An Excuse for Syrian ‘Regime Change’?

[marmar]

from Consortium News:


An Excuse for Syrian ‘Regime Change’?
May 2, 2013

Across Official Washington – including the neocon Washington Post and “liberal” MSNBC – pundits are demanding U.S. intervention in the Syrian civil war. But the furor over alleged use of chemical weapons represents just the latest dubious argument for regime change, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

By Paul R. Pillar


Once again people are getting spun up over elusive details about what a Middle Eastern regime is or is not doing regarding unconventional weapons. Participants in public debates over policy get seized with questions such as the significance of a soil sample or whether certain victims of Syria’s civil war had dilated pupils.

People wait with bated breath on whatever else intelligence can tell us about such things. It is as if the wisdom, or lack of it, of intervening in that civil war hinges on whether a particular regime has made use, however small, of a particular category of weapon. It doesn’t.


[font size="1"]A map of Syria showing roughly the areas under the control of the competing forces: red for pro-Assad forces; green for anti-Assad forces; yellow for Kurdish forces.[/font]

Much has been said about avoiding mistakes that were made over a decade ago in leading up to the Iraq War. Certainly we should try to avoid repeating mistakes. But the biggest mistake that is being made now — and repeats a fundamental mistake in the public discourse prior to the Iraq War — is not an interpretation of evidence regarding somebody’s unconventional weapons but instead is the false equating of an empirical question about weapons with the policy question of whether launching, or intervening in, a particular war makes sense.

Whether Saddam Hussein did or did not have WMD turned out to be one of the less important realities about the Iraq War. Even if everything that was said on this subject to sell the war turned out to be true, the human and material cost of the war would have been just as great (maybe even greater, if Saddam’s forces had possessed and used such weapons), the post-Saddam political and security situation in Iraq would have been just as much of a mess, and launching the war still would have been a blunder. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2013/05/02/an-excuse-for-syrian-regime-change/