Personally, I am glad that Congress cannot agree on a policy to arm the rebels in Syria. Adam Schiff is exactly right:
“There are a great many of us who applauded the president’s caution about not being dragged into this conflict and continue to have great concerns,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
“Primary for me is the concern that if we become an arms supplier . . . we’ll be sucked into another sectarian civil war,” Schiff said. “Providing a small amount won’t be enough to change the trajectory on the battlefield, and we’ll be called upon to give more, and more sophisticated weapons. . . . I think the risk is too great that once we get in, it will be very difficult to get out.”
We do not want to own any possible outcome in Syria, so we should not put any skin in the game.
We need to stop “owning the outcomes” in other countries. We are doing such a lousy job of owning the outcome of policies in the United States we no longer have credibility as the “world’s leading nation”. Or as George Bush would have it, “Mission Humble Foreign Policy Accomplished” (perverse little reality that is, isn’t it).
Yeah. I’d like to see us asking the question, “Do we have any right to interfere?’
There are times when we should, because our military is so overgrown. But we need some sort of test to ask ourselves. Like if we have a reasonable chance to stop a genocide, in a time-limited action engaged under the color of the UN, or whatever. Not just ‘how passionate is John McCain on the Sunday shows.’
Hell, the more passionate McCain is to do something, the more strenuously we should resist doing it.
Given the state of the US and operating under the rosy scenario, I’m asking the question “Do we have the competence to interfere?”
I don’t understand this:
The fact that our military is overgrown leads to a “sunk cost” fallacy of “what these guys and gals sitting around for”; we gotta use them in combat or they lose their edge. So we go looking for “training situations”. The US exceptionalism and our bias against other cultures kicks in and the folks we were helping change into just another enemy. And the folks that collaborate with us, believing the good things about the US or yore, get brutally punished when things eventually sort themselves out. Or get asylum in the US.
Yeah, that was poorly said. I mean, there are times we should, because there are times when, given our capacity, not interfering (if, as I said, other conditions were also met) is far worse. That’s not an argument about reducing our capacity, which I very much believe we must do. It’s an argument about disengagement in the face of genocide, with the backing of international institutions. This isn’t really a ‘ticking time bomb’ argument of the sort that torture apologists use: “Would you torture an evildoer in a scenario that Hollywood might dream up?” Because genocide happens more often than Hollywood villains do. The fact that our military is steroidal is a huge problem (with strength comes rage and shruken testicles) but that doesn’t mean it should never be used.
Obama’s new eleven-dimensional Constitutional chess move, Insider Threat Program (aka “1984” meets “Brave New World” meets Stasi meets, etc.) should fix that perception that “we are doing a lousy job” of governing ourselves.
Alots of pirates in Syria so you stay out of that country . http://linkapp.me/eLDEQ
.
Joshua Landis has changed optics on the Syria uprising, he is now reporting the downside of the rebels fighting an insurgency along sectarian lines. Russia’s Lavrov has provided the UN with a report which proves the Syrian rebels used sarin gas in a projectile fired at Khan al-Assal, near Aleppo in March 2013. Obama doesn’t know whether to call the popular revolt a coup, but sends the four F-16’s to the Egypt military anyway, So I have a suspicion the $1.5nb aid package will follow.
See my recent diary – Qatar Fail in Arab Spring and Loss to Saudi Diplomacy.
Wow, so congress has decided to do their job of oversight that should they should have done over 10 years ago.
but IRAN!!!!! we must help the al qaeda freedom fighters and their saudi benefactors.
Another one of those things O is up to that draw criticism from both the left and the right.
What is O up to?
I think the idea is to offer enough support to the rebels to prolong the civil war and slowly bleed the Syrian government, and it’s major ally Hezbollah into a political solution. This has been the plan all along.
If we want to do that, we should continue turning a blind eye to the arming of the rebels by other regional actors. What we don’t want is to put our prestige on the line or get sucked into a situation where we are responsible for the situation in Syria. The reason is because the country is as broken as Humpty Dumpty, and we cannot put it back together again. We also are not going to like the alternative to Assad much better, if at all.
i didn’t say I agreed with he plan, only that it was the plan. I’d say we’ve been providing arms covertly all along, so we’re already players.
We actually have not been supplying arms directly, and we’ve been vetoing Saudi requests to send heavier arms.
…while also working to redirect Saudi, Turkish, and Qatari arms to the (hopefully) least problematic elements of the rebellion.
What we’re seeing now in Syria is what Libya would have looked like absent the intervention.
If there was ever a time when intervention could have brought a responsible, effective, and decent government to power in Syria (a big if), that time has passed.
The Arab League, UN, and NATO were conducting air strikes within a month of Gadhaffi opening fire on the protesters. The cavalry rode to the rescue of the Arab Spring. This time around, the west more or less stayed out, and a very different cavalry became the rebellion’s foreign sponsor. Two years later, it’s too late to reverse that.
.