Saturday, April 14, 2018

The Syria strike

A reminder that the US, Britain, and France have been actively involved in the Syrian civil war for years, both directly and in support of proxy forces. from Phil Stewart and Tom Perry report in U.S. says air strikes cripple Syria chemical weapons program Reuters 04/12/2018:
Russian and Iranian military help over the past three years has allowed Assad to crush the rebel threat to topple him.

The United States, Britain and France have all participated in the Syrian conflict for years, arming rebels, bombing Islamic State fighters and deploying troops on the ground to fight that group. But they have refrained from targeting Assad’s government, apart from a volley of U.S. missiles last year.

Although the Western countries have all said for seven years that Assad must leave power, they held back in the past from striking his government, lacking a wider strategy to defeat him.
The official line from the NATO powers was that it wasn't interference in the Syrian civil war. But I take that as diplomatic comma-dancing.

It's hard to say where US policy in Syria is heading. Not least because the President himself is likely clueless on what to do or not do.

Given the lack of any obvious larger strategy for the Syrian civil war by the Trump Administration, Juan Cole has some thoughts about the motivations for this particular attack. The official justification was to deter Syria from further chemical weapons use. Cole writes in Reality Show violence in the Age of Trump: Striking Syria Informed Comment 04/14/2018:
The missile attacks are for domestic politics, and perhaps to some extent a demonstration of political will to Russia and Iran. As military history they are a footnote.

Those who argue that they were necessary to show resistance to the use of chemical weapons are missing some things. The West backed Saddam Hussein’s use of chem in the Iraq-Iran War. It is hard to see why killing children with chlorine differs from the point of view of the children from killing them with bombs. Military action should be taken in accordance with international law. And, deploying missile strikes ineffectually renders them less effective politically down the road.

These strikes are like when a fistfight breaks out on the reality show Big Brother. The show will go on next week.

He also sees the current situation as a win by the Assad regime:
The United States, France and the UK lost the Syrian War to Russia and Iran. It is all over but the shouting. ...

The Tripartite missile attacks on Saturday will attrite some regime military capabilities in a small way. But since the Russian Federation’s Aerospace Forces are actually supplying the air power to defeat what is left of the rebels, the regime’s loss of some facilities won’t matter to the course of the war. I expect further Idlib and Deraa campaigns later this year, and I expect the regime over time to win them. I have to say that I’m surprised by the resiliency of the al-Assad clan. You wouldn’t have expected them easily to restore control over places like Homs (a largely Sunni Arab city with a strong Muslim Brotherhood movement). Security is no doubt fragile. But it appears that a reassertion of the regime is plausible in the short to medium term.
He also reminds us of the company we've been keeping in Syria:

The Syrian revolution of 2011 was a homegrown revolt against a regime that had already largely abandoned its socialist policies in favor of the establishment of Alawite oligarchies, which imprisoned people for the slightest criticism of the regime, and under which the proportion of people living in absolute poverty was rapidly increasing. But when the regime cleverly maneuvered the revolutionaries into allying with Muslim extremists on the battlefield, even then the CIA went on supporting the rebels. Its officials would deny it, but they were one degree of separation away from al-Qaeda, just as they had been in Afghanistan in the 1980s. And even while the US FBI and right wingers in the Senate like Ted Cruz were darkly intimating that the Muslim Brotherhood and all its offshoots are terrorist organizations, the 40 vetted groups supported by the CIA were mostly Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.

No lesson of history is ever learned in Washington, D.C.
Al Jazeera has this post-strike discussion, Will strikes deter Assad from using chemical weapons? 04/14/2018:



Joshua Landis is one of the participants. His Syria Comment blog is an important resource on foreign policy issues involving Syria.

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