The Road to War

View 787 Tuesday, August 27, 2013

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

President Barrack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

“Build your enemy a golden bridge to retreat across.”

The Art of War

Sun Tzu

It has become breaking news and hard to follow, but one thrust is clear: the neo-cons and Secretary Kerry seem determined to involve the United States in the Syrian war. There has been no suggestion of what would get us out of the war once we are in it.

The provocation is about 100 civilians killed by war gas. The death of those civilian Syrians could not have been very useful to Bashar al-Assad, and thus he would have had to be a very stupid man to have ordered their use against that target: if you are going to cross a line in the sand, you don’t do it by spitting across it.

In the old days it was traditional for major powers to demonstrate their serious intentions by bombarding a port of a minor nation that wasn’t paying sufficient tribute to the major power. A warship would pull into the harbor and bombard the fort. Tomahawk missiles are I suppose the modern equivalent except that we will be bombarding cities far inland. Drone warfare with a vengeance. If we are fortunate the result will not exceed more than 200 civilian casualties. We will be certain there will be some, and that there will be a teddy bear in the wreckage shown on world television.

The news states that we are doing target selection, and trying to involve others in the fight, to include Turkey. Is this an invocation of NATO against Russia? I don’t know of any formal alliance between Russia and Syria; there is nothing like WTO involved.

We seem on a track to war. Not to effect a regime change – after all both Kerry and Mrs. Clinton have said that Bashar al-Assad is more liberal than his father and at one time they seemed to prefer him to the rebels who slaughter Christians – but to “punish” Syria for using war gas. And we have decided that he has used them, in the most ineffective way he could have used them, for no military purpose whatever.

I’m waiting for the TV image of the teddy bear on the wreckage from an American bombardment.

Syria and the "third possibility that nobody counted upon"

Jerry

I recall listening to the “Entire Massacree” of Alice’s Restaurant some 45 years ago, and many times since. Aside from inspiring me to visit the village of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the song had a line in it I have never forgotten:

"There was a third possibility that nobody had counted upon."

I thought of that while pondering the recent chemical attack in Syria. Seemingly everybody wants to blame the government, but the government denies they made the attack. As chemical attacks go, it was pretty small. Would the Assad government risk US intervention over so small an attack? I haven’t heard that any strategic assets were being threatened. It just seems like a random attack. Who would do such a thing?

There are four major factions in Syria – one government and three separatist groups. I think the Kurds had nothing to do with this. It seems unlikely the Assads would have much to gain from this attack. The quantity of gas used in the attack seems to fit the resources of someone who had captured that supply from government stores, not the government itself. Could this be an example of the jihadists attacking secular rebels and civilians with captured gas?

Ed

I find a false flag operation far more probable than that Bashar ordered an ineffective gas attack just so he could be accused of using them.

Jerry,

I am speaking as someone who has professional experience and knowledge obtained from professional contacts but no access to specific intelligence.

1. I am mortally convinced that Saddam had chemical weapons, to include non-conventional chemical weapons. Based on information I’ve seen, a portion was likely transferred to Syria by Saddam, a portion was disposed of by Saddam’s forces, and a portion was disposed of by other means. I can’t confirm any of this, but I have seen too much evidence – virtually all open source – just short of confirmation to believe otherwise. I can speculate on sound reasons why the government would suppress such information, even to the political embarrassment of President Bush.

2. Regarding the current Syrian exercise: I am going back to your original comment: who did it. This looks like an attack mostly against civilians in a rebel-held zone, and the casualties appear to be mostly non-combatants. Kerry is blaming Assad, but it could as easily be a false flag operation intended to force the US in against the Assad regime. Given the previous round of emails-essays about Muslim Brotherhood involvement in US politics, I am forced to the belief that the current Administration is supporting the false flag.

A

It would be far better for the United States to be thought feckless for assuming this was not done by Assad than to have us involved in yet one more perpetual war for perpetual peace. We have plenty of work for the armed forces without killing Syrians in Syria.

WMDs in Iraq

Dr. Pournelle,

I have to toss the "BS flag" when anyone says that no one found any sort of VX, Sarin, or whichever sort of nerve agent in Iraq. I personally met soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division that not only stumbled upon bunkers of 55 gallon drums full of it, they had to go through the complete decontamination procedures, to include the extra long swabs rammed up into their sinuses and all other orifices. Painful to say the least.

I’m sure that, for whatever reason, our military was directed to report that no WMDs were found. I cannot come up with any good reason why this was so, but suffice to say, that statement is not correct. I lump it in the same category with the stories from Vietnam when our military claimed that Agent Orange had no side effects and from the Gulf War, as is still maintained that Saddam did not use chemical weapons on our soldiers, even though the chemical detectors were repeatedly set off from the "smoke" drifting in on my unit’s positions. Our NCO told us that his direction was to wear NBC suits and masks until told otherwise.

In short, I was in Kuwait and spoke with the 4th ID chemical guys and know the people that experienced the chemo attack in the Gulf War. The all stick by their stories.

Keep up the good work,

Bill R.

But there was great incentive to show WMD and take Johnny Depp over to look at them. Along with other critics of the Iraq war. I would have thought that Bush had paladin officers out looking for any signs of WMD ready to summon the New York Times…

Syria–a DARPA challenge?

How do you disable chemical weapons from afar? What can we do neutralize the poison in the tanks? Or in the atmosphere? Put a blanket over the stockpiles? Chelate the stuff in the air? I realize that such technology might not be available right away, but looking ahead, it seems like a good investment, not only for rogue states, but also for everyone’s homeland security.

Maybe we could yet turn the whole dreadful Syria thing into a positive, if we could figure out a new way to deal with gas, before they turn some loose on closer to home.

JP

Vaporize and burn. There was considerable research on this at Edgewood in the 1960’s and I make no doubt there has been more since them. It is a messy operation and if there are a lot of chemicals the timing is crucial: the napalm has to arrive just in time to prevent the toxins from dispersing before they can burn, but after the disruption of their containers.  I have no idea whether the Navy has ever practiced such operations. They are very tricky and the chance of something going wrong and killing a lot of people is quite high.

If your own troops are threatened there are desperation operations; after all, one does not wait for the enemy to fire his machine guns if you can blow up the bunker.  But if the bunker is in the middle of an orphanage it does give pause to those who order the bombardment.

When I was a sophomore in high school I concluded from my studies that the law ought to be color blind.  Except for the Brothers at my school I was regarded as a communist. I continued in that opinion for the rest of my life, and now I am regarded as a hopeless right wing radical.  Yet I continue to believe that the law ought to be color blind.  I have a dream.

 

An 88 year old WW II vet was murdered in Spokane by two teen agers who were apparently infuriated when he defended himself, and doubtless thought he had dissed them when he didn’t plead and give them everything he had. I do not see much national outrage. http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/26/us/world-war-vet-beating-death

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/13/justice/zimmerman-it-firing/index.html