So... am I the only person here who finds it a bit curious that government spokespersons and the media have repeatedly reported that we are moving 4 "cruise missile capable" ships into the area for possible strikes, while in reality the Harry S. Truman carrier battle group has just recently transited the Suez? That battlegroup represents FAR more capability than 4 Arleigh Burkes or whatever. That is what you want in place if you intend a sustained air campaign. I understand that we'd want Assad to not have a clear picture of what we are deploying, but this is public knowledge. Assad surely knows that we have that CVBG in the area. He knows what ships are part of that group, he knows what their capabilities are. He knows that the "4 cruise missile ships" thing is total BS. Which means at this point he is not the one the Administration is trying to deceive. Who doesn't know what assets we have on station, I wonder? Why, the American People don't know, because they aren't paying attention. So, we are moving a carrier group (and possibly more assets) into striking distance. We are being told via compliant media that it's just a cruise missile strike, but we have a carrier on station. Assad knows we have a carrier on station, so we are not talking to him when we omit this. We are talking to our own people... Do you understand my curiosity on this point? Think. Think really hard...
Look at this: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/27/20209022-military-strikes-on-syria-as-early-as-thursday-us-officials-say?lite Someone tell me what the hell is going on here? (rhetorical, I think I know) Since when does a news source report in advance of a possible pending military operation that there are "Three days of airstrikes planned"?!? WTF? 1) How do they know this (leaks, obvious answer), and 2) why are they reporting it now? Answer: it was purposely leaked. They are trying to manage expectations ahead of a strike. The outcome has already been determined, and we are being played. Don't expect any significant result or real change in the situation as a result of the pending strikes. Unless, you know, that Box opens without us realizing it. This does not pass the smell test.
As much as it hurts to see people slaughtered, it hurts even worse to realize just how messed up Iraq has become because of our meddling. This Syria situation requires grand nation building. Simply taking one side out means extremists may come into power. We already created a power vacuum in Iraq for Iran. We ironically radicalized many areas in that part of the world by not doing the job the right way. We're rushing into this. To get at Iran? Syria's society needs to have its hand held by our institutions. Their economy and infrastructure thoroughly rebuilt. Their people need jobs that pay well, and a society not riddled with nepotism and/or corruption. Given our sh!tty record with nation building, with troops fatigued from two wars, with public support and our finances in the toilet, and the lack of information from that region, I say "no action." All of this seems to be moving too fast. I need more info. 100,000+ people already dead. No need to add a lot more bodies in the long-run since we're not fully equipped mentally and physically for this conflict.
And just to preempt... I understand that yes, that carrier group includes several Tomahawk-capable ships. I understand that by saying that there are 4 cruise missile ships in the area they are not lying. I get that. But the truth is that there is an entire carrier group that appears to be in the process of being augmented by other assets. I can't remember a conflict where we neglected to mention that a carrier group was on station and instead claimed that we only had a few "missile capable cruisers" or whatever. This is absurd. They need to stop playing games with us. You can't hide a carrier group.
Quite a bit actually. Your bias is why you could not see the ptetty clear evidence that the wmd case for war in Iraq was concocted by Bush-Cheney as was reported pretty extensively in the press in any forum to the left of the NYT, much less the chickiehawks at Fox. Interestingly here most of the public has temporarily wised up to the way the press running through the NYT and of course Fox, Rush and friends manipulates things. According to some polls only 9% of the population wants the Syria action. Actually the public is very united here just not for military action.
Israel has been officially neutral on Syria, but given the choice, Assad is much less worry for them. They like enemies weak enough not to be a serious threat and needing to be constantly looking over their shoulders at their own guys, but strong enough to keep their own people in line and keep a more ambitious guy from filling their shoes. Israel always prefers the devil they know rather than the one they don't. When Syria has been culpable for acts of terror in the past, the Israelis would buzz Assad with F-16s to let him know they could bomb him any time they want to...but don't. They also had no problem taking out chemical weapon caches or a nuclear reactor a few years ago. They also don't take his threats to attack Israel very seriously. They know and he knows, if that were to happen, Israel would flatten Damascus with 24 hour bombing and the regime would be done in days. Same goes for Hassan Nasrallah or Khaled Mashal. Israel "likes" them. They know their limitations and if they wanted either dead bad enough, they would have done it a long time ago.
Treeman, you are starting to wise up in your old age. We are being played just like we were in the lead up to the Iraq War.
The carrier group might not be used directly in any immediate action in Syria but might be there because there as a message to the Assad regime if they try to strike back at Israel and other US allies in the region. Also there are alot of things going on in the Eastern Mediterranean right now. My own feeling is that any immediate action in Syria is going to be very limited.
Let us assume that the main interest is in preventing needless deaths and suffering in Syria whether due to a few hundred deaths due to chemical weapons or tens of thousands due to the typical weapons sold by the military industrial complex. Well here is an idea from an unimbended journalist who has worked for years in the Middle East and who was not fooled last time when the same techniques were employed on us leading up to the Iraq War. ****** http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/27-2 Published on Tuesday, August 27, 2013 by The Independent/UK Only a Peace Conference, Not Air Strikes, Can Stop Further Bloodshed Could the US and Russia force their respective allies to at least agree to a ceasefire? by Patrick Cockburn What armed intervention by foreign powers in Syria will not do is bring an end to the present bloody stalemate in the two-and-a-half-year-old civil war. But governments in Washington, London and Paris should realise that in one respect the slaughter by chemical weapons of hundreds of people in Damascus on 21 August is an opportunity as well as a crime. "The sense of urgency among foreign powers generated by the present crisis should be used to launch the much-delayed peace negotiations in Geneva. A peace conference between the warring sides was proposed by the US and Russia in May, but has been repeatedly postponed." It is an opportunity because the chemical weapons atrocity and the crisis it has provoked show that the Syrian civil war cannot be left to fester. Previously, there was a shallow belief that, like the 15-year-long Lebanese civil war between 1975 and 1990, the Syrian war was basically containable. This hope has ebbed over the past year as sectarian and ethnic violence in Syria has spread to Lebanon and Iraq. The use of poison gas is the grossest sign, but not the only one, that the level of violence is spiralling out of control inside Syria. While the world has been focusing on the horrors in Damascus over the past week, anti-government rebels have been carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Syrian Kurds in the north-east of the country, forcing 40,000 of them to flee across the Tigris into northern Iraq in less than a week. So many are trying to escape in what the United Nations says is the biggest single refugee exodus of the war that the pontoon bridge across the Tigris they were using is near collapse and has had to be closed, trapping tens of thousands of terrified Kurds inside Syria. . It is unrealistic to imagine for now that negotiations between people whose prime aim is to kill each other will lead to any long-term political solution for Syria. The priority should rather be to prevent the continuing escalation in the violence and the further disintegration of Syrian society. A ceasefire is the greatest need, in which power-sharing would be geographical with each side holding the territory it controls. Such a truce should put in place and monitored by UN teams. It might not cover all the country and would no doubt be frequently breached, but it would be better than the present bloody anarchy. There were hundreds of ceasefires during the Lebanese civil war and they were regarded with cynicism by the Lebanese, but thousands more people would have died without them. Why has a peace conference not happened before? Within Syria the main reason is that government and opposition each believe they can still win and do not contemplate sharing power with anybody. President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have made limited advances since they captured in June the strategic rebel stronghold of Qusayr outside the city of Homs, 100 miles north of Damascus. Most important, Assad’s foreign allies – Russia, Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon – have stood firm and shown that they are not going to allow him to be defeated. The rebels do not want to negotiate with government in part because they are so fragmented that they would find it difficult to agree a negotiating team which represented the different strands of opposition. There are 1,200 different rebel military units in Syria by one estimate, varying in size from family bands of a few dozen fighters to small armies of well-organised and heavily armed militiamen deploying tanks and artillery. This was at a time he controlled all 14 Syrian provincial capitals (he has since lost one, Raqqa, to jihadi groups). The US is generally negative over whether Iran could attend a peace conference, as Russia insists, though negotiations which exclude any major player in the Syria crisis are not going to achieve anything. Could the US and Russia force their respective allies to attend a peace conference, negotiate seriously and at least agree to a ceasefire? The chances here are better than they look because both the Syrian government and the opposition wholly depend on outside military and financial support. Look how quickly Assad agreed to the UN chemical weapons inspection team being allowed to enter rebel areas in Damascus when Russia and Iran insisted that he should do so. Given the current chaos, the sniping at UN vehicles was predictable. There is greater pessimism about the opposition having the coherence to negotiate and agree to anything. They continue to hope that the US and its allies will be finally forced to intervene militarily and they will be able to advance under an American air umbrella, like the opposition Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in 2002 or the Libyan militiamen in 2011. One of the dangers of the air strikes now being considered by the US is that, unless they are accompanied by a fresh drive towards a peace conference, the opposition thinks it is half way to getting the Western powers to win the war for it. Nevertheless, the opposition can be pressured by their foreign backers, supposing they wish to do so. Peace conferences have the best chance of succeeding when one side knows it has won and wants to formalise its victory while the defeated want the best terms possible. Alternatively, peace negotiations may be productive when both sides are exhausted and come to realise they are not going to win a complete victory. The danger of supplying more weapons to the opposition is that it is not going to enable them to win but will simply fuel the level of the fighting. © 2013 The Independent
Nah. A classic overstatement. Everyone saw how the Bush administration burned itself to the ground with the Iraq catastrophic disaster. If the Obama administration hasn't learned from that, it deserves the fallout of overreaching in Syria. These strikes will be limited.
What a ridiculous poll. The actions we are considering are not going to make the situation any better. Attacking Syria with missiles, even if we're not looking to take down Assad, would do nothing. At most they would hinder the Syrian military's ability to combat real insurgents. I'm also not convinced it was Syria who used chemical weapons. Al-Qaida would not hesitate for a second to use it on civilians to provoke Western military action. We essentially would be handing them the "throne" to Syria. There are only two options in my opinion. One of them is extremely unpopular, but I feel it is the ONLY way to truly stop al-Qaida affiliated insurgents in Syria. That would be to put boots on the ground, and to establish a Democratic regime that was friendly to the West and especially to the religious and ethnic minorities. We are all aware how that has worked out for us in the past, and I don't think we have learned our lessons yet. However, I think our biggest mistake in Iraq was destroying the infrastructure. We took out the regime so quickly, we weren't ready to put the government back together and were forced to occupy and "train." This would be extremely costly and Syria has virtually no assets or American assets worth protecting, unlike Iraq. The other option is to do nothing, which would be disgusting and hypocritical, but it would save us money and American lives. It would result in many tens of thousands of Syrian deaths, but at least no Americans would die! We can not financially sustain another war like Iraq/Afghanistan. If we want to do this right, we need boots on the ground, but only if we can get a significant coalition to back us up, and one that is committed to the operation. In the end, the only thing I see Obama doing is taking a play out of Clinton's book, bombing some aspirin factory and then telling the public we "did something." If this civil war ends up with an al-Qaida affiliated replacement, we will regret not taking action when we had the chance.
I've heard several posters bring this up and while I see the reasoning behind it this does seem very speculative. What is the actual evidence that the Rebels were the ones who used chemical weapons? I am not ruling that out but most of the physical evidence points to Assad using chemical weapons and would like to hear more. There is a third option and one that I suspect is being implemented largely behind the scenes. A largely indirect shadow war. That involves Training and arming moderate / pro-Western militias combined with special forces strikes to cripple Assad's infrastructure and cyber war. I know that Obama has pledged aid to those groups but that aid has come slowly. I heard the other day though a brief mention that one of the moderate rebel groups has said that did just receive a large shipment of arms. This is speculative on my part but I wouldn't be surprised if those arms came with personnel also to train the Syrians. Also I have seen a few reports on the news about increased training operations regarding seizing chemical weapons.
Yes, because us invading the country and destroying both the government and the rebels - basically, alienating both sides of the country - will help us win hearts and minds? Forget whether we should or shouldn't have gone into Iraq for a second - the biggest lesson that should be learned is that invading a country makes enemies. Period. Even if you're "helping". Boots on the ground is the worst situation unless you're going to take a clear side and support them - and ultimately defer to them. Going in and putting in own chosen regime is the worst of all possible worlds.
Stalemate. You have Iranians helping Assad, you have Al Qaeda and who knows who else helping Sunni extremists, and us backing the moderates. If one side weakens too much it will flee underground and let the other two battle it out while it waits to regroup. So long as each side has a backer, no one will be able to win.
One interesting thing is the tacit support both Israel and the Arab League have given to intervention in support of the rebels. On the surface, it seems as though Israel should prefer Assad winning this civil war, because he's a known force and ultimately is better than AQ at their doorstep. The last thing the Arab League countries are going to want are marauding AQ rebels winning civil wars in the region, because it means more risk to their own countries. And yet, both seem to be aligning this way - it will be interesting to see if we learn the reasoning here, or if we learn of what else is going on behind the scenes.
Not saying that strategy works or even endorsing it but just pointing out there are other options besides all out invasion or do nothing.
I think Israel and the Arab countries are more interested in countering Iran. The Israelis are probably most interested in a prolonged stalemate while the Arab countries probably consider a Sunni dominated Syria less a threat than the Iran / Assad / Hezbollah alliance.
I made it very clear that destroying the government would be the biggest mistake, see Iraq. As for the hearts and minds, are we getting involved as a PR move or a humanitarian move? I support a humanitarian and a strategic move. Whatever we do, we can not allow an al-Qaida affiliated regime to take Assad's place. I believe the only way to truly prevent that is boots on the ground. Also, allowing 100,000 plus civilians to be killed does not win the hearts and minds either. It makes us look even worse. We took down Saddam based on human rights abuses (among other things), but we will allow Assad to kill and gas (if it was in fact Assad) his own citizens? Doesn't make us look any better. In the long run, there are potential US security risks if we allow the Assad regime to fall into the wrong hands. And I don't see how a few indiscriminate missiles are going to change that. In fact, if we end up taking out Assad with these missiles (which I don't believe they will even target him), and there is no one in charge to ensure that an al-Qaida affiliated group takes control of the country, we will be a lot worse off than we would be with Assad at the realm. The problem is, even if we DON'T do anything, it could still somewhat easily fall into the hands of an al-Qaida affiliated group. It's a bit of a lose-lose situation. Being Syrian-Lebanese, I of course want the violence to stop, perhaps that makes me a bit biased.
