Attacking Syria
Global cop, like it or not
The American administration sees no alternative to an attack on Syria
BARACK OBAMA came to office vowing to end wars in the Muslim world, not start them. For two years he has resisted calls, which close advisers have made with passion, to intervene in Syria’s ever-more-bloody civil war. And yet, as The Economist went to press, he stood poised to launch an attack on Syria’s armed forces, the results of which could not be foreseen. Even the most cautious American leaders will saddle up and play sheriff if the alternative is a world in which, when America has clearly announced that it will defend an international norm, a rogue dictator thinks he can call its bluff.
Eastern Ghouta, a suburban part of Damascus, was shelled at around 2am on August 21st. Soon people started suffering convulsions and choking, their muscles no longer under their control. Makeshift hospitals began to fill up, with volunteers forced to pour water over the afflicted to avoid contamination.
Médecins Sans Frontières, a charity, said three clinics it supports in the area treated 3,600 patients in a matter of hours, 355 of whom died. The Violations Documentation Centre, a Syrian organisation meticulous in its compilation of reports of death and injury, now puts the death toll at 457 or more. Other credible estimates range as high as 1,300. Harrowing videos—a man begging his two dead children to get up and walk; a girl repeating in wonder “I’m alive, I’m alive”—brought the atrocity home to the world.
The immediate assumption was that Syria’s armed forces were responsible. They have 1,000 tonnes of chemical weapons in their stockpiles, including the nerve agents Sarin and VX. These produce effects like those seen in the attack, though the symptoms seen do not quite match what textbooks would lead you to expect. A clearer picture of the agents involved should emerge from the work of a United Nations (UN) inspection team. In the country to investigate claims of earlier chemical attacks, the inspectors were at first denied access to the affected areas, then fired at by snipers. Having at last visited Eastern Ghouta, they may report on what they have seen in the first days of September.
A guilty look
Chemical weapons do not have to be used by the people who make and stockpile them. But from early on other evidence pointed the finger at the regime led by Bashar Assad. A wide area was attacked; precise rockets were used; the regime continued to fire on the site of the attack for days afterwards. It all seems beyond the capacity of the rebels. Captain Alaa al-Basha, a rebel commander in Damascus, thinks the regime was trying to depopulate the area in the face of renewed progress by rebels pushing towards the centre of the capital. Others point to similarities with earlier, much smaller attacks, and speculate that perhaps this time someone misjudged something.
America and its allies have more than this circumstantial evidence. Intelligence, apparently including telephone intercepts and remote-sensing data, convinced them of the regime’s guilt. America’s secretary of state, John Kerry, decried the “moral obscenity” of slaughtering civilians, including women and children, with chemical weapons. (Indeed, Mr Kerry had favoured military retaliation against the Syrian regime after an earlier, small-scale use of chemical weapons, says a source familiar with the debate inside government.) After long months of meeting atrocities in Syria with hedged rebukes and condemnations-with-caveats, White House spokesmen began throwing around words like “repugnant” and arguing that to allow chemical strikes to be left unanswered would be a threat to America’s national security.
The president’s own credibility is also at stake. On August 20th 2012 he warned Syria that the systematic use of chemical weapons would cross a red line and demand an American response. Although Mr Obama said on August 28th that he had made no final decision, if Mr Assad is to be punished, and both he and others deterred from using chemical weapons, there seems no real alternative to military force.
America has been careful to accuse Mr Assad of breaching “international norms”, rather than the law. Syria is one of just five countries which have not signed the UN’s Chemical Weapons Convention, arguing that Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons legitimise Mr Assad’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. But there is a case that the convention’s provisions apply anyway as international customary law.
Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, which are hostile to Mr Assad would favour such strikes, but are wary of heartily backing them in public. On August 27th the Arab League issued a statement which condemned the Syrian regime but stopped short of calling for military action. Ban Ki-moon, the UN chief, wants to give the UN inspectors time to finish their work in Syria, though they will say only whether chemical weapons were used, not who used them; Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN and Arab League envoy to Syria, turned his face against force unless mandated by the UN.
Russia’s foreign minister is reported to have said no UN resolution allowing force should be considered until the inspectors have reported (after which his country would surely veto it). Turkey has said that it is willing to support a strike, even without a UN mandate, if the regime was responsible for the attack. France’s president, François Hollande, said in a speech his country was “ready to punish” the guilty, and Germany, hitherto reticent, has also been supportive. That gives Mr Obama broader European support than George Bush had when he invaded Iraq in 2003.
Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, who has recently pushed harder for intervention in Syria than any other Western leader, was keen to stand with France and America. He recalled parliament from its summer recess to debate a British military response on August 29th, expecting to secure a majority in support of action. However the opposition Labour Party made it clear that it would not vote to authorise a strike until Mr Ban’s inspectors reported, and enough of Mr Cameron’s backbenchers are opposed to military action that he cannot get a motion through parliament without Labour support. If Britain is to participate in the attacks, they need to be delayed until after the weekend.
Some members of Congress would have liked to have been recalled from recess as their British counterparts were. They have grumbled about a lack of consultation, and fret openly about the war-weariness of their own constituents. Still, influential Republicans and Democrats have fallen in behind the new consensus.
Both within countries and between them, though, that consensus stretches only to a police action aimed to punish and deter. The motion before the British House of Commons notes that it “does not sanction any action in Syria with wider objectives”. The White House has repeatedly asserted that any actions in Syria are “not about regime change”.
This may sound strange. An attack on Mr Assad’s airbases, communication systems, and suchlike (see article) would seem, objectively, to aid the rebel cause. And it is official American policy that Syria’s future cannot include Mr Assad in power; it offers cautious, limited support to moderate factions within the patchwork of groups struggling to get rid of him.
Change is not gonna come
But the White House means something quite specific by “regime change”: the toppling of a dictator by force of arms, in a campaign led, and thus “owned”, by America. It is Mr Obama’s view that only a negotiated political settlement can end the killing, and that no neat military solutions exist. Indeed, military actions, including the one currently being planned, could easily make things worse.
Even if the White House did want to use military power in direct pursuit of regime change, the country has no stomach for adventurism. America is today, as it was before the invasion of Iraq, a place of flags, patriotic bumper stickers and public reverence for troops serving overseas. But it no longer has any patience for neoconservative notions of transplanting democracy into the Muslim world, and is distrustful of anything that conjures echoes of Iraq. Democrats, as well as Republicans, pushed for the swift release in declassified form of the intelligence that underlies the White House’s case, unwilling to take anything on trust.
Throughout the Syria crisis polling has shown large majorities of Americans opposed to intervention there—though that opposition has wavered when respondents were asked about a hypothetical use of chemical weapons. Much the same is true in Britain.
When America’s most senior military commander, General Martin Dempsey, recently told a congressman that he thought American force “can change the military balance, but it cannot resolve the underlying and historic ethnic, religious and tribal issues that are fuelling this conflict” he was speaking as one with his boss. Yet that boss, who has consistently asked for evidence that intervention will not make things worse, and when offered it has consistently been unconvinced, now finds himself on the brink of an intervention whose effects are unknowable.
From the print edition: Briefing
COMMENTARY
The United States as Global Cop: Arresting Consequences
The United States has injected itself into yet another volatile ethnic squabble on the other side of the world, and it’s an involvement we may all soon regret.
U.S. officials reluctantly acknowledged — after Turkish officials, including the prime minister, had already let the cat out of the bag — that Washington had tipped off Ankara that Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan was in the Greek embassy in Kenya. Turkish agents then grabbed him on his way to the airport and spirited him off to Turkey for trial. U.S. officials admitted that the arrest was the culmination of an intensive four-month effort by the U.S. and Turkish governments to snare Ocalan. American intelligence information and diplomatic pressure on countries to deny him sanctuary were the key to his capture.
Ocalan and his Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) are on the State Department’s list of terrorists. (Strangely, governments that also commit brutal repression — including allies such as Turkey — do not appear on that list.) And, in fact, over the past decade, the PKK has been one of the most active and well-financed terrorist groups in the world. The group has struck Turkish targets worldwide, including a coordinated attack against Turkish diplomatic and commercial targets in more than 30 cities in six Western European countries. But until now the PKK’s animosity has been reserved largely for the Turkish government.
What does the PKK want from Turkey? Ocalan, shortly before his capture, told an Irish journalist that he would be willing to settle for autonomy for the Kurds, rather than independence from Turkey. Not too far away, in Kosovo, the United States would consider itself fortunate indeed to get the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to settle for autonomy within Yugoslavia. But consistency in the American approach to such conflicts is nowhere to be found. Sometimes we support foreign governments in their attempts to defend internationally recognized boundaries. At other times we support rebel groups that seek to alter those boundaries.
In the disputes over Kurdistan and Kosovo, the grievances are long-standing and the antagonists on both sides have used brutal tactics. Such ethnic conflicts are spawning grounds for terrorist groups. If the United States is perceived as coercing the Kosovar Albanians into settling for autonomy rather than independence, the KLA (which has links to arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden) may begin to launch terrorist attacks against U.S. targets at home and abroad.
But as risky as our involvement in Kosovo is, meddling in the dispute between the Turks and Kurds is an even bigger blunder. The takeover of embassies and violent demonstrations all over the world (as far away as Australia) by Kurds in response to Ocalan’s arrest indicate how emotional that dispute has become. Those incidents also show the extent of the Kurdish global support network.
European governments, such as those of Germany and Italy, astutely passed up chances to become embroiled in Turkey’s domestic dispute and thus become targets for Kurdish terrorism. Unfortunately, the United States was not so adroit. The PKK funds Kurdish organizations in the United States that could become terrorist cells.
If the PKK launches a terrorist campaign against the United States, it will probably be delayed and surreptitious, much like Muammar Qaddafi’s campaign for years after President Reagan’s ill-fated bombing of Qaddafi’s complex in Tripoli in 1986. That campaign included the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988.
The United States should have also learned a lesson from Osama bin Laden’s coordinated bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The attacks were in retaliation for the well-publicized help the Central Intelligence Agency provided in the capture of Islamic militants by the Albanian government and their extradition to Egypt. Now, thanks to our ostensible ally, Turkey, the world knows the U.S. intelligence agents helped apprehend Abdullah Ocalan.
By acting literally as the world’s policeman, and helping to apprehend “terrorists” for repressive governments, the United States is effectively interjecting itself into the internal affairs of sovereign states in which it has no vital interest. Should the “terrorists” decide to bite back, we run the risk of horrific consequences. In a post-Cold War strategic environment in which even comparatively weak terrorist groups are more willing and able to use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, retaliation could be catastrophic. The U.S. government needs to ask itself whether playing the role of international cop is worth a half million dead in an American city.
Ivan Eland is the director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute.
Should America Enter Syria’s Hell?
On Saturday President Barack Obama surprised most everyone in America by making the right decision and asking Congress for authority to go to war in Syria. Now Congress should make the right decision and vote no.
One of the impacts of being a superpower is that America has interests everywhere. However, most of those interests are modest, even peripheral. Conflicts and crises abound around the globe, but few significantly impact U.S. security. So it is with Syria.
The bitter civil war obviously is a human tragedy. However, the conflict is beyond repair by Washington.
Ronald Reagan’s greatest mistake was getting involved in the Lebanese civil war, which at one point contained 25 warring factions. The U.S. invasion of Iraq sparked civil conflict which killed tens or even hundreds of thousands of civilians. Allied intervention in Libya prolonged that brutal low-tech battle and left terrorism and instability in its wake. Egypt, where America has successively backed dictatorship, democracy, and military rule, seems headed towards growing violent conflict, with the possibility of terrorism and even civil war.
Civil wars are particularly resistant to outside solution. The antagonisms run deep and there often are multiple parties, none of whom may want peace. In Syria the radical Islamists appear to be gaining influence. It is not obvious how the same government officials who have made such a mess of so many other countries would fix Syria.
Nor would the fighting likely end even if the U.S. ousted the Assad regime. Insurgent factions then likely would fight for dominance of either the whole of Syria or breakaway regions. For many rebels revenge against those backing the regime, as well as members of groups noted for their support, such as Alawites and Christians, would become a top priority. Then the U.S. would have to intervene again — or ignore the bloodletting, as it did in Kosovo when ethnic Albanians exacted retribution.
“Far from advancing U.S. security, getting involved in Syria would ensnare Americans in a completely unnecessary conflict.”
Even if nation-building in Syria wasn’t such a daunting task, the U.S. government should not risk the lives of its citizens in conflicts where Americans have no substantial stake. Policymakers have no warrant to be generous with fellow citizens’ lives. Protecting this nation, its territory, people, liberty, and prosperity, remains the highest duty for Washington.
Far from advancing U.S. security, getting involved in Syria would ensnare Americans in a completely unnecessary conflict. Damascus has neither the ability nor the interest to attack the U.S. Any attempt by the Assad government to strike, including with chemical weapons, would trigger massive retaliation — perhaps even with nuclear weapons, which are true weapons of mass destruction.
While the Assad regime theoretically could target a U.S. ally, it has no incentive to do so. After all, its very survival remains threatened by a determined insurgent challenge. Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey all are well heeled and well armed. All are capable of deterring attack.
The administration implausibly claims that striking the Syrian government would help protect Israel. However, President Bashar al-Assad is not suicidal, which he would be to attack Israel. Damascus did not even retaliate against Israel for destroying an apparent nuclear reactor. But Israel would be at risk if the Assad regime dissolves and insurgents, including radical Islamists, gained control of chemical weapon stockpiles. A more likely beneficiary of U.S. firepower would be Saudi Arabia, which has done more than any other nation to promote fundamental Islamic theology around the globe.
Some war advocates hope that hitting Damascus would weaken Iran. However, the administration has emphasized that it does not intend to actually weaken the Assad regime, making the attack a nearly purposeless gesture. Moreover, to the extent that Iran feels more isolated, it may press for tighter ties with Shia-dominated Iraq, which faces an increasing challenge from militant Sunnis. Tehran’s divided elites also likely would close ranks against any possible peaceful deal over its nuclear program, which would be the regime’s only sure guarantee of survival.
The Syrian conflict is destabilizing, but the Mideast never has been at rest. Most of the countries are artificial, created by British and French line-drawing a century ago. Most of the Arab states have been run by kleptocratic dictators, generals, and monarchs. Revolution has swept Egypt, Iran, Libya, and Tunisia while protests have shaken Bahrain. Iraq and Turkey confronted lengthy Kurdish insurgencies. Jordan forcibly suppressed Palestinian forces.
War consumed Libya and united two Yemens into one, which now could fall apart. Lebanon dissolved into years of civil war and recovered, but is threatened by Hezbollah’s dominant role. Iraq attacked Iran and conquered Kuwait, only to lose to a U.S.-led coalition. Later occupied by the U.S., Iraq dissolved into bitter internal conflict and now seems headed back in that direction. Israel has faced multiple wars with multiple opponents as well as resistance in the occupied territories.
And people worry about Syria destabilizing the Middle East?
The entire focus on chemical weapons is misguided. The travesty of the Syrian civil war is that more than 100,000 people apparently have died, not that some were killed with chemical weapons. The latter are not really weapons of mass destruction. They are difficult to deploy and not so deadly. Explained John Mueller of Ohio State University, in World War I “it took over a ton of gas to produce a single fatality. Only about two or three percent of those gassed on the Western front died. By contrast, wounds from a traditional weapon proved 10 to 12 times more likely to be fatal.” At least 99 percent of the millions of battlefield deaths in that conflict were caused by other means. Banning the weapon that killed one percent while ignoring the weapons which killed the other 99 percent exhibited a strange moral sense.
Entering yet another war against a Muslim nation in the Middle East is bound to create more enemies for America. The surest way to encourage future terrorists is to join other nations’ conflicts and kill other nations’ peoples. Washington is still fighting a traditional war in Afghanistan and “drone wars” in Pakistan and Yemen. The U.S. should avoid adding another conflict to the mix. It doesn’t matter whether Americans believe their actions to be justified. Those on the receiving end of U.S. weapons would believe otherwise.
Even if the administration is genuinely committed to only minor military action, Washington would find it hard to be only half in. The more limited the strikes, the less likely they are to achieve anything other than suggest the pretense of enforcement of the president’s “red line.” But even inconsequential missile attacks would represent increased U.S. investment in the Syrian civil war. Pressure on Washington to do more would steadily grow, with a warlike Greek Chorus intoning “U.S. credibility” at every turn.
However, concern over credibility does not warrant making a bad decision to enter an unnecessary war. American presidents routinely put U.S. credibility on the line without backing up their threats — how many times have we heard that North Korea cannot be allowed to possess nuclear weapons? However, the only policy worse than tolerating a North Korean nuclear weapon would be bombing Pyongyang.
The real lesson of President Obama’s throwaway comment on Syrian chemical weapons is that red lines should not be drawn unless they reflect overriding, even vital interests and are worth war to enforce. Other nations will respect American demands if Washington rarely issues ultimatums, and only for obviously core interests. Going to war for minimal, even frivolous stakes to enhance credibility is a fool’s bargain.
The president has placed the decision whether to go to war where it belongs, with Congress. Legislators should act on behalf of the American people, not the Obama administration. And the right decision is to keep the U.S. at peace.
Britain’s House of Commons has shown the way. After members rejected the government’s war policy, Prime Minister David Cameron observed: “it is clear to me that the British parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action. I get that and the government will act accordingly.”
President Obama needs to “get that” and his government needs to “act accordingly.”
Syria is a tragedy. But it is not America’s tragedy. Legislators should reject war with Syria.
Doug Bandow> is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
John Kerry Can’t See It, but Congress May Vote ‘No’ on Syria
On Saturday, President Obama announced that — this once — he’ll do what the Constitution commands. It doesn’t seem appropriate to praise him for that, but our standards have fallen so low that we’re now actually surprised when a president seeks congressional authorization before waging war.
Surprised — and, in some cases, outraged. “Weakest president since James Buchanan,” former Ambassador John Bolton fumed on Fox News: “Astounding! … a very foolish thing.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., was downright insulted that Obama bothered to ask for congressional imprimatur: “The president doesn’t need 535 Members of Congress to enforce his own redline.”
The Constitution’s architect, James Madison, believed that “in no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature” — but what did he know? Modern practice has been to let the Tomahawks fly, Congress be damned.
“Asking for a vote makes it a lot harder to ignore the results.”
The closest precedent to what the administration proposes in Syria is 1999’s air war over Kosovo, during which President Clinton ignored two congressional votes denying authorization, and became the first president to wage an illegal war beyond the War Powers Resolution’s 60-day time limit (with Libya in 2011, Obama became the second).
On April 28, 1999, the House voted no on declaring war 427-2, and no on authorizing the president to continue airstrikes against Serbia, 213-213. “The House is obviously struggling to find its voice,” Clinton’s National Security Council spokesman explained, “so we sort of just blew by” the House votes.
Clinton never wanted a vote; in contrast, on Saturday, Obama demanded that legislators stand and be counted: “All of us should be accountable… and that can only be accomplished with a vote.”
The growth of the Imperial Presidency, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed in his classic 1973 book on the subject, has been “as much a matter of congressional abdication as of presidential usurpation,” as legislators have ceded vast authority to the executive branch.
That’s a danger here in the Syria debate as well: The draft Authorization for Use of Military Force the White House released Saturday is appallingly broad.
There’s no “sunset clause,” and ground troops aren’t ruled out. It neither limits the president to striking Syrian forces, nor bans strikes outside Syria — it’s loose enough, as Harvard’s Jack Goldsmith points out, to allow the president to wage war against Iran or Hezbollah in Lebanon, so long as “he determines” there’s some connection to WMD in Syria.
“A president will interpret an AUMF for all it is worth, and then some,” Goldsmith cautions. Indeed, the last two administrations have used the post-Sept. 11 AUMF to justify unrestricted surveillance, drone strikes against American citizens, and other actions never contemplated by Congress. In this case, why take the risk?
On Saturday, Obama maintained he has authority to act without Congress, and Secretary of State John Kerry echoed that claim the next day: “He has the right to do that, no matter what Congress does.”
Still, asking for a vote makes it a lot harder to ignore the results. Clinton had already been bombing Serbia for a month when House refused authorization for the air war in 1999. A “no” vote in this case won’t be “blown by” nearly so easily.
“You have to win the vote. You have to win,” a panicky senior administration official told the Wall Street Journal Saturday. “House Republicans are poised to say no on Syria,” the Washington Examiner reported Monday; “I may be wrong, but I don’t think the votes are even close,” said Rep. David Nunes, R-Calif.
Kerry says he “can’t contemplate” that Congress would say no. He better start.
Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of The Cult of the Presidency.
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