David Bromwich again on Obama and the Syrian crisis

David Bromwich is a close scholarly observer of Obama and pays attention to his words and habits. He seems to have a dislike of the man that seeps into his writing and makes me wonder if he may not be trying a bit too hard to give a harsh reading to Obama's words and actions.

In Putin to the Rescue London Review of Books 35:18 (09/26/2013 issue; accessed 0918/2013), he discusses Obama's actions in the recent Syrian crisis. If the track to resolving the Syrian chemical weapons issue without war continues, the following will quickly drop into the memory hole. But the Obama Administration's case for what happened in the sarin gas attack of August 21 of this year was "dodgy," to recall a notorious word from the Iraq War buildup:

The unclassified four-page intelligence summary he released to the public – according to Congressman Alan Grayson, the 12-page classified document is no different in this respect – speaks from the position of 'We [the US government]'. The reason for the unusual grammar is that the document does not come from the American intelligence community. The Inter Press Service journalist Gareth Porter, piecing together the vague and generic evidence, the omissions and the grammar delivered by Kerry, reported on 9 September that the absence of the signature of James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, from the Kerry document was a significant detail. Clapper evidently had refused to sign off because the data had been cherry-picked (as Colin Powell’s had been for his UN presentation in February 2003). Kerry gave 1429 as a sure figure for the number of deaths in the August attack, but the figure is unexplained and at variance with first-hand reports: French intelligence estimated 281 deaths and Médecins Sans Frontières 355. The Kerry document was effectively discredited in less than a week, but only below the radar of the mainstream press and policy establishment. On the basis of a tissue of far-fetched inferences and assumptions, in which the most solid datum is a single radio intercept – a recording of a disturbed commander of Syrian forces given to the US by Israeli intelligence – Obama declared his intention to order an attack, and then asked Congress to authorise the use of force under wide discretion: he would be empowered to act in any way he deemed necessary to ‘respond to’, 'deter' and 'degrade' the military and defensive capabilities of the Syrian government. These are all words without a settled meaning, and they were chosen for that reason. To an amazing degree Obama's request for authorisation of September 2013 resembles Bush's request of October 2002. [my emphasis]

Bromwich notices that what Obama had proposed to do would have been a clear violation of international law:

The talk of 'punishing' Assad affected a stance of parental discipline and avoided the language of international law. This was not an accident. An attack on a sovereign state by another state that has not been attacked is a violation of international law. As for punishment, it is something a country may legally enforce on its own citizens, but it does not express a possible relation of one country to another.

He also notices what Charlie Pierce caught in Today in the March to Semi-War Esquire Politics Blog 09/06/2013, that Obama was saying we needed to attack Syria to prevent the erosion of international norms. Pierce: "Apparently, 'Norms' -- even ones about which the United States has been considerably blithe in the past -- are the latest dominoes over which to theorize."

The new Norm-ino Theory. Bromwich:

Early in the crisis, he tried to work around the law by a rhetorical stratagem: the United States and its allies, in punishing a gas attack on Syrians which had surely been ordered by Assad, would be ‘enforcing international norms’. ‘International norms’ is a phrase we are hearing a lot. A world without norms (the implication seems to be) is a world in chaos. Given the refusal of Russia to shelve its veto at the UN and take on trust French, British and American assurances that Assad ordered the attack, who will enforce such norms? Who if not the United States?

Cheney and Bush made a similar argument to invade Iraq without UN authorization, saying that we were enforcing the UN's own resolutions that the UN itself wasn't willing to enforce.

Bromwich also believes the British Parliamentary vote against war was an especially important moment in Obama's trajectory toward war: "It was only when the House of Commons voted against war that American war policy was made to hesitate. The president and his team were deeply discouraged by that vote."

And Bromwich also notes that the Administration offered very different notions to the public of what kind of military action he would be undertaking:

Even so, in the first week of September, Obama and Kerry appeared to stand behind both the ambitious and the minimal versions of their meditated attack. A decisive and damaging strike lasting many days: that was the version apparently offered by the president to Graham and McCain. On the other hand, the strike envisaged by Kerry, in remarks to the British press on 9 September, would encompass 'a very limited, very targeted, short-term effort ... That is exactly what we are talking about doing – unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.' The confusion didn't rest there; as recently as his speech to the nation on 10 September, Obama contradicted Kerry and said the attack would not be only a pinprick, adding gravely: 'The United States military doesn't do pinpricks.' (emphasis in original)

He does not mention the Syria war resolution that cleared the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which authorized a more expansive kind of action that what most people would think of as "a very limited, very targeted, short-term effort."

Tags: david bromwich, chemical weapons, preventive war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

Finally, somebody says why the August 21 sarin gas attack in Syria is a war crime

For the first time since President Obama started threatening to bomb Syria over chemical weapons attacks, this is the first thing I've seen that actually says why Syria using chemical weapons inside Syria is a crime under international law (not every bad act is).

From UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's statement yesterday: "The Secretary-General condemns in the strongest possible terms the use of chemical weapons and believes that this act is a war crime and grave violation of the 1925 Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare and other relevant rules of customary international law."

In all the articles I've read about the Syria crisis, this is the first time I've seen that actually spelled out. Syria was not a signatory at the time of the August 21 attack to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), the 1990s agreement of which all but a few countries are part. Egypt is also not a signatory. Israel signed the convention but has never ratified it.

The seven non-member states listed as of this writing at the website of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the international body that administers the CWC, also include Angola, Myanmar/Burma (signed but not ratified), North Korea, South Sudan and Syria. Syria is currently in the process of joining the CWC as part of the diplomatic deal with the Russians that defused the war crisis for the moment.

Robert Fisk writes in There is something deeply cynical about this chemical weapons ‘timetable’ The Independent 09/15/2013:

The world, I suspect, is not totally convinced that the regime was responsible for using chemical weapons in Ghouta on 21 August – though I bet the Russians know who did. Now we've got rebels chopping off prisoners' heads, I'm not sure what scruples they'd have about using sarin. But it was interesting to see the Syrian government agreeing to put their chemical weapons in international hands – I couldn't help noticing that they didn't demand the same of the insurgents... (ellipsis in original)

Tags: chemical weapons, preventive war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

Before the latest Syria crisis heads to the memory hole ... (Updated)

The Syria crisis that was resolved for the moment by the US agreeing to the diplomatic track proposed by Russia was quite a ride. It was like a condensed version of the run-up to the Iraq War, only this time with a happier ending, as of now. Ray McGovern describes it this way in How War on Syria Lost Its Way Consortium News 09/14/2013:

The just announced U.S.-Russia agreement in Geneva on a “joint determination to ensure the destruction of the Syrian chemical weapons (CW) program in the soonest and safest manner” sounds the death knell to an attempt by Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia to get the U.S. into the war in Syria.

Equally important, it greatly increases the prospect of further U.S.-Russia cooperation to tamp down escalating violence in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. That the two sides were able to hammer out in three days a detailed agreement on such highly delicate, complicated issues is little short of a miracle. I cannot remember seeing the likes of it in 50 years in Washington. [my emphasis]

Before our mainstream media move on to other bright and shiny objects like the latest Miley Cyrus publicity stunt, I want to mention some key points that I would hate to see get lost about this incident.

One is the significance of Britain refusing to go along, with the Parliament rejecting the participation with the US that Prime Minister David Cameron had proposed, and Cameron deciding to follow Parliament's wishes. It's an interesting development in European politics, as well, because the UK has previously been willing to follow the US in even such a disastrous adventure as the Iraq War even when many of its European partners were opposed. British support has been especially helpful to the US in the past, not least because British leaders are good at and very experience in about presenting a case for military action to the American public. Britain in generally perceived by Americans as a long-standing ally. Support from France or Germany doesn't have quite the same cachet.

I suspect we'll find out eventually that this was a major factor in Obama's decision making in that Syrian crisis.

Another is the fact that the United States has been actively supporting Syrian rebels for some time. America's involvement in Syria is not only about chemical weapons.

Obama acknowledged in his interview with George Stephanopoulos on This Week of 09/15/2013:

... there are radical elements in the opposition – including folks who are affiliated with al-Qaeda, who, if they got their hands on chemical weapons, would have no compunction using them in Syria or outside of Syria.

And part of the reason why we've been so concerned about this chemical weapons– issue is because we don't want – those folks gettin' chemical weapons, anymore than we want Assad to have chemical weapons. ...

What this is about is how do we make sure that we don’t have the worst weapons in the hands, either of a murderous regime, or– in the alternative, some elements of– the opposition– that– are as opposed to the United States– as they are to Assad.

But backing rebel forces isn't a speculative future program. It's already happening, although in theory we're vetting those receiving assistance to make sure they aren't "al-Qaeda." Jim White discusses the aid in the dramatically titled US: "Never Mind That Guy Eating a Heart, We Have Handwritten Receipts For the Guns" Emptywheel 09/13/2013.

Third is the vagueness with which issues of international law were discussed by politicians and the media, so far as I observed. There seems to be a near-complete consensus that the use of poison gas by the Syrian government against its own citizens would be a crime in international law. Obama repeated it again in his Stephanopoulos interview. (Do I even need to say that Stephanopoulos didn't press him on the point?) But not every heinous action is a violation of international law. The discussion largely focused on the political feasibility and practical problems of the proposed action, which are obviously hugely important questions. The fact that for the United States or any other country to attack a country which had not attacked it is illegal, unless the country being attacked presented an imminent threat or the UN had authorized the intervention, was scarcely discussed at all. (I'm genuinely uncertain on the question of whether use of poison gas by a non-signatory state to the Chemical Weapons Convention, as Syria was at the time of the August 21 attack, is on its face a violation of international law. Presumably targeting non-combatants would be a crime of murder under Syrian law.)

{Update 09/17/2013: From UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's statement yesterday: "The Secretary-General condemns in the strongest possible terms the use of chemical weapons and believes that this act is a war crime and grave violation of the 1925 Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare and other relevant rules of customary international law."}

Fourth is the war resolution itself that was approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It authorized the President to do far more than just make a couple of limited bombing strikes. It authorized up to three months of warmaking on Syria, essentially at the President's discretion. It banned the use of US troops in Syria - "boots on the ground" in the current jargon - only "for the purpose of combat operations", which leaves a lot of leeway for US troops in Syria to do "training." It established as a policy goal of establishing "a democratic government in Syria," though it did specify getting there through "a negotiated settlement." It also specified several groups of the Syrian opposition that it would be the policy of the US to support, even with "all forms of assistance," whatever that hair-raising phrase might mean. Some better reporting and wider public discussion on the meaning of that resolution would have been more than appropriate.

We should learn more from the UN report that should be coming out soon about the incident itself. Based on what I've heard, it seems plausible and even likely that the Assad regime was behind the attack. The UN investigators are not tasked with determining who gave the orders, only with reporting on the facts of the attack itself. Gareth Porter made an interesting catch in his report, Obama's Case for Syria Didn’t Reflect Intel Consensus Inter Press Service 09/09/2013.

And we'll probably hear more on the "isolationism" meme. Jim Lobe does a reality-check in U.S. Public-Elite Disconnect Emerges Over Syria Inter Press Service 09/14/2013. It's clear that the Obama Administration has some real credibility problems on foreign policy that were displayed by the Syria crisis, and not just with people who think he's the Islamic Antichrist. Ray McGovern discussed some of those in Time to Reveal US Intel on Syria Consortium News 09/09/25013.

Tags: chemical weapons, preventive war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

The Syria situation after Obama's Tuesday speech

There are lots of questions that I have about the whole Syrian situation.

First, there is the sentence at the start of President Obama's Address to the Nation on Syria yesterday. "In that time, America has worked with allies to provide humanitarian support, to help the moderate opposition, and to shape a political settlement." (my emphasis)

In other words, we're taking sides in the Syrian civil war. There has been some reporting in the mainstream press providing glimpses of this. But this should really be a core part of the discussion, whether the subject is Dead Babies propaganda or chemical weapons negotiations.

Yes, propaganda can be true, and in fact the best propaganda is based on reality. But if we want to understand wars, we also have to understand how the propaganda functions.

Anti-German Dead Baby propaganda postcard from the First World War

Most people now look at the First World War as a gigantic, mindless slaughter. But millions of English and French soldiers were sent to the front fired up with anti-German war atrocity propaganda. There is little doubt that if the political elites on all sides in 1914 had showed a minimum of good sense and decent human judgment, they could have avoided having the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand turn into a world disaster that set the stage for an even bigger round of carnage two decades later. Avoiding these things means that people have to use their heads.

Another question is, doesn't securing Syria's chemical weapons require a sustained ceasefire in the civil war, a ceasefire that would presumably not be advantageous to the hopes of our friends "the moderate opposition." As Karen Weise explains in Risky Business of Destroying Chemical Weapons Bloomberg Businessweek 09/11/2013, you don't just flush these things down the kitchen sink.

Jim White writes (Journalists Grope Blindly Around Syria CW Destruction Without Discovering Need for Ceasefire Emptywheel 09/11/2013):

In my post yesterday morning on the French move to submit a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for Syria to surrender its chemical weapons to an international group for their safe destruction, I noted that this process naturally would require an immediate ceasefire. My underlying assumption was that the need for a ceasefire would be obvious to anyone giving the situation any thought. Personnel will need to move freely about the country to find and log the materials that will need to be destroyed. These materials will need to be moved to central locations for incineration or chemical processing to render them safe. If the personnel and the dangerous materials they will be transporting are attacked indiscriminately, the risk of releasing huge quantities of very dangerous agents looms large and the very process of trying to prevent civilian deaths could instead to lead to widespread lethal exposure. ...

Yes, there are many different factions on the "rebel" side in this conflict, but even brief investigation shows that many of them are actually proxies for several of the foreign powers that claim to have “interests” in Syria. A UN resolution that has at its heart a ceasefire would be a huge step toward showing that all of the various countries supporting militias in Syria intend to provide the opportunity for safe destruction of what could be the third largest repository of chemical weapons in the world. Although a truly international force of armed peacekeepers likely will be needed, sending them in without a ceasefire already negotiated would make the whole process of rounding up and destroying the chemical weapons a recipe for a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions.

Of course, a true optimist would note that a ceasefire would open the door to discussions to defuse political tensions within Syria while the process of destroying the chemical weapons is carried out. That would of course thwart those whose real objective is regime change in Syria through violent means but would perhaps create the opportunity for peaceful regime change. Is the world finally ready to give peace a chance after twelve years of unfocused rage? [my emphasis]

In President Obama’s Doubtful Grounds for Military Action against Syria Informed Comment 09/11/20132, Juan Cole has the following international-law observations:

I don’t disagree that units of the Syrian military deployed chemical weapons against rebellious populations in the outskirts of Damascus, and that this serious breach of international law deserves condign punishment. However, leaked intelligence has raised questions about from how high in the government the command came, and it is possible that a local rogue commander exceeded his orders out of panic at a rebel advance. If Syria really could be referred to the International Criminal Court for this incident, it is not clear to me that prosecutors could get a conviction of President Bashar al-Assad. (Syria cannot be so referred at least so far, because the ICC only has jurisdiction if a country has signed the Rome Statute that created the court. The only way to get around this restriction is for the UN Security Council to forward a case to the ICC, which can be done even for non-signatories, as with Gaddafi’s Libya. Russia and China so far, however, have kept Syria from being so forwarded at the UNSC).

I would like to think that deploying poison gas against one's own population in a civil war would be illegal. But as I mentioned in a previous post, it's not clear to me, horrible as it is, that the action is actually illegal for Syria in the situation in question.

He warns that the Arab Awakening has reshaped the political game board for American actions in the Middle East: "Public opinion now matters in a way it did not used to, and getting making a whole generation anti-American is a definite risk."

In my understanding, the use of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not war crimes in 1945. But the points he makes here are important:

The third idea, that the US is 'exceptional’ and bears a special responsibility to intervene in Syria after the chemical weapons use seems to me not only incorrect but extremely dangerous. The US is a country like any other, and certainly no more virtuous than most others. It blithely polished off 200,000 Japanese women, children and noncombatant men at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Some were made into shadows on the wall as their bodies carbonized. Thousands suffered from lingering cancer afterwards. No US official was ever so much as reprimanded for this war crime, which was carried out at a time when Japanese had been dehumanized and demonized with the worst sort of racism. The atomic bombs did not hasten the end of the war; the Russian advance into Manchuria did that. One could go on with US infractions against international law and shameless killing of innocents, from the Philippines to Nicaragua to Vietnam.

The US helped craft the UN Charter in hopes of deterring ‘exceptional’ naked aggression, making it illegal to attack another country except in self-defense or with UN Security Council authorization. I am not unsympathetic to the idea that the UNSC is broken, and that partisan uses of the veto by the five permanent members warp and deform it, rendering it useless in cases such as Syria. Some have argued that a set of multilateral organizations could legitimately do an end run around the UNSC in such cases of paralysis, where the fate of thousands or hundreds of thousands weighed in the balance.

But in the instance of Syria, the US has no multilateral support for military action, not the Arab League, not the European Union, not NATO. Nada. [my emphasis]

I would say that it would be more realistic to say that the combination of the atomic bombs and the Russian invasion brought about the surrender. But the Russian invasion was effectively airbrushed out of Cold War remembrances of the end of the Pacific War in the US.

Peter Beinart caught something in Obama's speech that struck me as well, a problem presented by the level of threat inflation in which he and his Administration have indulged over Syria (Obama Fails to Make the Sale on Syria Bloomberg Businessweek 09/10/2013):

In his speech Tuesday night on Syria, President Obama — as is his tendency — tried to have it both ways. And it didn’t work. On one hand, he tried to argue that Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons could endanger Americans. If unpunished, he claimed, Assad’s actions might create a world in which "our troops would again face the prospect of chemical warfare on the battlefield" or Iran would be more emboldened to build a nuke that could threaten the United States. If we "stop children from being gassed to death" in Syria, he argued, we "make our own children safer over the long run."

But Obama's national security argument sounded like a Rube Goldberg-machine. Would Syria’s use of chemical weapons against defenseless civilians really increase the likelihood of an enemy using chemical weapons against American troops, who could respond with massive force? After all, Obama himself admitted that "the Assad regime" — chemical weapons and all — "does not have the ability to seriously threaten our military." Likewise, in a half-sentence, Obama claimed that permitting Assad's chemical weapons attack would embolden Iran to build a bomb, but he never bothered to explain why. [my emphasis]

But Stephen Walt came up with my favorite comment so far on the current situation (Flying Down to Rio Foreign Policy 09/10/2013):

As for Syria, one should not be churlish and cavil about the possibility of a diplomatic breakthrough that gets Obama and Kerry out of the corner they painted themselves into. The path by which we got here wasn't pretty, but as Lefty Gomez said, "I'd rather be lucky than good." Or as Bismarck famously noted, there's a special providence that "looks after drunkards, fools, and the United States of America." We've some ways to go before the chemical weapons issue is resolved, of course, and this is at best a first step toward ending the grinding civil war in Syria, but realists take what we can get in this imperfect world. Right now, this deal looks better than bombing Syria to no good purpose or having Congress in visible revolt against Obama's handling of the whole matter.

Tags: chemical weapons, preventive war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

Postponing an attack on Syria: what does the moment mean?

I would rather be posting about other stuff than a possible US intervention in Syria.

But wars are important. And this time we can celebrate not having one, at least for the moment.

Joan Walsh puts in this way in Diplomacy wins — for now Salon 09/11/2013:

Eerily, on the 12th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, people who argued about the Syria nightmare in good faith can all declare victory, for now. Those of us who insisted that the U.S. should exhaust all diplomatic possibilities before military action were right – and now we’re going to have a chance to see where diplomacy can go. Conventional wisdom said the U.N. Security Council was a dead end given Russia’s veto power — but now both the Security Council and Russia are engaged.

On a strictly realist basis, she's probably also right about this:

Certainly U.S. and global opposition to military intervention in Syria helped get us here, but I can’t say Obama's promise to use force didn't play a role as well. In the last few days Syria has not only admitted to possessing weapons for the first time, but Assad is promising to join the international Chemical Weapons Convention. I don't have any reason to believe either thing would have happened, this week, without the threat of force.

As I said yesterday, if taking credit for being a macho, macho man gives Obama a way to back off from an unnecessary and highly risky war, also an illegal one, that's fine with me.

Beltway Village foreign policy, short course:

But also in the realist spirit, we should add there that it was the stunning failure of the Obama Administration to generate support in Congress, in the international community or among the American public that created an opening for this peace initiative to have a chance.

Joan also observes:

Personally I think one of the most important factors in the surprising events of the last few days was the president going to Congress. Since antiwar public opinion forced the president to do that, I give a lot of credit to antiwar public opinion. And since it was the president who decided to go to Congress, when he believes he didn't have to, I give him credit, too. I guess it's clear I think the search for credit and blame is useless right now, as well as divisive.

I believe Obama's going to Congress must be a main thing Gene Lyons has in mind when he writes in Obama Gives Democracy A Chance In Syrian Crisis National Memo 09/11/2013 (which he says on Facebook that he completed before Obama's speech): "It's not necessary to think that President Obama has performed brilliantly throughout this debacle to suspect that next time around it's going to be much harder for an action-hero president to stampede the country into war."

And he continues, "As a corollary, hawkish politicians will find it more difficult to intimidate skeptics by questioning their patriotism."

He also notes what a difference a decade or so can make:

Ten years ago, fools were pouring Bordeaux wine into gutters and ordering "freedom fries" because the French urged the Bush administration to let U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq do their work. Ten years ago, American agents were kidnapping suspected terrorists and delivering them into Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's dungeons to be tortured. Ten years ago, "diplomacy" was a dirty word, a synonym for cowardice.

Ten years ago, President Bush, having promised to put his case against Saddam Hussein to a vote in the UN Security Council, reneged on that vow, ordered weapons inspectors busily finding no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to clear out, and commenced his "shock and awe" bombing campaign. The "embedded" American news media treated the subsequent invasion like the world’s largest Boy Scout Jamboree.

These days, diplomacy gets more respect. Most Americans hope for the success of a French-sponsored Security Council resolution transferring custody of Syria's arsenal of chemical weapons to international monitors. The numbers in a recent New York Times poll reflect a massive change in public opinion. Six out of ten Americans oppose bombing Syria. Sixty-two percent say the United States should avoid taking the lead role in solving foreign conflicts.
[my emphasis]

I see Joan Walsh has also noticed how illegal it would be for the United States to begin a war with Syria when that country has not attacked the United States:

The pause in the charge to war is welcome, even if the charge to diplomacy has its own problems. The Russians are reportedly blocking a Security Council resolution proposed by the French; post-speech cable news analysis made a lot of this, as though a military strike would be a cakewalk, in the words of GOP hawks in 2003. Of course there are plenty of obstacles to a negotiated settlement – including the Syrian rebels. Let’s remember they were the ones who rejected talks with Assad proposed by Kerry and his Russian counterpart in July. This is a mess.

But at least for now, diplomacy won, and whatever it took, it’s a surprising and welcome development. Though Obama still insists the U.S. will stand up to Syria to enforce international sanctions against chemical weapons, a unilateral strike against Syria would itself violate international law. With the ongoing unexpected engagement of Russia, we have a chance at assembling an international coalition to enforce international law. It’s a sobering place to be on another Sept. 11. [my emphasis]

I should mention here that I've been assuming that the international law governing the use of chemical weapons applies to Syria, even though Syria has not yet ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) that defines it. And it does look to me like that would be the case with use of chemical weapons by Syria against another country.

There's a cynical European saying, "Wars are God's way of teaching Americans geography." They are also a way of teaching us something about international law. I remember learning for the first time during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s when international attention focused on the Serbian "rape camps" in Bosnia-Herzogovia, that soldiers raping civilians was not a war crime. Not every horrible or immoral thing is illegal, and that's more true of international law than national.

We've been hearing the stories for days now, including in Obama's speech last night, about children being horribly killed by poison gas in Syria.

But our lazy press doesn't seem much interested in fishing out whether using poison gas in an internal civil war is illegal in international law. The non-UN Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPVW) is the international agency charged with enforcing the CWC. Just after the August gas attack in Syria, they issued a statement in their director's name that was obviously carefully worded (08/23/2013):

The OPCW Director General, Ambassador Ahmet Üzümcü, is gravely concerned about the latest allegations of use of chemical weapons in suburban Damascus reportedly resulting in tragic loss of innocent civilian lives. Any use of chemical weapons is abhorrent and stands fully condemned by the international community as embodied in the Chemical Weapons Convention and underlined in its near universal acceptance. [my emphasis]

To my non-specialist eye, CWC Article 1's prohibition of the use of chemical weapons does seem to mean they would be banned for internal use, not just in international warfare. But 1.5 also says, "Each State Party undertakes not to use riot control agents as a method of warfare." How big a loophole is that? I genuinely don't know.

And Syria has not yet ratified the CWC. Even if the Convention does ban their use internally to a country, would that apply to a non-signatory power like Syria was in August? I don't know.

To close, I don't claim to see the Owl of Minerva. (From Hegel's "Preface" to the Philosophy of Right: "When philosophy paints its gray on gray, then has a form of life grown old, and with gray on gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known; the Owl of Minerva first takes flight with twilight closing in.")

But I am struck by how the warmongering from the White House that was being faithfully and superficially transmitted by the compliant mainstream press fell flat in its actual effects this time as far as swaying public opinion. I would like to think this is a sign that despite non-stop fear mongering from our vastly bloated national security establishment that we may have finally reached the post-"post 9/11" era when it comes to foreign wars and public opinion.

Tags: chemical weapons, preventive war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

Attacking Syria: no better than "the least bad option"?

Aaron David Miller in an article apparently prepared before the Russian peace initiative flurry of yesterday and today, Can Obama Afford Not to Bomb Syria? Foreign Policy 09/09/2013, expresses great skepticism that attacking Syria is a good idea and is unconvinced by the argument that not attacking Syria is likely to have some significantly bad consequence for the US:

Let's face it. Obama's in a real box. He's got bad options on Syria, he doesn't have a lot of support, and he faces the very real prospect that this situation won't end happily for him. Even the least bad option -- the one that falls in the middle between not acting and acting too expansively -- is a dog's lunch. A limited military strike -- even one that falls on the tougher end of the limited continuum -- isn't likely to have much of an impact. And that raises the very real possibility that not acting won't make all that much difference.

Having supported the president's willful and wise decision to avoid militarizing the U.S. role in Syria for the past two years, I find myself struggling with bad options now. Doing nothing is unacceptable in the face of the largest single deployment of chemical weapons since Saddam gassed the Kurds; doing everything to change the battlefield balance is reckless and will ensure too much ownership of a Syrian problem we can't fix. And that leaves the muddle in the middle.

If I were in government -- a land where "doing something" is a built-in part of the job description -- I'd be tempted to go with the limited strike option.

But I have no illusions. When you're selling the least bad option as a strategic and consequential move, you know you have a problem. The international community knows that the kind of military action the United States is contemplating is no solution and could make matters worse; the American people know it; much of Congress knows it; and I suspect Barack Obama knows it, too. If the president ends up acting militarily against Syria, he knows that, more than likely, it will make a point rather than a significant difference. And when U.S. military power is deployed and American lives put in harm's way, that is never a good outcome.

In the end, this is a pretty wish-washy conclusion, despite the useful observations in Miller's article. If there's no significant benefit associated with starting a war, it's better not to start it.

He also doesn't consider the legality of a US military attack on Syria.

Stephen Walt has a good post reminding us what a minor power Syria is, Syria Matters Less Than Everyone Thinks Foreign Policy 09/09/2013:

Contrary to what people like Bill Keller seem to think, the United States is not becoming "isolationist." Opposition to the Syrian adventure stems from the fact that U.S. strategic interests are not deeply engaged (here the American people have got this one right), and moral considerations do not mandate intervention because we might easily make things worse and increase the level of human suffering. But comparisons to World War II are deeply misleading: Assad is a thug and a war criminal, but he's not genocidal or bent on world domination, and Syria is not a great power like Germany was. No matter what happens in Syria, the United States will remain the single most formidable international actor, and other countries aren't going to lose sight of that reality in the years ahead. I'd even bet that the pivot to Asia continues no matter who is elected the next U.S. president, unless China slips badly and doesn't seem like an emerging threat anymore.

Instead of becoming "isolationist," the American people seem to be returning to a realistic degree of prudence. To oppose a military response in Syria because it won't make Americans more secure and may not help the Syrians very much isn't cowardly, irresponsible, or feckless; you might just call it common sense. [my emphasis in bold]

He also notes the ridiculous and all-too-predictable threat inflation in which the advocates of war are indulging:

... advocates of military strikes have been using increasingly overheated rhetoric over the past week, employing the familiar tropes and arguments that hawks have relied on ever since World War II. Comparisons to Hitler and the Holocaust? Check. Obligatory reference to Munich? Got it. Lurid warnings about a loss of American "credibility"? Uh-huh. Repeated attempts to portray opponents of a military strike as "isolationists" or worse? Roger.

This approach makes it appear that what is at stake in the Syria debate is nothing less than America's Future Role in the World. If the United States doesn't act, so the argument runs, this one decision heralds a progressive retreat of the United States from its global responsibilities (whatever those are), its steady decline as a great power, and the onset of a new era of global anarchy. But if the United States can just find the will to send some cruise missiles into Syria, then all those terrible things can be avoided and American leadership will be restored (until the next time it is hanging by a hair, of course -- probably a few months from now).

Walt is also reserved about the peace prospects offered by the Russian initiative:

There has been a flurry of diplomatic activity today, based on a Russian proposal to take control of Syria's chemical weapons arsenal. If the U.S. goal is merely to reinforce the "red line" against chemical weapons use, then it has little choice but to take the deal and spin it as a great success for "tough" U.S. diplomacy. But it is likely to take some time to work out the procedures and actually secure the weapons, and there's always the risk that Russia would renege (or Assad would cheat) so as to retain a chemical weapons option in extremis. More importantly, this arrangement doesn't by itself get us much closer to settling the war, which should be our primary objective. To do that, the United States is going to have to engage with Russia and Iran, and we might even have to agree to leave Assad in power for a while. That's not a very satisfying outcome, perhaps, but it is one that would save a lot of lives.

If the war resolution that cleared the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week reflects the parameters of the Obama Administration's goals, then the point of the intervention is far less to reinforce international law against chemical weapons - by staging a war of aggression in violation of international law - than to military boost the Syrian opposition, which the resolution specifies include the Free Syrian Army, the Syrian Supreme Military Council and the Syrian Opposition Coalition.

If the Administration's main goal is to intervene militarily to promote those rebel forces, they will likely continue to push for war sooner rather than later. They will see the Russian peace initiative as bad news.

The "gaffe" that prevents a war?

It's a nice story of the moment. And I enjoy any story that makes an unnecessary war less likely to happen.

The public narrative has it that Secretary of State John Kerry blurted out an off-the-cuff, Bush-style ultimatum on Monday that Syria could only avoid war by giving up its so-called weapons of mass destruction within a week. Russia then jumped on the comment and proposed that Syria turn over its chemical and biological weapons to an international authority to be destroyed.

It poses an immediate question of what it is that President Obama will be asking Congress and the public to support in his address on Syria later today. Should he go ahead and push for a war resolution from Congress as a way to keep pressure on the Assad regime in Syria? Or should he abandon that track and pursue diplomatic negotiations?

Some in US Intel. Community Reject Obama Admin Case for Syria Attack The Real News 09/09/2013:

(Related print report by Gareth Porter, Obama’s Case for Syria Didn't Reflect Intel Consensus Inter Press Service 09/09/2013

The good news is that this turn of events improves the chances of avoiding war. The bad news is that it may allow a bad war resolution to pass Congress.

And the practical, legal and political problems with the US going to war with Syria that existed up until Kerry's statement yesterday are still there. War is still a bad idea. But even opponents of war won't be unhappy in the short run if Obama can avoid war and declare it a win for his tough-guy diplomacy. It's probably closer to the truth to think that the international isolation of the US on the issue of attacking Syria, and country that has never attacked the United States, was more responsible for producing this opportunity than the Obama Administration threatening an illegal and ill-considered war.

But if taking credit for macho manliness is what our Nobel Peace Prize President needs as a face-saving claim to avoid war with Syria, avoiding that war is still a good outcome.

On the other hand, the Obama Administration hasn't left itself as much room as it could have to back off from its war threats.

Threat inflation is a chronic problem for US foreign policy. The Obama Administration is so isolated, internationally and domestically, on its war threats against Syria that they may take the chance the Russian initiative offers to back away from the brink. But over the last couple of weeks, they've declared Assad to be the New Hitler, i.e., Evil Incarnate.

The Administration and its supporters have been treating us to atrocity stories about the horrors of little children being killed by poison gas. With arguments from its supporters along the lines of, so if you hippies don't want war what are you gonna do about Syria's poison gas, huh? I guess you support New Hitler gassing little children, huh?

Samantha Power went to the UN last week to criticize the Russians and trash the UN over the Syria situation in a way that could have been neocon UN-hater John Bolton speaking.

John Kerry's statement Monday, "gaffe" or not, sounded like a Bush-style ultimatum to comply right away and without question or get blasted by American Freedom Bombs.

Since the idea of going to war with Syria is about as popular among the American people right now as the bubonic plague, Obama can still accept a peace settlement and have most people approve of it. But once you've declared someone to be the New Hitler and gone into war propaganda mode, it makes creating the climate for a diplomatic solution that much harder.

Obama's own policy of intervening in Libya in 2011 creates its own problems for this situation. Libya agreed with the Bush Administration in 2003 to give up its "weapons of mass destruction" programs, which Bush claimed as a great success of his war in Iraq against the (nonexistent) WMDs there. And it was a real success for US nonproliferation policy.

But what was Muammar Gaddafi's reward for cooperating with the US on WMD? We came along eight years later and joined France and Britain in supporting rebel groups seeking to oust Gaddafi. Gaddafi wound up dead, and not via court proceedings. I'm sure Assad and his advisers will have that in mind as they consider what kind of WMD deal they might want to make based on US assurances of not attacking Syria.

Tags: preventive war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee resolution on war with Syria

Obama gives his major public appeal tomorrow for support in attacking Syria, a country that has not attacked the United States.

Much of the press will focus on atrocity propaganda, much of which will presumably be based on fact. And the parts that aren't may not be authoritatively debunked for months or years, way too late to make a difference to the start of the war.

Syria & Chemical Weapons - Where's The Evidence? The Young Turks 09/09/2013:

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), i.e., Obamacare, back in 2009-10 were sputtering about how many pages there were in the bill, and who knows what scary awful stuff might be buried in there. I'm mean, who's gone read all them pages? Shoot, it's like a book or something.

Well, there is a much shorter resolution on military action approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week: S.J. Resolution 21, Joint Resolution To authorize the limited and specified use of the United States Armed Forces against Syria. It's eleven pages long. I hope some mainstream journalists read it and report on what's in it. That would be nice.

Here are some interesting features. It doesn't just say, "Obama can drop some bombs on Syria for a couple of days and hooray for him." The authorization of force in Section 2 covers four areas:

a) AUTHORIZATION.-The President is authorized, subject to subsection (b), to use the Armed Forces of the United States as the President determines to be necessary and appropriate in a limited and specified manner against legitimate military targets in Syria, only to-

(1) respond to the use of weapons of mass destruction by the Government of Syria in the conflict in Syria;
(2) deter Syria's use of such weapons in order to protect the national security interests of the
United States and to protect United States allies and partners against the use of such weapons;
(3) degrade Syria's capacity to use such weapons in the future; and
(4) prevent the transfer to terrorist groups or other state or non-state actors within Syria of any weapons of mass destruction. [my emphasis in bold]

Section 3 sounds like it prohibits the use of US ground troops. But check the last six words (my emphasis): "The authority granted in section 2(a) does not authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces on the ground in Syria for the purpose of combat operations." Jon Soltz explains what a big loophole that is in Senate Bill Authorizes Tens of Thousands of Combat Troops In Syria Huffington Post 09/06/2013.

Section 5, the "Statement of Policy" section should prompt a lot of questions to the White House, if we had a functioning press corps worth the name:

(a) CHANGING OF MOMENTUM ON BATTLEFIELD.-
It is the policy of the United States to change the momentum on the battlefield in Syria so as to create favorable conditions for a negotiated settlement that ends the conflict and leads to a democratic government in Syria.

Does changing "the momentum on the battlefield in Syria" sound like more than a spanking for Assad the New Hitler over chemical weapons? Yeah, it does to me, too.

(b) DEGRADATION OF ABILITY OF REGIME TO USE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.-
A comprehensive United States strategy in Syria should aim, as part of a coordinated international effort, to degrade the capabilities of the Assad regime to use weapons of mass destruction while upgrading the lethal and non-lethal military capabilities of vetted elements of Syrian opposition forces, including the Free Syrian Army.

So, the Free Syrian Army, a rebel group that is a party in the civil war, is one of the "United States allies and partners" that we have to protect. Against chemical weapons. And the policy in this resolution is to upgrade their lethal and non-lethal military capabilities" of the Free Syrian Army and other "vetted elements" of rebel groups.

That sounds like a commitment to one side in a civil war to me. I wonder if that might have wider implications than just a couple of days of bombing or firing cruise missiles.

Section 6 is a statement of "Syria Strategy" under the resolution and it has quite a few elements:

(b) ELEMENTS.-The strategy required under sub-section (a) shall include-
(1) the provision of all forms of assistance to the Syrian Supreme Military Council and other Syrian entities opposed to the government of Bashar Al-Assad that have been properly and fully vetted and share common values and interests with the United States;
(2) the provision of all forms of assistance to the Syrian political opposition, including the Syrian Opposition Coalition;
(3) efforts to isolate extremist and terrorist groups in Syria to prevent their influence on the future transitional and permanent Syrian governments;
(4) security coordination with allies and regional partners including Israel, Jordan and Turkey;
(5) efforts to limit support from the Government of Iran and others for the Syrian regime;
(6) planning for securing existing chemical, biological, and other weapons supplies; and
(7) efforts to address the ongoing humanitarian challenges presented by 2,000,000 Syrian refugees in neighboring countries, and 4,500,000 internally displaced persons in Syria, and related humanitarian needs. [my emphasis]

How is the US going to be "securing existing chemical, biological, and other weapons supplies" without troops on the ground - but only those not "for the purpose of combat operations," of course. And we have another group that's on Our Side, the Syrian Opposition Coalition. Also the Syrian Supreme Military Council and "other Syrian entities," to whom we're going to provide "all forms of assistance."

All forms? Say what?!?

And how long is the President authorized to do this? It's partially buried in the legalese of Sec. 2(c)(1):

Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution (50 U.S.C. 1547(a)(1)), Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution (50 U.S.C. 1544(b)), within the limits of the authorization established under this section.

That means two months, 60 days. The Library of Congress Law Library as of this writing explains in its article, "War Powers":

The fourth part of the law concerns Congressional actions and procedures. Of particular interest is Section 1544(b), which requires that U.S. forces be withdrawn from hostilities within 60 days of the time a report is submitted or is required to be submitted under Section 1543(a)(1), unless Congress acts to approve continued military action, or is physically unable to meet as a result of an armed attack upon the United States. Section 1544(c) requires the President to remove U.S. armed forces that are engaged in hostilities "without a declaration of war or specific statutory authorization" at any time if Congress so directs by a Concurrent Resolution (50 USC 1544). [my emphasis]

But Section 4 specifies 60 days plus another 30 days essentially at the President's discretion.

In other words, the supposed punitive strike for the use of chemical weapon could mean three months of bombardment of Syria. Bill Clinton's spectacularly badly-named Operation Desert Fox in December 1998 to punish Iraq for being persnickety about WMD inspections lasted only four days.

Three months of bombing in alliance with a bunch of iffy Syrian rebel groups to whom we're providing "all forms of assistance." What could possibly go wrong?

Here's how Obama described what he plans to do in his weekly address of 09/07/2013, after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed the resolution: "What we’re talking about is not an open-ended intervention. This would not be another Iraq or Afghanistan. There would be no American boots on the ground. Any action we take would be limited, both in time and scope – designed to deter the Syrian government from gassing its own people again and degrade its ability to do so."

Does that sound like all that resolution authorizes to you? Me neither.

Tags: preventive war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

UN Ambassador Power goes all John Bolton on the UN

I've not taken on any detailed discussions of the Obama Administration pitches for going to war with Syria. Some of it is because of my broader skepticism about the need for the US to engage in more wars in the Middle East. Or anywhere, for that matter. See Andrew Bacevich's piece, The Hill to the Rescue on Syria? Don't Hold Your Breath LobeLog Foreign Policy on the history of that policy since the Carter Doctrine. Also at Informed Comment and TomDispatch.

Part of it is distrust of the Obama Administration that intervened in the civil war in Libya under the pretext of preventing a humanitarian disaster in one city and instead became a party in the civil war that ended with a regime change whose advantage to the US is not at all obvious. And as unpleasant a character as Muammar Gaddafi may have been, he had voluntarily given his nuclear weapons program in an agreement with the Cheney-Bush Administration, as GlobalSecurity.org explains (Libyan Nuclear Weapons n/d):

On 19 December 2003 Libya agreed to destroy all of its chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons. The surprise announcement followed nine months of secret talks between Libyan, American, and British officials. Libya agreed to abide by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and to allow for immediate inspections and monitoring.

Then eight years later, the US comes along and intervenes military for regime change in Libya. For humanitarian purposes, of course. I griped in 2011 that rewarding that Libyan regime for cooperating with the US on "WMD", our excuse for invading Iraq in 2003 and Obama's case for attacking Syria now, by intervening to help overthrow him may not have been entirely advisable.

The US press hardly noticed that connection. I'll bet Assad the New Hitler did.

I also don't believe that Assad the New Hitler's use of chemical weapons is the main reason for Obama's push for attacking Syria. As Juan Cole explains, the US is already playing an active role in the Syrian civil war: How US Grand Strategy in Syria led to the idea of Missile Strikes Informed Comment 09/09/2013.

And, apart from the illegality in international law of attacking a country that has not attacked us, the Congressional authorization process doesn't sound to me like it's likely to put any serious restraints on escalation and mission creep, which are all but inevitable. Tom Hayden writes in Fooled Again Into Wider War? Peace and Justice Resource Center 09/05/2013 of the measure approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

The measure authorizes: two or three months of sustained bombing and missile strikes, aimed at decisively damaging Assad's military bases and infrastructure, increasing the capabilities of the insurgent forces (somehow without strengthening Al Qaeda), and profoundly weakening Assad's capacity to continue in power. The prohibition of "boots" on the ground, so important to Congress, does not cover CIA boots on the ground nor the boots of American advisers and trainers just over the Syrian border.

UN Ambassador Samantha Power doesn't want us focusing on such questions. She wants to be horrified at the results of the use of chemical weapons, which at this point has not been clearly linked to Assad the New Hitler, based on what's in the public record, as Rick Perlstein reports in On Syria: Don't Surrender to Trust The Nation 09/09/2013.

Ambassador Power has no doubts. And she doesn't want us fretting about mission creep or who Our Side is in the civil war in which her boss is asking us to intervene in the name of humanitarianism and to combat the proliferation of chemical weapons. This is video of the speech, US Ambassador Power Speaks On Syrian Crisis (Full Speech 2013):

The text is here, Remarks on Syria at the Center for American Progress 09/06/2013:

Notwithstanding these complexities – notwithstanding the various concerns that we all share – I am here today to explain why the costs of not taking targeted, limited military action are far greater than the risks of going forward in the manner that President Obama has outlined.

Every decision to use military force is an excruciatingly difficult one. It is especially difficult when one filters the Syria crisis through the prism of the past decade.

But let me take a minute to discuss the uniquely monstrous crime that has brought us to this crossroads. What comes to mind for me is one father in al-Ghouta saying goodbye to his two young daughters. His girls had not yet been shrouded, they were still dressed in the pink shorts and leggings of little girls. The father lifted their lifeless bodies, cradled them, and cried out "Wake up...What would I do without you?... How do I stand this pain?" As a parent, I cannot begin to answer his questions. I cannot begin to imagine what it would be like to feel such searing agony.

In arguing for limited military action in the wake of this mass casualty chemical weapons atrocity, we are not arguing that Syrian lives are worth protecting only when they are threatened with poison gas. Rather, we are reaffirming what the world has already made plain in laying down its collective judgment on chemical weapons: there is something different about chemical warfare that raises the stakes for the United States and raises the stakes for the world.

There are many reasons that governments representing 98% of the world's population – including all 15 members of the UN Security Council – agreed to ban chemical weapons.

These weapons kill in the most gruesome possible way. They kill indiscriminately – they are incapable of distinguishing between a child and a rebel. And they have the potential to kill massively. We believe that this one attack in Damascus claimed more than 1,400 lives, far more than even the worst attacks by conventional means in Syria. And we assess that, although Assad used more chemical weapons on August 21 than he had before, he has barely put a dent in his enormous stockpile, and the international community has clearly not yet put a dent in his willingness to use them.

President Obama, Secretary Kerry, and many members of Congress have spelled out the consequences of failing to meet this threat. If there are more chemical attacks, we will see an inevitable spike in the flow of refugees, on top of the already two million in the region, possibly pushing Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey or Iraq past their breaking points. The fourth largest city in Jordan right now is already the Zaatari refugee camp. Half of Syria's refugees are children, and we know what can happen to children who grow to adulthood without hope or opportunity in refugee camps; the camps become fertile recruiting grounds for violent extremists.

Of course, the ordinance we drop during "two or three months of sustained bombing and missile strikes" will only kill Bad People. So it's all good.

Digby isn't quite so sure. In Another problem from hell. Self delusion. Hullabaloo 09/09/2013, she writes:

This whole argument among the humanitarian hawks raises the question: at what point do those who believe that violence is the only way to stop violence against innocents become what they despise? I think it's a very easy line to cross without even knowing it because I suspect that nearly everyone involved in these disputes self-righteously believes they are either acting out of self-defense or in defense of others. Even "the evil ones" believe they are doing what they do for a higher purpose. Everyone who promotes violence as the answer to problem are very sure that they are doing it for all the right reasons. But the reasons on all sides always sound exactly the same.

Digby is commenting on Power's speech of September 5, as reported by Louis Charbonneau of Reuters in U.S. gives up on U.N. Security Council in Syria crisis, blames Russia 09/05/2013. The text of that speech is here, Remarks at the Security Council Stakeout [sic] on Syria 09/05/2013.

Tags: preventive war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

Syria: "History starts today." Again.

The episode that most stuck with me from James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (2004) was a meeting just after the attacks of September 11, 2001 between Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. By Mann's account, it appears to have been the day of the attacks or the following day:

As Ahmad sat in Armitage's office with Pakistani Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi at his side, the deputy secretary of state kept returning to a single theme. "Are you with us or against us?" he asked. Pakistan had been the prime supporter of the Taliban, the Afghan regime that had harbored and protected Osama bin Laden and his AI Qaeda supporters. Now, Armitage said, Pakistan faced a choice. Pakistan was either on America's side or not. You can report that back to General Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, Armitage said. When Ahmad tried to explain the background to Pakistan's relationship with the Taliban, Armitage cut him short. "History starts today," he said. ...

Armitage's warning was one that the Vulcans and their president, George W Bush, delivered again and again over the following years: "You're either with us or against us." To the Vulcans these words were meant to demonstrate that it was a new era and that America had changed after September 11. "History starts today." There would be no more long-winded explanations, no more shades of gray. [my emphasis] (p. 298-299)

But history didn't start on 9/11/2001. And while the Cheney-Bush Administration went further than any in memory in taking that attitude of shunting off the constraints of the past, they were by no means unique in that. In foreign policy, public memory - the vague but important general level of historical knowledge and understanding of the voting public and the mainstream press - is spotty at best. And the history that is well known - Munich! 1938! Czechoslovakia! Appeasement! - is so mangled and has been misused for so long we'd actually be better off forgetting a lot of it.

There's a cynical European saying that nevertheless addresses something real: "Wars are God's way of teaching Americans geography."

The example Mann gives of Armitage with the Pakistani Ambassador and the head of the ISI is a good illustration. Presumably Armitage, who has a better reputation for professionalism than many other leading members of the Cheney-Bush Administration, actually knew a lot about the history of Pakistan's relationship to the Taliban. At that moment, he was making an important diplomatic point to a country that would be a key player in the US response to what actually was an armed attack on the United States.

But when it comes to Pakistan and Afghanistan, the history that started that day in Richard Armitage's office bears a striking resemblance to the history that took an important turn in 1947 when Hari Singh, then the leader of the Kashmir territory, agreed for Kashmir to become part of India. This was part of the unwinding of British colonialism in India, which was divided at the time into majority-Muslim Pakistan and majority-Hindu India. India and Pakistan fought a war over Kashmir, a majority-Muslim region, in 1947-49, with a UN-negotiated cease-fire in January 1949.

Since then, Kashmir has been the chief point of contention between Pakistan and India, with various military clashes and terrorist attacks, mostly by pro-Pakistan Islamic groups seeking to undermine Indian rule in the Kashmir province. Did I mention that both India and Pakistan are now nuclear powers? Afghanistan is seen by both Pakistan and India in the context of the Kashmir conflict, Pakistan wanting it as a "strategic reserve" both for training of fighters for Kashmir and to prevent India from gaining influence there that India could use to put military pressure on Pakistan from the west. Pakistan has always regarded the Karzai government in Afghanistan as pro-Indian. So they've never been completely on board with the American-backed war effort in support of what they see as a pro-Indian government in Kabul.

History may have started for Richard Armitage 12 years ago. But Pakistan was working on a different calendar, whether we reckon it by the Western or the Islamic calendar. Kashmir hasn't ceased to be a central concern for them that overrides whatever the Americans want to do in Afghanistan. And, in fact, Pakistan wound up being both "for us" and "against us" in our Afghanistan policy since the meeting with Armitage.

John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in his neglected but excellent book The Culture of Contentment (1992):

A change in official attitude toward some foreign country, although it may make headlines and the television evening news, does not impinge upon the life of the average citizen. If some peculiarly repressive or abhorrent government is being treated with inappropriate courtesy and grace, there may be objection, even indignation; nonetheless, few Americans are immediately affected in any concrete fashion. Such public response as is heard has the comforting virtue of being rhetorical rather than real, and the adverse opinion can be easily tolerated.

When thoughtful commentators and the press report a deterioration in relations between the United States and some other country, the change has occurred, in practice, only in the attitudes of a limited number of officials on each side. There is no larger involvement or consequence. A newspaper headline saying that the United States government views with grave concern some development in Guatemala, the Philippines or the Ivory Coast means only
that a handful of government functionaries have so reacted. Reporting their concern, they are the United States. The further consequences of the development are normally slight, as also when, at some later moment, it is said that relations have improved.

The politically and intellectually undemanding character of the routine conduct of foreign affairs is made strongly evident by the way the presumptively responsible personnel come into office. With each new administration high officials of the Department of State are installed, often with no apparent earlier preparation and frequently with no visible qualification. (pp. 110-111)

Galbraith's book was published in 1992, which would be 9 PHE (Pre-History Era) according to the Armitage calendar. But the situation in year 11 AHE (Armitage History Era) sure sounds a lot like the one Galbraith described back before human history began.

So when a Presidential Administration starts urging the urgent need for war against pretty much any country, it takes some convincing because most people aren't paying much attention to the particular target country. And without a strong informational pushback from credible sources, many people who are initially dubious about the war start to think that the "safe" position is to favor war.

In the real world, war is never safe.

The Obama Administration is in an all-out push to convince the public and Congress to support a US war on Syria.

But what is so striking about the case for this war is that it's a rehash of the case for the Iraq War. Which didn't turn out so well in the view of, well, pretty much anyone who was actually paying attention.

We have the Arab dictator who the Administration has declared to be the New Hitler, who pals around with terrorists and has weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and has "gassed his own people." Plus American Credibility is at stake. And somehow someway the New Hitler might give some WMD to some of his terrorist pals sometime to attack the United States for some reason.

Obama's case for war on Syria isn't identical to Cheney's and Bush's for war on Iraq. There's no real doubt that there are chemical weapons in Syria and that they've been used this summer on some Syrians. It's not entirely clear to us lowly citizens if it really was the Syrian government that used them, although it's not a great stretch to believe so.

The Pentagon and our political elite don't have a good record when it comes to mission creep. In fact, mission creep is pretty much built in to the case being made for war that we're dealing with the latest in a series of New Hitlers.

The Republican advocates of war are being pretty clear that they are cheering for this war because they are hoping for escalation, and eventually a war on Iran. (See, for instance, Kristol Cares Deeply About the Syrian People LobeLog 09/07/2013)

Various reporters and experts and bloggers are looking at the particular claims. But in some ways, the particular claims are beside the point. Back in the time before Richard Armitage's history began there was something known as the Peace of Westphalia in 1948. It is generally taken as a convenient date from which to date the beginning international order of nation-states that we still have today. In the centuries since then, a formal body of international law has grown up with which the international system works. Since the days of Abraham Lincoln's Presidency, the United States has played a leading role in constructing and formalizing international law.

After the carnage of the two world wars, the United Nations was created based to a great extent on the vision of Franklin Roosevelt, who was in turn greatly influenced by the internationalism of Woodrow Wilson. Like all human institutions, it has been less than perfect. It is not a world government. But it is a critical arbiter of international law, formally recognized as such by the United States.

A critical part of the international system and international law is the prohibition of one country attacking another that has not attacked it and does not present any imminent threat to it. That is the case with the United States and Syria. The fact that Syria violated international law by using chemical weapons - a legal standard that applies to Syria despite the fact that it is one of the few nations that hasn't ratified the anti-chemical weapons treaty - doesn't give the US the unilateral right to violate the international law against wars of aggression to punish Syria for it.

There are very good reasons for the law against wars of aggression. See, for instance, the Thirty Years War that was ended by the Peace of Westphalia. Also World Wars, One and Two.

The Obama Administration will attempt to make us ignore that fact, both the legalities and the realities. They are pitching the war as a straight up-or-down opposition to the use of chemical weapons. Analyzing the specifics of the claims are important, just as it was with the Iraq War. Initiating an international war with a country that has not attacked the United States is not like delivering a spanking to a naughty child, which is how the Obama Administration and its loyalists on the Syria War issue are presenting it. It's a lot deadlier, a lot more complicated, and has far greater risks.

Telford Taylor, a member of the US prosecution team at the Nurembrrg War Crimes trials, wrote about the realities of laws of war in Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (1970). In this passage, he addresses laws for the conduct of war rather than specifically laws on the initiation of war. But his point is relevant to the latter, as well. He argues that the justification for international laws is "strictly pragmatic":

They work. Violated or ignored as they often are, enough of the rules are observed enough of the time so that mankind is very much better off with them than without them. The rules for the treatment of civilian populations in occupied countries are not as susceptible to technological change as rules regarding the use of weapons in combat. If it were not regarded as wrong to bomb military hospitals, they would be bombed all
of the time instead of some of the time.

It is only necessary to consider the rules on taking prisoners in the setting of the Second World War to realize the enormous saving of life for which they have been responsible. Millions of French, British, German and Italian soldiers captured in Western Europe and Africa were treated in general compliance with The Hague and Geneva requirements, and returned home at the end of the war. German and Russian prisoners taken on the eastern front did not fare nearly so well and died in captivity by the millions, but many survived. Today there is surely much to criticize about the handling of prisoners on both sides of 'the Vietnam war, but at least many of them are alive, and that is because the belligerents are reluctant to flout the laws of war too openly. (p. 40)

This is unlikely to play a major role in the Congressional debate or in mainstream media coverage.

But it matters. A lot.

Tags: preventive war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

Russia and Syria

G20 - a club divided over the conflict in Syria Euronews 09/06/2013:

Robert Fisk takes a characteristically unsentimental look at Vladimir's Putin's role in the Syria crisis, Vladimir Putin will happily let Obama sweat it out alone in Syria Independent 09/05/2013:

Oddly, the Western television networks have fallen into a rut over [the G-20 conference in] St Petersburg, asking if Obama can "narrow the gap" between himself and Putin. I’m not at all sure if Putin wants to narrow any such gap. He knows that the US President's "red lines" and "options on the table" and all the other Obama-isms that are talking the Americans into yet another war against Arabs, have given him a powerful card. He knows that the Syrian war is about Iran. And he was perfectly able to entertain Iran's awful former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Moscow. His slouching figure beside Obama at the Fermanagh summit told you a lot about his feelings for America's Punisher-in-Chief. After all, that was the role he himself adopted in Chechnya.

And as he looks south from the Kremlin, he can see Chechnya on the horizon and – just 800 miles further away – Syria itself, where Assad is fighting rebel forces that include Chechens. He may certainly point out that Obama is planning to fight on the same side as al-Qa'ida – which is perfectly true. But is he really going to line up behind America’s latest crusade? I rather suspect – since he’s a self-taught expert on fighting Islamist "terror" – that he might let Obama sweat it out.

He’ll be asking, no doubt, what America's permitted 60 days of "limited" attacks will achieve. And what happens when it’s over and Assad is still in Damascus and gas is used all over again?

G-20 Summit Shows Low Support for Military Strike in Syria PBS Newshour 09/06/2013:

Tags: preventive war, russia, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

Attacking Syria for "credibility"

One of the main arguments the Obama Administration and its supporters are using to rally public and Congressional support for a military attack on Syria, a country that has never attacked the United States, is "credibility."

The gist of the argument, such as it is: Obama made a foolish commitment to a "red line" over Syria's use of chemical weapons with unspecified consequences, so now the US has to undertake a foolish, risky and illegal military attack to reinforce Obama's credibility.

Helena Cobban looks at this argument in The credibility trap Aljazeera America 09/05/2013:

Others have echoed [John] Kerry’s and [columnist David] Ignatius' claims that the U.S. response to Syria’s alleged use of chemical weapons should be guided primarily by the need to shore up the "credibility" of U.S. power. This is a dangerous and potentially self-defeating claim. Such an action will do nothing to help Syria's war-ravaged people. It will exacerbate tensions, complicate the search for a negotiated peace and consign Syria's people to further long months or years of war. In fact, there is no more effective way to undermine U.S. credibility than a unilateral military assault intended to establish credibility.

The whole argument about needing to demonstrate the United States' military commitment is a canard. No one doubts the lethal and destructive capabilities of the U.S. arsenal — or the willingness of U.S. leaders to use this power under many circumstances. What many people both inside and outside the United States doubt, however, is the wisdom with which U.S. administrations have used it in the past, and with which they may use it in the future. A large proportion of the world’s people — though a smaller percentage here in the United States — also doubt the morality with which Washington employs its military.

Granted, it would be somewhat embarrassing for the president to step back from the "red line" on Syria's use of chemical weapons that he has reaffirmed over recent months. But the president has made other public commitments that have gone fulfilled — for instance, the vow he made early in his first term to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within 12 months. That promise has moldered unimplemented ever since, with strong consequences for the worldwide credibility of the United States — not that many government officials seem to have paid much heed. [my emphasis]

She concludes:

Indeed, the whole concept of a single state taking it upon itself to deliver a military "punishment" to a distant and much weaker country, absent any enabling resolutions from the United Nations, seems like an instance of behavior that the United Nations was set up to prevent.

An American strike against Syria is unlikely to help the Syrian people. And if it demonstrates anything to the rest of the world about the nature of American power, it is most likely to reaffirm to most of humankind the lesson that the invasion of Iraq sent them 10 years ago: that what the United States has in military power, it lacks in wisdom, self-restraint and morality.

I'm not sure why she uses "seems like" there. It is an illegal act - and was before the UN was established - and clearly is that "behavior that the United Nations was set up to prevent."

Tags: preventive war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

Threat inflation with Syria

The problem with making the leader of every country we want to go to war with into "Hitler" is that it has produced threat inflation again and again, exaggerating the danger of country after country, none of which were "Hitler."

Robert Fisk does a memorable takedown of the "Hitler" meme in a column mocking the shallow clichés being used to drum up support for a US attack on Syria, a country that has not attacked the United States (This bombardment of Syria with clichés shows no sign of stopping Independent 09/05/2013):

And then yet once more – how tired can you get of this mulch? – Kerry also felt he could compare Assad to Hitler. This is preposterous. Over a hundred thousand Syrians may well have died in this terrible war. But Hitler started a war that may have killed 70 million. Does Kerry maybe think that Hitler is still alive? The late Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin thought that when he fantasized in a letter to Ronnie Reagan when he was invading Lebanon in 1982 that he felt he was advancing on Berlin (Arafat was the man in the bunker). And not long ago the now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told us all that the crackpot president of Iran (Mahmoud Ahmedinejad at the time) was "worse than Hitler". So let’s have it just one more time: HITLER IS DEAD.

Tags: appeasement, germany, hitler, preventive war, second world war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

Very Serious Liberals are weighing in for going to war in Syria, with the usual ritual hippie-punching rhetoric

Nicholas Kristof is one of the Very Serious People.

He starts his column The Right Questions on Syria (New York Times 09/04/2013) off with, "Critics of American military action in Syria are right to point out all the risks and uncertainties of missile strikes, and they have American public opinion on their side."

Gosh, Nick, I'm so glad you think so!

Then he continues directly, "But for those of you who oppose cruise missile strikes, what alternative do you favor?"

Well, gee, Nick. Maybe we just shouldn't go to war when we don't really need to. I hear that's been known to work out pretty well.

But our VSPs don't think that way. Since Nick has decided it's time to go to war in Syria, he's ready to go into Spiro Agnew hippie-punching mode: You hippies are against war, well what's your alternative, huh? I guess you support the New Hitler, huh?

Markos Moulitsas in The war supporter's weak case for war Daily Kos 09/05/2013 takes down Nick Agnew's arguments in more detail. He begins it with this relevant series of observations:

It's easy to oppose this Syrian intervention. One simple fact is on our side: No one has made a serious case as to how lobbing a few low-impact cruise missiles will accomplish much—runway craters can be fixed in hours. Anything more valuable has already been dispersed or is inside hardened bunkers. Anti-air systems are deployed in populated areas, inevitably killing the very same people we'd supposed to be "protecting." Regime change has been explicitly ruled out. The use of heavier ordnance would have to be delivered via manned aircraft and that increases dangers dramatically—both of losing a pilot and of collateral damage.

War opponents have another simple fact: There is no alternative to Assad. The insurgency is dominated by Islamist radicals. It seems like our best post-Assad scenario looks depressingly similar to post-Soviet Afghanistan.

War opponents have public opinion on our side, which is always a nice place to be.

War opponents don't have to contend with "allies" like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Having them agree with anything you support is always depressing.

If the topic weren't so serious, the push for war in Syria would be like a low-budget remake of the 10-year-old Dick Cheney classic, Crusade to Liberate Iraq: The Rush to War.

We already have the basic script. We have the Middle Eastern New Hitler, the dictator with weapons of mass destruction, who is "gassing his own people" and who pals around with The Terrorists. And one day he might decide to give some of his WMD to some of The Terrorists who then might sometime decide to use them against the US. Somehow.

We're so far missing some of the old favorites, like the hydrogen-gas producing Mobile Labs Of Doom and the Intercontinental Plywood Anthrax Drones. I haven't caught any war fans using the term "cakewalk" yet, but the Administration is promising one for the Syria War.

Every remake needs some plot adaptation, though. One recurring plot feature this time around that I didn't fully appreciate the first time is the grim threat of Bentonite: The Kitty Litter Of Death. (See Jim White, Joby Warrick Is the New Judy Miller Emptywheel 09/05/2013)

I'm thinking that once we hear that the NSA has confirmed that Syria's Bashar "New Hitler" al-Assad secretly got gay-married to Mohammad Atta in Prague when the two of them were there with Saddam Hussein plotting the Nine Eleven attacks, then we're good to go!

But it's not just Kristof. The White House has reportedly been focusing attention on liberal columnists and bloggers. Because apparently war is still unpopular enough among the Democratic base that even Democratic Members of Congress who worship at the altar of Corporate Neoliberalism are feeling like they need a bit more cover to vote for yet another war. Which would be just as much a war of aggression that is illegal in international law as the Iraq War was. I won't speculate about how many people in the US care about that or are even aware of it in this case. But it is important, even if Congress largely ignores that consideration.

Law and pragmatic considerations are not totally disconnected from each other. Lambert Strether put together this helpful chart showing a certain trend in recent wars (Lambert Strether, Wheels Falling Off the Imperial Reality-Creating Machine Naked Capitalism 08/31/2013):

It's good news that our warmaking plans are less ambitious. But it's also a reflection of the declining international support for these adventures. In the case of Iraq and Syria, initiating war on a country that has not attacked the United States, we're talking about wars that in international law are criminal wars of aggression. And the US disregard of international law is one significant reason for the decreasing trend of international support.

Michael Tomasky decided to be a good boy and hope for pats on the head from Obama loyalists on starting a war with Syria. In When Liberals Enable Tyrants Daily Beast 09/06/2013, he joins Kristof in making the sleazy argument that if you aren't already cheering for war and killing in Syria, that means you love Assad the New Hitler: "Taking no action now, after what Assad did, strengthens the hand of murderers, theocrats, and some of the most illiberal people on the planet."

In one sense, it's actually encouraging that Obama loyalists on attacking Syria feel the need to resort to this kind of Spiro Agnew sleaze-slinging. Because it's a telling sign that they have no confidence in the substance of the arguments they have to make on why the US should undertake a war of aggression on a country that has not attacked us.

Markos' comment on Kristof piece also applies to Tomasky's:

Unless Kristoff is advocating boots on the ground and regime change, neither of which are currently on the table, then his argument is nonsense. Again, war supporters can't get over the hump of how lobbing a few missiles and dropping a few bombs will fix the situation. Pounding on the table and screaming, "we must DO SOMETHING!" is not a strategy. Sometimes, there is nothing one can do without risking all. And there's no reason for the United States to risk all on Syria.

It's always discouraging to see how Presidents can gin up support for wars. But it's also encouraging to see that the supporters of wars often have to go to such ridiculous lengths and engage in insane threat inflation and the most trashy kind of insults to do it. Ordinary people just don't like war very much. And for good reason.

I have to give Mark Shields credit on this. He normally half-snoozes through his weekly Political Wrap segment on the PBS Newshour with Very Serious Neoconservative David "Bobo" Brooks. But when it comes to war, he is still being alert and sensibly critical of incitement to unnecessary wars. Shields even seems to have the quaint notion that people advocating for war and killing have the burden of making their case to everybody else. These are the most recent two Political Wrap segments. Note that Bobo makes it clear in both segments that he's for war in Syria because he thinks it will make war with Iran more likely.

Shields and Brooks Debate Need for National Consensus Over Syria 08/30/2013:

Shields, Brooks on Syria as 'Test' for Obama's Credibility 09/06/2013:

Tags: preventive war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression