Congress is the dog that caught the car. Waco

View 788 Tuesday, September 03, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barrack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

Never do any enemy a small injury.

Niccolò Machiavelli

 

“Congress is now the dog that caught the car.”

David Axelrod on President Obama’s Syria decision, August 2013

“From the start of the Syrian uprising, these columns have called for Mr. Obama to mobilize a coalition to support the moderate rebels.

This would depose an enemy of the U.S. and deal a major blow to Iran’s ambition to dominate the region.”

Wall Street Journal Editorial, September 3, 2013

Terrific advice. Of course it requires that we identify a group of moderate rebels, and there seems to be a problem finding any who haven’t headed for the border. The only regions where Christians, Druse, atheists including Baathist socialists, and moderate Muslims are relatively safe are in the areas securely held by Bashar al-Assad’s Alawites. (For what it’s worth, the French, who ruled Syria and Lebanon under a League of Nations mandate after The Great War, considered the Alawites and Druze to be the only warlike people in their mandate.)

Prior to going into Iraq the United States was given to understand that that US troops would be greeted as liberators, and we would ride in triumph to Baghdad where we would install a government made up of moderate Muslims, many of them Iraqi exiles who would accompany our Abrams tanks (although probably riding in open limousines rather than armored vehicles). That didn’t work very well. There was a period after the initial US military victory in which we might have built a government from among Saddam’s generals who had been promised “an honorable role” in the reconstruction of Iraq. The problem was that the exiles couldn’t agree amongst themselves on a government, and the Iraqi people didn’t exactly welcome the returning exiles. And into this mess the State Department send the most incompetent pro-consul to serve in the region since Roman times.

The President asserts that he has the authority to order “punishment” of the Assad regime for its use of Sarin gas in Damascus, and the Secretary of State has made it clear that he has no doubt that the Assad government was responsible for this; thus it is clear what Congress must do. ““I can’t contemplate that the Congress would turn its back on all of that responsibility and the fact that we would have, in fact, granted impunity to a ruthless dictator to continue to gas his people,” Kerry said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Those are the stakes.”

Which has prompted the President’s political advisor David Axelrod to say that “Congress is now the dog that caught the car,” which is a good indication of the White House view of the nature of this issue: it’s political, and the important thing is not to waste a crisis.

What we do not have is any indication of just who we ought to be helping in Syria. Which side would we like to see winning?

Bashar al-Assad is winning at the moment, and he was winning before the use of Sarin. He didn’t need to use war gasses in his capital: if he wanted to exterminate the population in that neighborhood, gunpowder isn’t as efficient as Sarin, but it will do the job. As would bayonets.

The Wall Street Journal has proclaimed the Syrian issue vital to the United States: “A defeat in Congress would signal to Bashar Assad and the world’s other thugs that the U.S. has retired as the enforcer of any kind of world order.”

There are those who do not believe that the U.S. was ever the enforcer of world order – particularly when the nature of that order is obscure. Secretary Kerry is infuriated that 426 children were killed by Sarin. It is a scene of horror but we are used to scenes of horror, in the Middle East and in Africa. There is no world order to be enforced. If there were, the United Nations would be more effective. The world is not universally civilized. The regions of civil order grow and ebb. The British Empire attempted an experiment in world order. They had neither the strength nor the will to continue. There is an honorable heritage of the British Raj, but there are also bitter memories.

We are the friends of liberty everywhere. We are the guardians only of our own. Thomas Jefferson and both Presidents Adams said this at a time when the strength of the United States made it a bold but limited foreign policy. John Quincy Adams, President when the strength of the United States was growing, said “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

When Congress debates what to do about Syria, it should be very specific in what objectives it authorizes. Congress does not need permission to start a war. It has the constitutional authority to make war on anyone it likes (as did the Crown in England, at least until recently). The President has asserted his right to make war on Syria because there is a threat to US interests, and he has the authority to send in the missiles under the War Powers Act. Congress is not likely to repeal that. The President must make the case that it is vital to the security of the United States that we break things and kill people in Syria. Congress need not make the case for him, but it should not prevent his acting once he determines that it is made.

No battle plan survives contract with the enemy.

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

 

Killing children with chemical weapons…

As I understand it, Mr. Obama said:

What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price? What’s the purpose of the international system that we’ve built if a prohibition on the use of chemical weapons that has been agreed to by the governments of 98 percent of the world’s people and approved overwhelmingly by the Congress of the United States is not enforced?

Make that dozens of children instead of hundreds, and you have Waco. And at Waco there is no uncertainty as to who did the gassing. It is my understanding that Texas has no statute of limitations with respect to manslaughter, murder, and capital murder.

Charles Brumbelow

I had my say about the Waco massacre several times over the years, with a summary in The Grand Inquest of the Nation http://www.jerrypournelle.com/other/inquest.html .  That essay was published in Intellectual Capital http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/intellectual/intcap3.html.  The entire Intellectual Capital essay series remains on line.  It was mostly a series of warnings on how we have sown the wind, and alas, most of these essays need no revision.  Now they are no longer prophetic: they are a sort of I told you so.

I also ran across my essay Breaking Things and Killing People http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/intellectual/intcap1.html#4 written in Spring of 1998. I was, thankfully, wrong about how quickly the nuclear club would grow – we can thanks the Israelis for much of that – but I had a lot of other things right.

 

Succinct and on point: http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/syria/articles/20130903.aspx#startofcomments

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

Who should we support?  Or we can break things and kill people.  Who should we kill?

 

Outrage is not a strategy

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

Michael Yon hits the nail on the head, in my opinion. I honestly believe he’s this generation’s Ernie Pyle.

http://www.michaelyon-online.com/syria-outrage-is-not-a-strategy.htm

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Never do any enemy a small injury. Declare war with a stated war aim, or stay out.  Bombarding ports is a small injury.