I plan to return shortly to wrap up my reflections on the foreclosure crisis, with a particular focus on the local economy of Springfield, Massachusetts, but two other intervening subjects have grabbed my attention and I will need to respond to each with a post. The first of these is the problem of Syria, one of the two major national disasters (the other being Egypt) closing out the promise of the Arab Spring. I plan to write some set of reflections on the sad situation of Egypt in the very near future, but Syria grabs my attention now if only because it looks extremely likely that we are about to go again to war, our actions will have serious implications for the course of the rebellion in Syria, for our relationships with numerous other states in the Middle East (Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran) and for our relationship with the other major nuclear powers (Russia, China), and, lastly, because I fully agree that we must respond to chemical weapons use by the Assad regime, but not necessarily through military force. In this regard, I have to explain exactly what my position is with regard to Syria and why I think we have to get directly involved in the fate of the Syrian rebellion against the Assad regime. I will approach this, like I have in a number of previous rants, through a series of propositions to illuminate my larger argument.
1. The rebellion against the Assad regime has been an unmitigated disaster for the Syrian people, as a result of the initial violent reaction by the regime to protests favoring liberal reforms, the tepid initial support of Western governments for Syrian democratization, the direct interventions on Assad's behalf by Iran and by the Lebanese Shi'a Hezbollah movement, the direct and indirect obstruction of a tangible, U.N. authorized international effort to support anti-Assad forces by Russia and China, and, finally. the consequent radicalization of the Sunni resistance to Assad, implicitly and/or explicitly, under the monetary support of the Sunni monarchical Gulf states and benefiting from the organizational expertise and paramilitary training by the Al Qaeda networks.
It is profoundly unfortunate that the U.S. and the Western European states are contemplating military action against the Assad regime now, as opposed to one year or more ago. At this point, nearly 1.75 million Syrian citizens have fled their country to crowd refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, and other places. Several hundred thousand citizens may have already died in the rebellion and the Assad regime's reaction, and the rebellion may be sowing the seeds for broader sectarian (Sunni v. Shi'a) conflicts elsewhere in the regions, especially in Iraq, where the Shi'a dominated government appears to be losing its ability to squelch a growing Sunni insurgency. Many of these lives could have been saved, and fewer displacements might have taken place, had Western governments moved more quickly, in the process reassuring the Russian government in regard to its tangible military interests, to bring about a governmental transition in Syria. As it stands, it appears unlikely that the liberal, pro-democracy entities that began the anti-Assad protests in 2011, militarily unified since under the blanket of the Free Syrian Army(FSA), stand a fighting chance of overthrowing the Assad regime, by themselves or with limited military intervention by the U.S. Rather, jihadi forces, like the Jabhat al-Nusra movement, supported or otherwise affiliated with al Qaeda and funded heavily through the Gulf states, appear to currently have the upper hand, especially in eastern areas on the border with Sunni-majority Anbar province in Iraq. The possibility that such groups are making significant inroads around Aleppo at shifting the course of the rebellion toward the goal of establishing an anti-democratic Salafist state conforming to Sharia law and potentially forming a new national base for al Qaeda from which to wage war against Western states is extremely troubling. More recently, the addition of Lebanese Hezbollah militia forces and the usage of the regime's chemical arsenal are introducing the possibility that, if unrestrained, the regime may retake significant territory in the south around Damascus and, perhaps, regain control of lines of communication from Damascus to Aleppo, the coastal Alawite enclaves, and the northern coastal region bordering Turkey. Under such circumstances, the most likely long term scenario would feature a weakened but more aggressively repressive Assad regime dominating the major urban areas and holding tenuous control over lines of communication against a lingering, radicalized Sunni insurgency, periodically dominating within rural areas of central, southern, and eastern Syria, with, perhaps, the ascendancy of a Kurdish secession movement in areas bordering Iraqi Kurdistan. In other words, it seems improbable that the civil war in Syria will end any time soon (maybe not for another five or six years, maybe longer), and it appears, similarly, unlikely that Assad is going to lose.
2. The Syrian civil war is a problem for the U.S. and Western states more generally because of the presence and active utilization of chemical agents.
Minus the utilization of chemical agents in the Syrian conflict, the civil war becomes a humanitarian tragedy and a politically destabilizing force in the heart of the Middle East that needs to be dealt with, but it does not pose an eminent threat. The use of chemical agents transforms the conflict because there is not only the potential for chemical agents to be exported from Syria by either side and the potential for use of chemical agents against neighboring states (especially Israel), but there is also the potential for proliferation of chemical weapons production within and outside of the region if the use of such weapons is not aggressively policed by the international community. Failure to respond undermines the credibility, not of the U.S., but of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), intended to prohibit the usage or stockpiling of chemical weapons arsenals. If Assad gets away with utilizing chemical weapons (even though Syria is not a signatory to the CWC), then it undermines the force of CWC as the primary means for preventing the use and proliferation of chem in the rest of the world.
In this circumstance, the promise of nuclear powers like the U.S. and Israel that any use of chem against their citizens by a foreign state will be met with the ultimate retaliation does not suffice - Assad is gassing his own citizens. He has not come close to threatening Tel Aviv with chem, and if he does, he must know where this is going to go. Ultimately, Assad and his advisers are realists. They understand that they will need to push the envelope against the opposition if they hope to stay in power, but they are not going to push the envelope beyond the points that the international community, under tangible threat of military force, have stipulated that chem should not be used.
The key point here is not that Assad must be driven from power because he is a bad guy who butchers his own citizens to crush a democratic uprising. Rather, it is that it would have been alright for Assad to butcher his citizens with conventional artillery shells, but that the use of chem trips a wire announcing the unacceptable character of Assad's actions to the rest of the world. With this in mind, the primary concerns for the U.S. are to prevent the further use of chem, to prevent any exportation of chem to other states or leakage (through the rebellion) to organizations committed to violent actions against citizens of Western states (e.g. al Qaeda), and to clearly elucidate that the use of chem is always and forever unacceptable. The operative question concerns how we go about doing this.
3. Pin-point air strikes on command, control, and communications (C3) facilities, air defense sites, and surface-to-surface missile batteries (as the primary long range platforms for chem.) may achieve a certain level of immediate success in impeding the capacity of the Assad regime to utilize chem in the civil war, but it will ultimately generate minuscule effects in preventing the use of chem, and may lead to some form of retaliation by the regime or its allies.
The weapons systems available to naval and air force commanders in the Eastern Mediterranean, including globally deployable U.S. air bomber capabilities (e.g. B-2 bombers from the continental U.S.), are excellent at delivering pin-point strikes against Syrian weapons systems, especially those systems capable of delivering chemical ordnance (both heavy artillery and surface-to-surface missiles, like variants of the old Soviet-era SCUD-B missile system). Moreover, in a world where Google can deliver a reasonably detailed image of a house in Traverse City, Michigan to interested viewers in rural Bangladesh, I am fully confident that satellite visual surveillance technologies will be able to accurately identify targets of interest for time-sensitive pin-point strikes with Tomahawk cruise missiles in the Damascus area, even if the targets are relatively mobile. Any truly mobile targets might be more suitably identified through airborne forward air controllers, likely to be most needed in targeting field artillery if such units are to be included in plans for air strikes. That is to say, I have a lot of confidence that U.S. forces will not be throwing punches in the dark if air strikes are launched against the Assad regime. The problem will not be the effectiveness of air strikes at successfully engaging ground targets with minimal loss of friendly aircraft and minimal collateral damage/civilian casualties (of course, an unhappy thought, but a certainty to any modern military campaign). Rather, the problem concerns the effectiveness of pin-point strikes in damaging the capacity of the regime to use chemical weapons, either against rebel forces or in retaliation against the U.S., allied Western European states, or Israel.
It is certain that the sorts of pin-point strikes that the U.S. is contemplating will throw a temporary wrench into the Assad regime's counteroffensive against rebels in the Damascas suburbs, forcing the Syrian military to redeploy forces, harden existing facilities, and forestall plans for new attacks into rebel held areas. That said, it is unlikely to the regime maintains a universal storage depot for its chemical arsenal. Chemical ordnance must be dispersed among specialized field units and stored in multiple, hardened depots (some of which may now be in the hands of either FSA or, more frighteningly, al-Nusra!). It is extremely improbable that a limited series of U.S. pin-point air strikes is going to destroy the combined Syrian chemical arsenal. When the air strikes are over, there will still be available sarin and/or VX nerve agent stores left for use by Assad, by Hezbollah, or by the various rebel contingents and their global allies (i.e. the potential will remain for al-Qaeda to get its hands on chem). Further, the potential exists not only for Assad to continue to use chem against FSA, al-Nusra, and other rebel groups, but it is equally possible that the regime will contemplate some form of retaliation against Western interests, most notably and easily against Israel, either directly or through the agency of Hezbollah. Here, again, the use of chemical weapons against Israel would obviously risk the potential of a nuclear counterattack against the Assad regime, something that the current Likud government in Israel wouldn't be likely to think twice about! In this sense, the range of complications likely to emerge from a limited air campaign against the regime should raise very obvious concerns for the greater political stability of the Middle East and the potential for a vast expansion of civilian casualties from subsequent rounds of retaliatory actions.
4. A more sustained air or a combined arms (land, air) campaign against the Assad regime, with the goal of "regime change" might be more promising for the goal of dismantling the Syrian chemical arsenal, but such a campaign may not fully eliminate all traces of chemical weapons if rebel forces are already in possession of chem. Moreover, the sort of commitment by the U.S. for such a campaign does not currently exist domestically (within the Obama administration, within Congress, or within the general American public).
Pin-point air campaigns are suited to securing very limited political objectives. Theoretically, the U.S. should be capable of using a sustained air campaign, in cooperation with rebel ground forces, to overthrow the Assad regime outright. The obvious problem here is that reliance on rebel forces, as in Libya, would deny the U.S. of any hope of steering political outcomes on the ground. Would an air campaign against the Assad regime have to be followed by a supplemental air campaign, supported by FSA, against al-Nusra? The only way to adequately ensure that a post-Assad Syria will conform politically to U.S. expectations for a (more-or-less) secular democratic state would be to buttress the U.S. political position with infantrymen and armor on the ground, a requirement that appears wholly unacceptable within the U.S. in the aftermath of Iraq and the soon to be ending but rapidly degenerating situation in Afghanistan.
In any case, either of these options would no doubt require a much larger commitment on the part of the U.S., and the Obama administration has made it clear that it has no intention of undertaking such campaigns. Succinctly, the only thing for which Obama may be able to generate domestic support is a limited air campaign with the truncated goal of punishing the Assad regime for use of chemical weapons.
5. Now that the Obama administration has thrown the gauntlet down on the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, it is absolutely indispensable for the U.S. to act, but there is no meaningful way for the U.S. to do so militarily without a larger commitment to U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war and the long term fate of Syria.
The point here, for the U.S., is that the force of the Chemical Weapons Convention has to be upheld against Syria, or the CWC's legitimacy as a component of "international law" (in my view, a misnomer!) will be compromised. There has to be a meaningful way for the U.S. to enforce the CWC against the Assad regime. A pin-point air campaign will not do this and neither a sustained air campaign nor a combined arms campaign involving ground troops and a costly U.S. commitment in human and financial terms is acceptable to Congress or the larger American public. What to do?
The Obama administration, in its second term, is attempting to establish a lasting legacy for itself in foreign policy, particularly in restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. However, it is very clear the administration never wanted to be handed the present portfolio of events in Syria as the raw materials against which to craft a foreign policy legacy, especially after Obama rather weakly enunciated a doctrine (in regard to Libya) through which the U.S. maintained a right to intervene in a foreign civil war to save the lives of civilians facing potential mass casualties. The larger problem here is that the administration lacks any clear vision on what the U.S. thinks the Middle East should look like. If the second Bush administration enjoyed such a vision, enmeshed in the imperial possibilities of "expanding democracy" to the Arab world, Obama, to a great extent, actively ran against this very vision without generating an alternative beyond the notion that the U.S. should be less directly involved in the future of the Middle East. It is difficult to comprehend how such an amorphous doctrine could be meaningfully executed given substantial U.S. financial commitments to Israel, Egypt, and other states in the region, and the U.S. dependence on petroleum production and trade with the Gulf states. Moreover, given increasing clandestine U.S. involvement in Yemen against al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, it is clear that the Obama administration is not succeeding in its attempts to reduce U.S. involvement in the region, whether or not that should ever have been the goal.
Rather than pursue such an impossible prerogative, the Obama administration needs to shelve the idea of restarting the peace process in Palestine (as meaningful as that might be if it was even possible at the present time) and concentrate on developing, for its remaining time in power, a new, sensible, realistic vision for the political future of the Middle East, writ large, based, in large part, on diplomacy and, to a lesser degree, on continued, low-scale/clandestine direct military engagement in the region. Most emphatically with regard to Syria, direct military action is not going to solve anything. Rather, the U.S. needs, most critically, to engage not only with its allies but with Russia and China to develop a joint plan to prevent further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime and to "wind down" the civil conflict, with or without democratic reforms in a post-civil war Syria. That is, we may have to consign ourselves to the notion that Assad is there to stay for now and, further, that it is in everyone's best interests for the rebellion to end as soon as possible, without the exportation of conflicts to Iraq, Turkey, and/or Lebanon, and without any provocations against Israel. The Gulf states must, thus, cease providing financial and military assistance to Sunni Islamist rebel forces in Syria and a broader effort must be taken to bring in all of the regional players, including Iran and Israel, to craft a durable and ongoing intra-regional plan for resolution of existing conflicts. Beyond this, there might be ways for the administration to promote democratic reforms by a post-civil Assad regime. In there very least, there need to be assurances that no genocidal violence (against Sunnis, Kurds, or any other non-Alawite ethnic groups) will follow the reestablishment of the peace.
Much of this, in the present context, appears extraneously utopian, especially the notion of resolving intra-regional conflicts with diplomatic engagement. Clearly, the Sunni/Shi'a fissures that erupted after the Iraq War and U.S. occupation will be active for a long time. The Shi'a revolution of Iran has gained substantial strength through the ascendancy of the Shi'a majority in Iraq and the evolving axis of Shi'a power between Iran, Iraq, and Assad's Syrian regime represents a palpable threat to the Gulf states and their entrenched Sunni monarchies. Such fissures need to be approached through a broader diplomatic effort between divergent stakeholders in the region, especially the U.S., Russia, and, increasingly, China. Succinctly, the world's great powers need to convene and decide once again how the Middle East should look if the best interests of all the stakeholders are going to be mutually respected. Clearly, the status of Israel and the situation of Palestine are not exempt from such considerations. The larger point, however, is that the political destabilization of the Middle East that, arguably, began with the preemptive U.S. invasion of Iraq needs to be resolved diplomatically, the resolution must involve all of the major international parties with a stake in the region, the effort must be continuous, and there must be a consensus against any further unilateral military actions to resolve persistent problems (e.g. Iranian nuclear development).
6. The Obama adminstration was right to insist on deliberation with Congress on the possibility of a military intervention in Syria, notwithstanding the President's ability to undertake offensive military action without Congressional consent under the War Powers Resolution of 1973. On the other hand, the capacity of the administration to act without democratic consent raises fundamental questions about the War Powers Resolution and its truncation of Congressional prerogatives with regard to foreign policy. Fundamentally, the U.S. needs to reconsider the distribution of powers between the executive and legislative branches with regard to national defense and the deployment of U.S. forces for military actions of relevance to national security.
It is possible that the Obama administration will walk away from its encounter with Congress over Syria with egg on its face, denied the approval that it is seeking to enforce the CWC. Indeed, the administration does not need such approval. On the other hand, if only as a means of fully accounting for its actions before the people's representatives, the administration is right to ask Congress to deliberate on this. The remainder of this post has sought to emphasize that the military option in Syria is not a good one. I am hopeful that Congress will recognize this fact, and, further, I am hopeful that at least some voices in Congress will seek to steer the conversation about Syria and the Middle East in general toward diplomatic avenues and away from the pointless military interventions that have become necessary in the endless night of the post-9/11 world.
Beyond recognition that there is merit to the administration's approach here, in the long run, Congress needs to come up with some more meaningful restraint on military operations by the administration than currently exists through the War Powers Resolution. Valid Constitutional questions are implicated in the War Powers Resolution, including especially the time limitations that it places on the deployment of military forces at the behest of the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. forces (i.e. the President) without the subsequent legal authorization of Congress. In my view, Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution provides adequate authority for Congress to place such demands on the President as a "necessary and proper" means of executing Congress' enumerated power to "To make rules for Government and Regulation of land and naval forces." However, I do not think that the War Powers Resolution in its current form goes far enough. Rather, Congress should specify the terms under which the President should be allowed to commit U.S. forces to military action outside of the Continental U.S., it should differentiate between actions of a purely defensive nature involving U.S. bases on foreign soil and actions involving offensive warfare, it should differentiate between actions undertaken through multi-lateral treaty obligations and unilateral actions undertaken by U.S. forces, and, in the present world, it should differentiate between actions taken against a foreign state and its armed forces or actions undertaken against a non-state organizational entity (think al-Qaeda). Parameters should be drawn to specify what sort of information needs to be presented to Congress in defense of prolonged unauthorized military commitments, and the administration should be compelled to rigorously define a timeline and an exit strategy, with the possibility that such information would be subject to subsequent revisions as events evolve. Such requirements might make the sorts of military interventions occurring over the last decade more difficult for administrations to carry out without express approval by Congress.
No comments:
Post a Comment