Case For Intervention - Tumblr Posts

Narrative

I'd thought about some facebooking or twitter as they have more accessibility to the bumper-sticker thinker of the modern era, but anyone who's got a position on Syria that can be summed up in 250 characters or less is a fucking moron, so get a snack and settle in.

Assumptions

It'd be disingenuous and daft to suggest that I'm going into this without assumptions, so here they are.  If you disagree with these points, then you can stop here- I understand that not everyone trusts some of these things to be true as I do and that's understandable, but if you don't subscribe to these points then the discussion isn't going to be fruitful.

Chemical weapons were deployed in Syria repeatedly, most notably in the Demascus incident.

The Assad regime is the responsible party for these attacks.

The Assad regime possesses the means to manufacture such weapons and has a stockpile as implicitly admitted by their foreign minister yesterday.

The US intelligence mechanism is adequately efficient and has compiled a sufficient case that awaiting UN inspection results is now redundant.

Regime change is not a sought after goal, but if it were to happen spontaneously without our handling of it or its costs directly we wouldn't mind.

The Play by Play for The Limited Strike

In the immediate future, the Russian initiative runs to ground and military strikes begin.  Assad regime targets involved in the manufacture, storage and deployment of chemical weapons are hit and there is collateral damage to that organization as nearby assets are damaged by bombs and cruise missiles.

The Risks

The chemical weapons are not fully and completely destroyed and a contamination event occurs in which sarin or other deadly substances waft over Syria and her neighbors leading to mass casualties.

Destruction of the weapons are incomplete in this fashion and they are salvaged by "interested parties."  Who interested parties are and what their agenda for those weapons are is anyone's guess at that point, but it's bad news as will be discussed in further detail below.

The Benefits

Assad's military is suddenly fighting a multi-front conflict, and one of those fronts is the West led by US military assets.  Assad doesn't necessarily fold, but his war machine is thrown into disarray in the wake of the attacks and is significantly hampered in its efforts to restore dominance over the rebels.  No predictions from me on how the war ends.

The international community restores credibility in its ability to, in fact, reign in WMD manufacture without a full-on invasion.

Risk to western warfighters and inspectors is reduced compared to the Russian plan.

Development of the facilities needed for Syria to responsibly destroy its weapons is avoided in part as most of the weapons are destroyed in the attacks  How to deal with the remainder is a relevant question as no one has as yet addressed- who will foot that bill?  The US and Russia have both invested billions since the end of the Cold War to accomplish the same task, and we're not done with disposing of our chemical weapons yet.  We started dismantling in '97 here in the states.

The Play by Play for the Russian Initiative

In the next few weeks, a UN resolution comes to pass along the lines of that being put together in France requiring the relinquishing of all chemical weapons by the Assad regime.  In the following weeks, inspection teams are put together and preparations are made for them and disposal teams to enter the country and remove the weapons.

That's in the long run.  At the moment, a frantic game of cat and mouse is no doubt being played between the western intelligence community and those men who Assad has no doubt ordered to eliminate records of the bulk of his chemical weapons and to liquidate the those assets in the international terrorist black market.  The one group is trying very hard to keep track as well as they can for where these weapons are and the other is racing to get them out of sight.  More below.

Over the course of the next decade or more, the international community pours billions of dollars into dismantling these weapons, extracting them, tracking them and keeping them out of the wrong hands.  The task requires, implicitly, that boots end up on the ground in Syria to ensure that the UN disarmament teams can do their jobs.

The Risks

When the UN resolution passes and those inspectors go to Syria, they face all kinds of challenges.  They came under fire and weren't able to complete their missions when they were there for simple humanitarian inspections and the only thing that might suggest that they'd have more luck this time around is that the alternative for Assad is a military solution to his weapons.  The short version of all this is that the naive expectation of many is that the Russian initiative is a bloodless, cheap option by comparison that leads to fewer western lives lost and more weapons accounted for is a beautiful but unrealistic pipe-dream.  

It's an option, and it has risks just like a military strike does in terms of lives lost, weapons unaccounted for, and money spent in the billions.

It's heavy stuff, thought you could use the joke about now.

There's no guarantee that blue-helmeted UN guards and their inspectors and disposal teams will be able to achieve safe passage in a country now saturated with fighters from groups like Hezbollah and Al Qaeda who aren't going to just capitulate because we threaten to blow up the weapons of Assad.  We call them radical extremists for a reason.

Those organizations and the other groups that now fight in that country as well as the untenable security situation there make it all the more imperative that any solution to the chemical weapon issue be swift.  As Assad's guys scramble to get rid of those weapons and raise him some revenue to continue a costly, two-year war, there's no telling who they'll get to buy from them.

I guarantee this though: if Assad's government wants to sell chemical weapons at closeout bargain prices in Syria, they won't have much trouble finding a buyer, perhaps in Iran or Iraqi insurgents or perhaps just the first at hand militant organization willing to cough up cash to take the weapons off Assad's hands.  Whoever that may be and whatever their targets may be.

The same risks with not destroying the weapons thoroughly in a military strike are present in a protracted diplomatic engagement, all kinds of interested parties can get access to these weapons right now as you read.

The Biggest Risk

The biggest risk on the table is with the diplomatic solution, because while our intel guys scramble to keep track of these weapons, ultimately Assad's guys are the ones with their hands on them, and that means that sooner or later, they're going to disappear to God knows where.

If- and this is not an if that is out of the question- the Russian initiative evaporates in coming days or weeks, Assad's guys will be right where they were the other day and we'll be right where we were the other day looking at cruise missiles and bombs.  The only difference is that the weapons we want to explode may very well no longer be there anymore.

If that's the case, then we've wasted precious time with the weapons still in our sights and in Syria and now what was a "Syrian Question" becomes a global WMD proliferation nightmare that I don't care to contemplate further at this time.

In Sum

Neither plan is without its risks.  I'm not by any means a war-hawk.  However, I believe in the ability of the black market to move illicit goods and I believe in the integrity of the modern US intelligence infrastructure.  Indeed, the very strength of that capability has been under fire for months now, you've either got to claim that we don't know what's going on or that we're spying on literally everyone, can't have it both ways.

When I examine the potential risks and the scenarios that grow out of either of these options being mishandled, it looks grim.  In the end however, the most immediate response that offers the best risk and prevents Assad from deploying these weapons again is best.

The assumption seems to be that he's going to stop at one outrage and one war crime, that we've put him on notice and that he wouldn't dare to use such weapons again.  After all, the US is threatening attack and the international community is actually cooperating.  That's the logic in any event, but desperate men are often beyond logic, and it's awfully early to rule out the possibility of another chemical attack.

Conclusion

I appreciate the risks and I understand if you prefer to hope for the best, but I don't intend to be one of those who regretted not calling for action when we still had the chance a la Rwanda or the Rhineland.  "Peace in our time" sounds like a great relief for everyone, but I'd urge you to remember that not every military solution is the ill-considered knee jerk of an overgrown, paranoid man-child who wants to land on a carrier with a "mission accomplished" banner, and not every hailed peace agreement is the work of a visionary who has saved the world.

Some threats to our national and international security are credible and do demand action, and when we see that that's the case, we ought to act.