yeah, i think karn is saying "he basically said it", meaning his reservation kind of masks how enthused they actually are for this to happen

this is behind a paywall but you can hit stop once the page has loaded and read the whole thing:

http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/ ... enting_fsa

this is such a mess

GrizzledVeteran wrote:So this is what happens:
1. US launches missile strike at Damascus
2. Syria, Iran and Hezbollah retaliate against Israel and US forces already in the region
3. Israel retaliates
4. All hell breaks loose in regional war

#$!&@ credibility. I'll take my chances by not attacking and not starting World War 3.

So the counter proposal is:

The US to hit Syria.
The US and Isreal to hit Iran
Isreal to hit Hezbollah

Problem solved. Holy shit.

karn wrote:

drsmooth wrote:

karn wrote:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2411885/Revealed-Pentagon-knew-2012-75-000-GROUND-TROOPS-secure-Syrias-chemical-weapons-facilities.html

Exactly the kind of shit I mean about the means and ends not jiving. This is phase 1 in the works

there's little precision in any of that Daily Mail report. Perhaps you can connect some dots for us?

I'll try.

tl; dr

Syria has to do principally with oil now? As you say - but not as you meant it - incredible

there is no chance american troops are marching in on the tailfins of whatever rockets we shoot into Syria. Nope

Now, if Assad were to be stupid enough to ok anything like some sort of retributive action on US people or places, he'll be obliterated in short order along with, I hope, the more odious of the rebel faction groups. Syria would be a blazing chaotic hell for a few weeks more, & then ashes fit for new growth. Putin better not put his grinning mug in, either, if he knows what's good for him.

in case it's not clear though, I'm for Congress voting down any supportive resolution

The Dude wrote:this is such a mess

absolutely

i don't understand how people can have formed such strong opinions on whether we should "do syria" one way or the other. we know so god damn little

Exactly. That Atlantic article posted earlier is fantastic, if you haven't had a chance

the polk one? yeah i've been reading it in bits and pieces, it's very good

GrizzledVeteran wrote:So this is what happens:
1. US launches missile strike at Damascus
2. Syria, Iran and Hezbollah retaliate against Israel and US forces already in the region
3. Israel retaliates
4. All hell breaks loose in regional war

#$!&@ credibility. I'll take my chances by not attacking and not starting World War 3.

I am totally down with this line of thinking. Let somebody else be the world's policeman for a change. The last two times we played big brother in the Middle East, we ended up in a combined 20 years worth of war (and counting), expenses totaling $1.5 trillion and approaching 7,000 American casualties.

Try 7,000 deaths and 50,000 wounded in action. Not to mention the residual suicides, substance abuse, PTSD and other mental issues that accompany fighting in a war.

Also, this talk about missile strikes being something other than war is specious horsedookie. Is a woman somewhat pregnant?

There are three traditional "levels" of war. The tactical, the operational and the strategic. The tactical level of war is a single battle, where the application of physical violence occurs. Shooting Tomahawks is a tactical action. The tactical is the "way" of fighting. The operational level of war is a campaign, or a series of battles. Campaign planning and execution is "how" the military conducts large scale application of maneuver and firepower. It is the "means" of military campaigning. Campaigns end when one side capitulates in one form or another. The strategic level of war is where the policial-military-public nexus occurs...it should contain the "why" are fighting, as well as the "ends" associated with the war. There is a paradox here as well...you can win at the tactical level, but lose at the Operational and Strategic level. See Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. And Syria. We have no operational campaign to speak of...we have no strategy to answer the "why" or to develop the "ends." Firing TLAMs does nothing but continue to ensure a false perspective of bloodless war from our perspective and it will piss off our adversaries to no end.

Then there was a dude named Colonel John Boyd, the greatest military theorist this country has produced. Mitchell and Mahan are second rate compared to Boyd. Out of the many different perspectives he had, he developed three other levels of war. His taxonomy was the physical, the mental and the moral. The US military is fixed on the physical, the "servicing of targets" as if they were outside the entire human experience. The mental is the "how" one fights an enemy...similar to the operational, it is really a deep dive into the differing methodologies of the application of violence. It ties in with Boyd's most commonly accepted theory, the OODA Loop (if you want to know why good quarterbacks and point guards are good, study the OODA Loop). Finally, you have the moral level of war, the highest and most important. It is critical to understand he was NOT talking about MORALE, but morality. If the reasons why a country goes to war are seen as immoral, or the conduct of the war turns immoral during its span of operations (see My Lai and Abu Gharib), then you are going to not only lose, you are going to be seen as evil at worst.

Boyd had a saying when he came back from serving in Thailand during the Vietnam War. He said that he was told throughout his career that if you land superiority, sea superiority and air superiority, then you would win the war. We had all three in Vietnam and we did not win, so this acted as a catlyst for him to start conducting very deep and heavy analysis into a myriad of different subjects. We still haven't understood as a national entity that war is an all-encompassing human condition and once started, the lid comes off Pandora's Box and no one can control what occurs because war is inherently uncontrollable. The more actors that are brought into the war, the more uncontrollable it becomes. If one asked the common Parisian or Berliner in 1913 that in six years the French countryside would be ruined, an entire generation of their male youth would be bled white, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire and the German Empire would be gone, and the British Empire would be economically destroyed, and the US would emerge as the strongest nation in the World, they would ask if you had gone mad.

And that is exactly the situation that has emerged in the Middle East today...our insertion into this mess makes no sense strategically, operationally, mentally or morally. We're playing with a substance we don't understand very well. There are thousands of blowback scenarios that could occur at any level of war...firing TLAMs solves nothing from any perspective.

My heart and head weep.

Wow. Thanks for that post.

Was about 80 percent against intervention when I opened this page a couple minutes ago. Around 99 now.

LG, ever think about running for office? If and when...

History teaches us that the worst wars are those that are promised to be short.

Getting to the point where I just want everything Assad cares about destroyed. I can not compartmentalize the pictures I saw of dead mothers clutching their dead children, who died in an incredibly painful way. He deserves to die.

I want no boots on the ground, but if our Air Force is as good as advertised and the price tag would suggest, we should be able to accomplish this with little or hopefully no cost in American lives. The Syrian Air Force is crap, and the way some are suggesting its capabilities you'd think we'd have a Battle of Britain circa 1940 on our hands.

Also, I do not care about Israel. They are capable of defending themselves.

CalvinBall wrote:Wow. Thanks for that post.

Yeah thirded, great knowledge and perspective, perfectly put forth

I appreciate LG’s post as well, and agree with a lot of it and learned from parts I don’t agree with. I think the two strongest parts are the criticisms of our lack of strategy/defined ends in the planned actions, and underlining the inherent impossibility of controlling and predicting how a war will unfold once the lid is off the box. As it stands alone, it’s a compelling case against intervention in Syria.

The one part I disagree with is the assertion that our intervention makes no sense morally, at least as far as I understand your paraphrasing of what Boyd means. I think upholding (or attempting to uphold) a taboo against chemical weapons usage is a moral application of military force. Opposition from within the US as well as from most non-crappy countries around the world generally concedes that the usage of chemical weapons is abhorrent. I also think the potential conduct which has been outlined in the hearings also seems unlikely to veer toward the immoral side of things.

Taking a step back, the president and Congress are choosing between a variety of options, all of which are awful. Demonstrating that intervening is a shitty thing to do is fine, but not intervening also has some large negatives to it. I’ll talk more about both sides of the coin below in trying to answer some of the thoughts voiced by Bucky, td, The Dude and maybe some others about whether we, the American public, know enough about the situation to have an opinion about taking action.

td11 wrote:

The Dude wrote:this is such a mess

absolutely

i don't understand how people can have formed such strong opinions on whether we should "do syria" one way or the other. we know so god damn little

Obviously we know less about this (war in general; the Syrian case in particular) than LG – due to his life experience, education and potentially his access to information we cannot see – but I think the general public knows plenty at this point to be able to form an opinion on striking Syria, pro and con.

Here are six basic things we know: 1) President Obama and his administration are convinced Assad’s regime was responsible for a major chemical weapons attack. Kerry described the evidence as being beyond a reasonable doubt. The intelligence community has declared they have a high level of certainty in this.

2) President Obama has staked a great deal of credibility, personally and as a country, on the idea that the usage of chemical weapons would not be tolerated, and serious consequences would follow if this warning was ignored.

3) The stated tactics and objectives are very limited in scope.

4) We suck at fighting wars in the Middle East.

5) On top of this, the last time we entered a war in the Middle East, the president and Secretary of State and others made statements about WMDs based on intelligence which we learned later were untrue.

6) There is little official international support for our actions, no sanction from the UN, NATO, the Arab League, etc. However, many countries appear to favor the US taking action, and a handful may also lend logistical or financial support.

Personally, I believe Obama, Kerry, et al. I don’t think they have any reason whatsoever to lie about this, and Obama in particular seems genuinely reluctant about having to make this decision, but is acting as if he has little choice. I also believe #2 outweighs the downsides expressed in #4 and #6.

On the other side of things, there are plenty of reasons to oppose the attack depending on your preferences/priorities even if you are convinced chemical weapons were used by the Assad regime.

Of course there are tons of things we don’t know, and additional info may emerge that might cause people to change their mind one way or the other. You can start with we have little reason to believe beyond the word of administration officials, members of Congress, and leaks in the news media that Assad’s regime was responsible for the gas usage. Beyond that there are much more difficult to predict things like how successful will military action be at constraining future chem weapons usage; whether unsuccessful action will lead to a deeper US involvement; what will Syria do in response to an attack; what will Syria do in response to us standing down; what will Russia/China/Iran do in response to an attack; what will Russia/China/Iran do in response to us standing down; whether we prefer Assad or the rebels winning the civil war; etc.

But not knowing how something is going to play out is not reason enough to think one shouldn’t have an opinion on whether one course of action is likely to result in a better (or less bad) outcome than another.

In regards to JH's point #1, I do think (and I owe this idea to a student) that had there been serious evidence that the rebels, not Assad, were behind the chemical attack, Rand Paul would have raised that issue during the hearings.

There's been some really good discussion in this thread, with valid points being made on both sides. This current discourse sets a high bar for the future of the politics thread, and oh yeah Luzinski should run for public office.

Some other things to consider, and this might inflame some, but war is ugly and the discussion to go to war should be deep.

1. If chemical weapons were used, the intelligence should be publicly broadcast to the nation. I for one don't trust our intelligence one iota. Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, shame on you (and you can kiss your budget goodbye once I get my foot out of your ass). After Iraq, the nation should demand they see what intelligence we have - you can scrub the collection data (how we got the info) out of the report.

2. So children were killed huh. Horrible stuff. If this is the metric, perhaps we should invade every country with high infant mortality rates due to poor healthcare. I won't even get into the abortion parallel here.

3. Tomahawk strikes will NOT stop this regime from using chemical weapons. You can't blow up a chemical weapons bunker or a production facility...it will create a large, toxic cloud that will be dispersed with the winds over all sorts of areas. Oh, and if you have a smart enemy, he'll deliberately place chemical weapons near possible targets...and then he can blame the US for causing a mass casualty event. Let me say this again - these strikes will not stop anyone on the ground.

4. Anyone interested in the Syrian air force and air defense should read this. Very interesting:
http://www.understandingwar.org/sites/d ... f_8May.pdf

and

http://www.slideshare.net/ISWPress/syri ... e-overview

5. The moral question...it's a complex issue. Are we willing to get involved in every conflict that has a moral dilemma? Sure didn't in Rwanda and there was a lot more killing and genocide going on there...that was old fashioned Biblical killing, with machetes and axes. What happens if the strikes result in blowback against the US and the war expands...again, it's uncontrollable.

No, I think we should definitely argue about the similarities of school children being gased to death by sarin and abortion of non-sentient fetuses. (Vast majority of abortions)

Stand by my statement about the Syrian Air Force being poop, because it is.