[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
For both tactical and psychological reasons, CBRN’s represent a step along a path of escalation which ends in total (exterminatory) war. Cormac McCarthy shit. Obviously, it doesn’t matter to the dead how they died once they’re dead. But it matters to the living who’d rather not follow suit.
Weapons that initiate or can too easily lead to actual war – the kind of war we used to have before the Trinity test – are more worrisome than a civil war on the other side of the world and, frankly, more worrisome than some cave-dwellers planning to hijack an airplane somewhere in a nicer part of the world. Chemical weapons in particular are better suited for killing civilians than they are a useful tool for a battlefield strategist. More importantly, every time a chemical weapon is used, the anti-CBRN international norm is degraded, and we legitimize a qualitatively different kind of war, one which has the very real potential to end not in a treaty or a surrender or a draw-down, but in apocalypse. This is only a slight exaggeration, if that.
But don’t take my word for it. We made the escalation path explicit in the 2002 Statement on the National Strategy To Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction:
[quote]
The United States will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force–including through resort to all of our options–to the use of WMD against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies.[/quote]
[“All of our options” means The Bomb.]
Also 2002:
[quote]
The emergence of a new, hostile military coalition against the United States or its allies in which one or more members possesses WMD and the means of delivery is a potential contingency that could have major consequences for U.S. defense planning, including plans for nuclear forces…North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya are among the countries that could be involved in immediate, potential, or unexpected contingencies.[/quote]
So, here is the DOD under Bush talking about a nuclear strike on Syria because of chemical weapons. If that isn’t heavy talk, heavy talk does not exist. And that isn’t Bush’s DOD being hysterical, as some people have argued: These are the natural stakes where CBRN’s are concerned, whether anybody thinks it’s logical or not. This is why chemical weapons stockpiles mean more than conventional weapons stockpiles, and this is why Syria’s being armed with Russian bombs and heavy equipment is not remotely comparable to their sitting on 2 million pounds of Sarin and Mustard gas. And all of this is to say nothing of chemical weapons as tools for terrorism, which would require some skill–but then again, so does flying a plane into a building.[/quote]
Wiat, chemical weapons were WMD’s, now there WMD’s? Or maybe that was Bismark making that claim?
Anyway, I agree, chemical weapons are bad nasty things that the world is better without.
The argument is that this request was insufficient. Getting rid of chemical weapons is a good thing, but it was too little too late in a degrading situation that is showing little hope of improving, in fact is showing signs of getting worse as it has already spilled over into Iraq and is hitting American interests pretty hard.
I would even argue that giving up chemical weapons has strengthened Assad and entrenched his position and is allowing him to slowly but surely get his country back.
Our strategy in Syria is unfocused, goalless, and ineffective.
Our initial concern wasn’t getting rid of chemical weapons. We didn’t state that was a goal. We had other goals in mind, Assad stepping down, Moderates take over, and free elections and a new constitution drafted and everybody is happy. While hemming and hawing about whether or not to support the opposition, we draw the ‘red line’ which Assad crosses immediately and in inhibited.
All the sudden, our focus becomes chemical weapons. I think it’s a valid question, why did we not demand this from the start, before they were used? Why did that become our goal?
It seems to me, that obama was looking for a way out of using military force and getting involved militarily. While we had all kinds of demands on the table, we settled for chemical weapons.
The situation has become more dire, Assad is armed better than ever, the opposition has turned into an al qaeda breeding ground, which is crossing borders now. Assad still uses chemicals to kill people, granted less effective less dangerous over all. You got a huge refugee crisis. The humanitarian crisis, chemical weapons or not is dire, a civil war with no end in sight which is spilling over into Iraq, Russia increasing arms shipments to Assad and now the U.S. is deciding to aid the rebels. The problem is, who are the rebels?
Everything is too little too late. We are either involved or we are not. The halfass measures have only serve to embolden our enemies to which we have on both sides of the fight.
I have to wonder why we are arming the rebels now after all seems lost, what is our end game? To keep the civil war going as long as possible? Assad is poised to win.[/quote]
The weapons deal is not the whole of Syria. I’m not going to get into a debate about whether or not we should have taken Assad out. Even if we were all experts, counterfactual histories are difficult and often more or less worthless, and this one happens to be very complicated. What I will say is that it is most certainly not a given that we would be in a better position right now if we had done more to bring Assad down. How much more? What enduring responsibility would we have assumed? The last time we stuck our dick in a shitty country in order to usurp the throne of a despot, it didn’t work out so well–for anybody.
But the focus of the argument in this thread is clearer: Chemical weapons. You ask this:
[quote]
I think it’s a valid question, why did we not demand this from the start, before they were used? Why did that become our goal?[/quote]
And the answer is obvious. We have a hundred thousand goals at any given time. Syrian accession to the CWC has been one for decades. Bush wanted it, and went so far as to talk about nuclear strikes on a non-nuclear country with Syria explicitly in mind. Suddenly the goal became possible–as it had not been for Clinton, as it had not been for Bush. Moreover, it represented the clearly rational choice, given the circumstances.
Whether you think we should have intervened in the Syrian Civil War is a much larger, separate, hazier, and in many ways unrelated question. By the time of the chemical attack on Ghouta, al-Nusra was one of the strongest rebel groups in Syria, and had been a major player since Aleppo heated up. That is to say that this deterioration – this rise of radical Islam as the driving force of the opposition to Assad – you’re touting was well under way by September 2013. If we were going to intervene – and I do not accept as a given that intervention was necessarily rational at any time – we should have done it early, before radical ideology had crystallized among the strong rebel groups. Late 2013 was too late, and so the questions are entirely separate. One question is left unanswered, and in many ways cannot be answered. The other is simple, and the answer has been given and given again.
Edited
you still have to address the spitting on Vietnam Vets