Syria: The Story Thus Far
This my impression. Everyone has their own impression. The statements of fact herein are (or should be) vanilla matters of fact. No tin-foil. The value judgments and opinions are, I hope, plainly value judgments and opinions.
A couple of years ago the "Arab Spring" sprung on Syria with an insurgency that started along the Jordanian border. Ophthalmologist turned world-leader Assad sent very mixed signals, promising reforms and ruthless repression. The thing grew into a civil war with break-away regions and defections of Sunni military people and other big-shots wanting to replace the Alawites (Syrian Shia, essentially) minority rule.
The Syrian civil war is incredibly dangerous for the region. Syria is a player, aligned with Iran, a Russian client, neighbor to Israel and Lebanon, and Jordan and Turkey and Iraq. (For those keeping score - respectively, America's untouchable ally, a nice country riven by a series of conflicts including a war between Israel and Hezbollah, an oil poor Arab nation that we are on good terms with, our regional Frankenstein, and a NATO ally.)
Interested parties started getting involved in the Syrian conflict, which became more and more a Sunni vs. Shia deal. Aide and fighters flowed in from the Turkish and Jordanian (and Iraqi) borders. Jihadis left places like Iraq and Libya to get in on the action. Saudi Arabia and Egypt want Assad gone. Etc..
What I call "Institutional America" took an interest. That portion of our foreign policy spectrum between Obama and McCain, which is not really that much of a gap, truth be told.
We set in motion policies of arming rebels and the CIA training rebels. This was an intervention in the war, of course, in that gray area where proxy wars are fought. (We didn't fight against Chinese boots on the ground in Vietnam, but we had no illusions as to whether China was involved in Vietnam.)
Okay... so now the USA is supporting the fight to oust Assad. And Assad launches avery large nerve gas attack. Only the latest of many such attacks, but this one was really big. Some large number of people died. (Obviously not the 1,429 Obama claims, of course. That number is just stupid in its precision, and seems to fail to differentiate people killed in a huge explosives-and-gas artillery attack in terms of how many died from nerve gas specifically.)
We had said nerve gas was a red line. Assad had ramped up the pace of the war. (Ignore the 'rebels launched the gas attack' distraction/koolade. It was Syrian government forces.) Our previous fantasy of time being on our side imploded. To be there to shape the final collapse of Syria meant we had to establish whatever control we seek fast.
So we decided to take out Syria's air-force in retaliation for the nerve gas.
And we made up THE DUMBEST STORY EVER about how we wanted to take out Syria's air-force as an abstraction of international convention, having nothing to do with the fact that we happened to have just begun a policy of 'lethal assistance' to rebel forces only weeks earlier.
Nobody bought it because it made. No. Sense.
So the thing was kicked to Congress an the entire theory of the thing flipped 180 degrees. No longer a limited attempt to drop some bombs without affecting the civil war, it became all about Assad must go, now. (Which it always was, so the new harder line is more candid.) The target list started growing and rebel assistance started expanding. Now the US military (rather than CIA) will be doing the rebel training, and hurting Assad's side tactically and strategically an open goal of the targeting.
I do not know if Obama or Kerry can recovery from the pure WTF!!?? of the disingenuous mess that was the initial Syrian missile strike roll-out (pre-going to congress), so the policy is in danger in Congress. The feigned neutrality jetisoned, the cost of getting the McCain types (bellicose partisanship in the civil war) alienates everyone else.
As to whether we should bomb Syria, I find myself in an odd mode of analysis. If we are to intervene in a civil war then we might as well intervene effectively, so I do not think the missile strikes are really the policy to examine most closely.
If our military is to be handing bombs to people in Jordan and training them how to use them and pointing them toward Damascus, that seems a circuitous and peril-fraught way to get explosives to Damascus when we have all these very accurate missiles under our direct control.
So if arming and training and providing intel to rebels is a no-brainer than the missile strikes kind of make sense, and don't cross any real new moral line. (The reductio ad absurdum of a moral bright line between assisting rebels versus launching cruise missiles would be, what if we gave the rebels the cruise missiles and told them what coordinates to punch in? Would that be assisting the rebels or us launching cruise missiles?)
On the other hand, if arming and training rebels is too much intervention then of course the missile strikes are too much intervention. A big Duh there.
There is probably a Goldilocks view that arming and training rebels but not giving those rebels air-support is "just right." Kind of a "Bay of Pigs" approach.
(There is no paradox in opposing a policy while holding it insufficient. I was entirely and absolutely opposed to invading Iraq AND I thought that if we did invade, we should have sent more troops than we were planning for.)
As with many things in our politics, the "reasonable" view is perhaps the silliest. Staying out entirely has a lot going for it. Deciding the outcome with intervention has its points, since the outcome is very important. Just fucking around with the thing to keep our hand in has no obvious merit at all except being the maximum that can be sold to the public... the elusive "just right."
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