nothing.” He did precisely the opposite of nothing, and the events by which he was able to do what he did proved beyond the possibility of doubt that the credibility of his threat was assumed as a given by Putin and Assad.
But there are other ways to look at this, including the childishly reductive way you’ve been peddling, so let’s take a tour through some of those:
– What if your primary concern is with the innocent dead? Didn’t Assad keep using chlorine bombs? First, understand that the American military and national security apparatus does not share this primary concern. In bombing 7+ countries, weak-kneed pro-Muslim dove Barack Obama has killed more Muslim civilians than have any of Assad’s chlorine attacks. A handful of dead Syrians is not in and of itself even a remote concern for a commander in chief where American security interests diverge from humanitarian conscience (more on that in a bit). We live in a world in which many of the people who make American foreign policy celebrate and will soon glowingly eulogize a man who has been implicated in multiple genocides. But it is quite literally always noble to concern oneself with the moral and human element of international relations, so how does Obama’s red line fare through that lens? I’m glad you asked! I crunched the numbers myself, but the raw data comes from the Syrian American Medical Society’s March 2016 chemical weapons report (the document from which you drew the 1,500 casualty estimate [without knowing it, of course]): There were 1,414 chemical-attack casualties in Syria between the first, on 23 December 2012, and the signing of the Framework for Elimination of Syrian Chemical Weapons on 14 September 2013. That’s 1,414 in 266 days (note: the single event at Ghouta, which precipitated the strike threat and Framework, accounts for most of this 1,414). From the following day – 15 September 2013 – to the last day for which there are reliably compiled and verified data, 31 December 2015 (that’s 838 days), there were 77, of which some number were actually killed by ISIS (which began launching its own chemical attacks in Summer 2015). Converting the numbers to rates (remember this saying: only rates compare), we arrive at 5.316 dead per day before Obama’s response to the red line…and less than 0.092 after it. That’s a greater than 98 percent decrease in Syrian chemical-attack deaths, effective the very day on which Obama did his mystically consequential “nothing.” It isn’t 100 percent, but then little in politics and war is 100 percent. This is damn near as close as you can get. In other words, Obama’s red line response not only deprived the world’s worst region of millions of pounds of the world’s worst chemical agents – it also diminished what it was designed to diminish by more than 98 percent. Remember these numbers, they’re about to matter again.
– What about your reductive childlike fantasy in which the world is black and white and results are binary and there is the LIGHT SIDE and the DARK SIDE and ONE CHLORINE DEATH IS A CATASTROPHIC FAILURE OF FOREIGN POLICY NOT BECAUSE OF ANY KIND OF MATERIAL GEOPOLITICAL CONSIDERATION BUT BECAUSE THAT’S HOW MY TUMMY WANTS TO FEEL? The first thing you’ve got to understand is that many of our not-necessarily-rational psychological peculiarities follow us into the realm of international relations. Sarin, for example, is important to us not merely because of what it does but because of what it represents and what it portends. The path of escalation between a normalized schedule 1 chemical attack and a nuclear event is linear and not nearly far enough. Chlorine is a dual-use chemical. It does not imply this kind of psychological leap into the unthinkable – and for good reason. As we’ve just seen, as soon as Assad was forced by us to switch to chlorine, his chemical attacks lost almost all of their potency. It simply doesn’t kill well (what was the number I cited a week or so ago – 543 times less deadly than sarin and VX?), and therefore it simply doesn’t concern us to the extent that schedule 1 agents like sarin do. Try as you might to stuff your empty head up your ass far enough to ignore it, the world is a collection of scales and degrees. Assad knows this. He further knows that it’s much more difficult for us to attribute a rudimentary chlorine attack than a sarin attack, and indeed ISIS began muddying the waters a year ago with chemical attacks of their own (we had to pass a resolution last summer to create a Joint Investigative Mechanism tasked with identifying responsible parties in Syrian chemical attacks). Furthermore, it isn’t actually in our interest to start creating chaos in Syria by bombing Assad. This is the kind of thing that an idiot like you can’t generally wrap his head around, but it is possible and even common for us to come face to face with bad people whom we want to corral and whom we don’t want to help but whom we also don’t want to directly eliminate. Again, Obama took the correct lesson from his catastrophically disastrous predecessor’s adventure in Iraq, wherein we created a vacuum in the world’s most volatile region and watched it fill with layer upon layer of cancer, regional disputes stitched into social problems (275,000 arms-bearing men out of a job in one single swoop – an actual presidential blunder with actual, material consequences) drizzled over two transnational century-spanning religious wars…out of the middle of which came AQI, its small detachment dispatched to Syria, and one final name change. ISIS does have a nice acronymic elegance to it.
…So with chlorine the waters are muddied, the stakes are much lower, the casualty count is comparatively negligible, normalization vis-a-vis WMD non-proliferation is a concern but it isn’t even close to the concern that Ghouta was, the direct American security interests stand in opposition to needless airstrikes not targeting ISIS, and American credibility was already vindicated at the large scale by the 2013 chemical weapons deal. Assad knows all this…and he’s trying to get away with what he can. That’s the fuckin’ world. Hegemony is not omnipotence. Somebody wrote earlier in this thread that chaos is a ladder: it is, for the weak. For ISIS it was a ladder. For Russia it can be a ladder (up to a point – really what Putin wants is a return to stability for his client so he can keep Russia’s GDP competitive with fuckin’ California’s). Chaos is not a ladder for us, and the world is not some adolescent movie you saw once.
Still think it’s all just a huge failure? Despite all the foregoing – despite all the real-world reasons for which it is not remotely a failure? Still shoving your head up your ass and chanting that ALL IS FUCKIN LOST because Obama said no chemical weapons and then took away millions of the most potent chemical weapons under a Putin-verified threat of military force but now a tiny handful of people are dying every few months in much-diminished, small-scale, hard-to-attribute, comparatively-close-to-non-lethal chlorine attacks? Okay: then every president has been a failure. Work your way backwards from 43. Bush warned the Iranians against continuing with their nuclear program: more and more and more centrifuges spun. He warned North Korea against nuclear proliferation: their first test came and went. He warned Putin against aggression in Georgia: Russian forces continue to occupy a fifth of the country to this day. Comparatively, Obama’s red line in Syria is a fuck-half-the-cheerleading-squad-at-the-same-time kind of night. Now, most rational thinkers who understand good old complicated reality don’t believe that a central failure of G.W. Bush’s presidency was his not having bombed Iran, North Korea, and Russia. But you are obsessed with the smallest of international infractions, even when they are baked into an unmitigated American victory. How fucking odd that you never seem to worry about anything but this thread’s particular object of your immense capacity to become and remain confused.
Speaking of working backwards, here’s how you know Obama’s been a good foreign-policy president: clowns like you are talking about this nonsense rather than saying, e.g., “he created a mendacious case for a non-sequitur distraction of a war and threw the worst region on Earth into utter and seemingly permanent chaos to the tune of literally no American interest or benefit.”
Edited multiple times.
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Do you honestly believe that the absence of a codified, explicit threat of American military force against Iranian nuclear facilities in the event of a violation of the JCPOA is a “gotcha” moment that undermines that 1) Iran was brought to the bargaining table by the specter of military action against its nuclear program
and that 2) the nuclear deal significantly increase the efficacy and international legitimacy of military action?
First, prior to the deal, rhe United States lacked a detailed understanding of the supply chain that would allow Iran to build new centrifuges. This meant that Iran would be able to quickly reconstitute its nuclear program in the event of an air campaign. The deal is an intelligence windfall and allows western security agencies to collect, analalyze, and formulate targeting databases that will give the United States to destroy the vast majority of Iran’s nuclear program rapidly and with high confidence.
Second, the deal forces Iran to store the bulk of its centrifuges in the Natanz facility, which, while buried, is much less fortified than Iran’s facility at Fordo. The vast majority of Iran’s centrifuges will be vulnerable to American bunker busting munitions. This in turn significantly increases Iran’s breakout time (the time it would take for Iran to sprint to produce 27 KG of 90% highly enriched uranium, enough for a single bomb) and would ample time for weapons such as the 30,000 pound Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP) - a weapon championed by the Obama administration to specifically threaten Iran’s buried nuclear facilities pound away at Fordo.
Third, the nuclear deal represents the most intrusive arms control and inspections regime in history. This ensures that an Iranian breakout or sneak out attempt will not go undetected. Because breakout time is effectively increased by 400%, the deal allows ample time for the United States to act against Iran’s nuclear program. As long writes, “[the deal] generally expands the U.S. intelligence community’s understanding of the nuclear program and decision-making surrounding it. Even if Iran seeks to thwart some inspections, the patterns revealed can help the intelligence community unravel Iranian deception practices as well as focus scarce intelligence collection on those areas where the Iranians are most evasive. This all helps improve targeting for military action.”
Your entire line of reasoning is the latest in a string of posts that betray that you don’t have a 101 understanding of the underlying concepts of the non-proliferation regime in general and the JCPOA in particular. You claimed that Iran will be able to legally build the bomb after a sunset period following implementation of the deal, a notion that anyone who is familiar with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation (NPT) -the bedrock of the nonproliferation regime and whose study is required prior to any discussion of nuclear arms control agreements - would instantly recognize as egregiously and categorically false. Anyone who has actually read the JCPOA text would have come across numerous and direct references to the NPT, upon which the deals authority rests upon. Even after this massive gaffe, you remained so unfamiliar with the NPT that you claimed that Iran could “leave the IAEA” (the international agency that among other things, is charged with implementing nuclear safeguards to prevent the proliferation of military nuclear programs) when it’s clear to anyone with an introductory understandings of such matters that Iran is party to the NPT,
not the IAEA. Now, any reasoned argument asserting that Iran was brought to the bargaining table in part by the specter of military force and that the efficacy and international legitimacy of post-deal military force is increased by the deal is “conjecture” because the deal doesn’t explicitly entail military force in the event of a major Iranian violation, as if that ridiculous and nonsensical burden of proof makes any fucking sense to anyone who actually has taken the time to study these issues at a rudimentary level. Do you honestly believe that such a stipulation in the deal would be necessary or prudent? Do you honestly believe you can reduce extremely complex and nuanced issues in world politics to such adolescent conclusions?