The Hubris of the Syria Interventionists

[unhappycamper]

http://www.juancole.com/2013/09/hubris-syria-interventionists.html

The Hubris of the Syria Interventionists
Posted on 09/16/2013 by Juan Cole

The hawks who are deeply disappointed that diplomacy has likely forestalled a US military intervention in Syria in the foreseeable future often attempt to tug at our heart strings by pointing to the over 100,000 dead and the millions of displaced, implying that the US has a responsibility to intervene to stop the carnage on humanitarian grounds.

If the world were such that the US could in fact do so, perhaps they might have a point. The problem is that social engineering on that scale is currently beyond even a superpower. We need a humanitarian realism to forestall the utopians from taking us into quagmires. There is nothing wrong with doing good where you realistically can. Trying to do good by military means where you cannot can be deadly to both you and the victims.

Syria resembles Iraq in many respects. It is a multicultural country with 60% Sunni Arabs, 10% Kurds, 10-14% Alawite Shiites, 10-14% Christians, and smaller Twelver Shiite, Druze and Ismaili communities. Iraq is a mirror image, with a Shiite majority and a Sunni Arab minority.

~big snip~

What the US and its allies can do is improve the conditions of the 2 million Syrians displaced abroad, and try to figure ways of getting food and necessities to internally displaced noncombatants. The US hasn’t been bad on refugee aid, but it can do substantially more, as can Europe and the Arab League. Ignoring the plight of a third of the country (the DPs) while strategizing how to scramble fighter-jets is the opposite of humanitarianism.

[jakeXT]

1. No no-fly zone this time?

http://www.juancole.com/2011/03/how-the-no-fly-zone-can-succeed.html

[unhappycamper]

2. The question is:

How long can the military sling missiles against Syria BEFORE they must go to Congress for a supplemental?

The great sequestration squeeze has finally hit the DoD in near real time. There's not enough money to fund all the Navy's shipbuilding dreamz, all the Army's helicopter/hummer replacement/Ground Combat Vehicle dreamz and all the Air Forces wet dreamz of new takers/ fighter jets/drones AND blow off $1.5 million Tomahawks.

I suspect the two carrier groups we deployed to the Med for this adventure will also cause some additional problems in the Navy's budget.

Expect cries of "The sky is falling!" any time now....

[jakeXT]

3. They can sling a lot, but they were whining before this year

Defense budget analysts say weapon systems like Tomahawk cruise missiles are already in the Pentagon’s inventory, and personnel costs are on the books. The added expenses of any limited operation probably will be small enough that the Pentagon can absorb it from existing funds, which include a wartime contingency budget of $93 billion this fiscal year.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-06/obama-likely-to-avoid-congress-on-cost-of-strike-on-syria.html


WASHINGTON: While the Army can keep troops headed for Afghanistan trained up and ready to go, the ongoing budget gridlock threatens its ability to prepare for crises around the world – from North Korea to Syria – conflicts that would require a very different kind of training than the counterinsurgency tactics the force has focused on for years. That’s the warning from Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno, who added that the service might even have to submit an “unfunded requirements” wish list to Congress for the first time in years

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/05/07/gen-odierno-budget-crunch-will-render-army-unready-for-syria-or-anywhere-else/