MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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Hits of the Day
The West persuades itself: "We have to bomb Syria to save Syria"
By acanuck on Mon, 12/10/2012 - 5:16pm |Britain, France and the US have agreed that none of their countries would have “boots on the ground” to help the rebels. The training camps can be set up in Turkey. However, the use of air and maritime force would, in itself, be highly controversial and likely to lead to charges that, as in Libya, the West is carrying out regime change by force.
Furthermore, any such military action will have to take place without United Nations authorisation, with Russia and China highly unlikely to back a resolution after their experience over Libya where they agreed to a “no-fly zone” only to see it turn into a Nato bombing campaign lasting months.
The plan will also draw accusations that the decision to station Nato Patriot missile defence systems at the Syrian border, at the request of Turkey, was, in reality, to camouflage intervention. The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Foreign Secretary William Hague and the alliance’s Secretary-General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, had all insisted at a meeting in Brussels last week that the deployment was a purely defensive measure. British defence sources maintain that Ankara would have made the request even without the plan to aid the rebels. Neither Germany nor the Netherlands, which will be deploying the Patriots, have been part of the secret Syria talks.
There has been a steady flow of briefings from the US that the Damascus regime is readying its stock of chemical weapons. Ms Clinton stated that a desperate Assad may resort to such an attack, while President Obama has warned of a “red line” on chemical weapons, saying the use of them will not be tolerated.
URL:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/exclusive-uk-military-in-talks-to-help-syria-rebels-8399658.html
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Comments
The last two paragraphs I quote are important ones. Several months back, when the West first raised the issue of Syrian chemical weapons, the supposed concern was that Assad, like Saddam Hussein, would use them on his own people. The Syrian reply was to pledge never to do so -- that chemical weapons would only be used to repel "external attacks." The controversy eased, because everyone agreed that any country has a right to repel external attacks. That's why Western countries have such stockpiles.
Now, however, a coalition led by the U.S. and Britain (sound familiar?) is openly planning not only to train and arm Syrian rebels, but "support" them by sea and air. In other words, mounting precisely such an external attack. This time without any UN authorization, making it an act of war that is illegal under international law. I've even seen military pundits speculate on TV about the feasability of bombing Assad's chemical stockpiles, weighing the pros and cons of collateral damage, i.e. of killing thousands of the people we're purportedly trying to save. And Obama has the balls to tell the Syrians what he is willing to tolerate.
So far, Canada hasn't been mentioned as a participant in these secret talks. I have no illusions, however, that the Harper government will not jump in with both feet once the U.S. gives the green light.
by acanuck on Mon, 12/10/2012 - 5:45pm
Just say quietly "we're really just defending ourselves" and it all feels better.
Of course who knows how much we instigated the initial protests. Pretty easy to set up a few provocateurs in any crowd.
Pax Americana, coming to a military base near you.
by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 12/11/2012 - 1:11pm
This doesn't sound to me like Bush and Blair on Iraq allover again at all:
Bush and Blair made sure Saddam sounded more dangerous every day. No backtracking, as the evil villain narrative was followed with discipline.
Seems more like they have just been presenting the reality of the intel they can get on what is going on, not trying to sell anything, though granted it might not always have been accurate. Not to mention it seems to me like the Obama administration has not wanted to do much of anything at all until they had a better idea of who they were dealing with in Syria, and that what was done was by the CIA pretending they were helping. And figuring that out took a very long time, while lots of people died and a massive refugee crisis. No urgency was communicated until now, for a very long time.
We may even be seeing some evidence of "lessons learned from Libya" on what not to do.
Oh, and also missing in action from the Obama administration: emotional human-interest stories about the suffering of Syrians.
by artappraiser on Tue, 12/11/2012 - 6:04pm
With this going on
I find it hard to believe that any assistance being sought in intervention measures is being forced on Turkey rather than the other way around. That's not to argue that it should be done, rather, I'm just saying I don't see the usual western imperialism story here. If that were the case, involvement would have been much more and much earlier. The Syria story to me has so far been more like the Western powers saying "don't want to get so involved, please regional actors, we'd rather not." That if Turkey wasn't asking for involvement, they wouldn't chose to do so. (And if it were only Jordan asking for involvement/assistance from western powers, from what I understand of that relationship with the west, my guess would be that they'd probably only get the least possible to keep them from whining and withholding intel and cooperation on terrorist threats.)
Meanwhile, elsewhere on this site, some are unhappy with Susan Rice not wanting to get more involved with challenging African bad guys in the past, possibly even supporting their continued power rather than, say, sending CIA to help locals overthrow them. Which is it, laissez-faire when large numbers are being killed and larger numbers are fleeing to other countries, or get involved? How about when one of the neighbors experiencing the repercussions is a NATO member, and another neighbor is a traditional tinderbox of trouble (Lebanon), and another neighbor still is basically a tinderbox (Iraq)? Just let it continue to happen, because the dictator is a sure bet on stability once all the challengers are killed and run out of the country? (Reminds me that there are interesting equivalencies with the Kosovo intervention story applicable here, too.)
My guess at what seems to be happening now is that the West is trying hard to clean up the nastiest rebels now because they don't want to have to intervene further after Assad is gone. I may be wrong but I have see a pattern where they seem to have withheld help to rebels until the more moderate ones showed signs of being able to coalesce and force the more radical to stand down or to marginalize the same. This has just been followed up with the terrorist classification for Jabhat al-Nusra, done quickly, as if to seal a deal or at someone's specific request
And this narrative I have seen is confirmed in another Christian Science Monitor report published today: US draws line in Syria: aligns with moderate rebels, labels others terrorist.. Once again, my main point: seemed to me it took an awful long time and a lot of deaths and refugees to get to this drawing of "a line.." Previously, seemed to me to have been much more of a problem in having no one in Syria that "the West" cared a whit about.
by artappraiser on Tue, 12/11/2012 - 3:05pm