Posted on 08/28/2013 3:14:27 PM PDT by neverdem
Our coming intervention in Syria already looks like a no-win proposition. If we go heavy, we’re liable to empower al-Qaeda and assorted jihadists, or tie ourselves down excessively. If we go light, we’ll seem like paper tigers. Obama’s foolish decision to turn chemical weapons use into a red line is what got us into this mess. We wouldn’t be acting now had he not trapped himself with a bluff he thought Assad would never call.
When Samantha Power’s humanitarian interventionism first emerged as an explanation for the war in Libya, many found it hard to take the administration’s stated justification for action at face value. It’s true that pleasing Egypt’s “liberal” revolutionaries by going after Gaddafi was a partial motive for the war in Libya (another mistake). Yet Obama truly shares Power’s vision of utopian interventionism, even if he’s somewhat less inclined to take political risks on its behalf than she is. We wouldn’t have gone into Libya had Gaddafi not threatened Benghazi.
This time, it’s clear that we wouldn’t be acting in Syria had Assad not used chemical weapons. As Max Boot put it, prior to the gas attack there was “approximately zero chance” that America would intervene in Syria. Obama painted himself into a corner by explicitly calling chemical weapons use a red line last year. At the time it seemed like a cost-free way of endorsing Power’s vision. It no longer does.
Supporters and opponents of the Syrian intervention agree that simply lobbing a few cruise missiles at chemical weapons storage-areas will be useless or worse. Any attack that Assad easily survives will make us look weak, turning our “red lines” into jokes.
There’s a lesson here. Humanitarian interventions seem to be limited and discrete. Threaten to massacre a city, and we block you. Use chemical weapons and we take them out. In practice, however, it doesn’t work that way. Once we enter a conflict on humanitarian grounds, anything short of well-executed regime-change tends to make us look weak.
By defining chemical weapons use as a “red line,” instead of one factor among many to be judged in context at the moment of use, we allow humanitarian concerns to compel huge, risky, and difficult-to-control adventures that go way beyond their initial stated purpose. The alternative is to come off looking ineffective by ignoring our declared limits of tolerance. In other words, all we achieve by drawing humanitarian lines before-the-fact is to surrender control of our own foreign policy.
Obama thought turning chemical weapons use into a red line in Syria would be cost free. Why would Assad be stupid enough to cross us? After all, hadn’t he seen what we did to Gaddafi? He had, but it didn’t matter. This is partly because Assad is desperately fighting for his life, and partly because Libya itself was a very mixed signal.
We famously “led from behind” there. Fearful of suffering casualties, we avoided close-in air support and allowed our allies’ overstretched forces do most of the work. Victory in Libya was touch-and-go for quite some time. After we won, we avoided sending troops to secure the country. Chaos, the disaster of our ambassador’s murder, and the administration’s bogus cover-story soon followed.
Obama nonetheless believed that Assad would never dare cross his humanitarian red line. This shows that the business of drawing lines against certain kinds of international behavior cannot properly be separated from overall assessments of our behavior. Attempts to lay down discrete markers on humanitarian violations quickly get tangled up in other issues. In the end, the fact that we kept Gaddafi out of Benghazi on humanitarian grounds didn’t matter. The fact that our ambassador got killed in Benghazi did.
So it wasn’t enough to protect Benghazi from invasion. It wasn’t even enough to depose Gaddafi. All this did was expose our fear of casualties and unwillingness to secure our victory with an occupation. That refusal to occupy Libya was quite sensible, given the country’s strategic insignificance. Yet the overall effect of Libya wasn’t to keep Assad from using chemical weapons. It was to make him believe we would never truly follow through on our threat to police the red line.
Now we’re stuck in the same old mess. We’ll hit Assad in some way, but we’ve already declared that regime-change is out as our goal. In the end, we’ll come off as weak, which means the next regime that thinks of using chemical weapons or razing a rebellious city will remain undeterred. We’ll keep on letting Samantha Power draw her humanitarian red lines, and they’ll keep on failing to scare the next perpetrator, precisely because they are out of synch with our strategic interests.
The answer is to repudiate Power’s policies. Don’t draw red lines ahead of time based on non-strategic considerations. Insofar as Power’s commitments diverge from our strategic interests, America will be harmed by following through on them. If, on the other hand, we protect our interests, undercutting Power’s message in the process, the cycle of failed deterrence will start again.
This is the dangerous mess Obama’s utopianism has landed us in.
When evaluating Obama’s position on Syrian intervention, I had to ask myself what his position would have been in WW II when the Nazi concentration camps were discovered. I guess that by looking at how concerned he is about the Egyptian Copts and the Syrian Christians I have my answer. He hasn’t said a word.
This all reminds me of the letter I just wrote. The beta-male needs to stay in his place and not try to run with the big dogs.
Pondering the Syrian “Red Line”
What to do about the “red line” reveals a pervasive misunderstanding of war and diplomacy as irreconcilable alternatives. For this Administration military action would be a bewildering, tragic, accidental consequence of hideous attacks enabled by their failed diplomacy.
To manage this contentious environment, Obama brought his newly minted Nobel Peace Prize. He and the nominating committee considered Basher al-Assad received a crushing blow as Obama lead Western leaders in saying he must go to benefit the Syrian people. Clearly, al-Assad should have realized the brilliance of Western conflict resolution and entertained peaceful dialogue.
However, al-Assad shares the perception of Greg Lewis in American Thinker, who portrayed Obama as a beta male. The alpha male dog approaches directly, while the beta male displays acquiescent gestures signaling submission. Lewis saw submissiveness in bowing to King Abdullah, sending John Kerry to Syria, and in generally ridiculing the U.S. whenever Obama appeared on an international stage.
When al-Assad’s actions beleaguered the feebleness he trampled in rising to power, liberal statesmen became befuddled by the intricacies and chicaneries of this unorthodox diplomacy. Al-Assad saw this confusion and ongoing debates narrowing national interests. He then asked why abandon strategies proven against behaviors disregarded in my rise to dominion?
Effective diplomacy would have been methodical, overt/covert, multi-faceted, and predictably lethal. Talks, conferences and economic measures would have been war without bloodshed invigorated by intelligence, propaganda, and espionage. Military action would then become the planned, foretold consequence of not responding to international isolation and internal dissention.
Did We Elect a Beta Male As President?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/did_we_elect_a_beta_male_as_pr_1.html
Syria massive explosion will be in retaliation for Obama’s war on them:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMs2pQTxOcc
How fitting on the anniversary of the day that MLK made his speech we have our noble experiment speaking to a crowd of negroes in Washington. His appearance was complimented by a bevvy of other absolute fools. Several references were made to the thug in a hoodie who got his butt shot off and what a shame that was.
I call Bozo a noble experiment because, I suppose, it was to show the world that we are a nation of equality-minded people. Of course the fact that he was an utterly unknown, unvetted, failure of an amateurish socialist phony made no difference whatsoever. He has carte blanche to ruin this nation as part of that noble experiment.
Whoever was the first to say that our strength is in our diversity was full of stool. America is being buried along with its Constitution thanks to this ass and his circle of sycophantic perverts.
He is, however, behaving as the neoconservatives (like GWB) would act. These idiots believed that our precious ‘democracy’ could only exist if all other governments that didn’t espouse this sophomoric theory were converted.
Today there is no ‘goodness of America’.
We wouldn’t be acting now had he not trapped himself with a bluff he thought Assad would never call.
No proof has been tendered to show that Assad's government forces did use gas.
It looked like a great weekday party for those who don't actually have to work for a living.
Party like it’s August 1914.
“I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction,” thus spake Obama.
Certainly agree about the ugly part.
Using a Sharpie to draw a red line in the sand has the marked disadvantage of erasing rather quickly.
The only thing close to a win is if we nuke both sides. Neither is friendly to us.
“Obama thought turning chemical weapons use into a red line in Syria would be cost free. Why would Assad be stupid enough to cross us? After all, hadn’t he seen what we did to Gaddafi? He had, but it didn’t matter. This is partly because Assad is desperately fighting for his life, and partly because Libya itself was a very mixed signal.”
Does it not seem that Obama’s oddly specific “red line” speech about any future chemical weapons used against civilians changing his “calculus,” sounded even then that he had knowledge aforethought that this is how the Syria situation was being manipulated by someone to play out and was planned by somebody to play out?
Obama makes big political moves that favor the Islamic enemies of the West.
The "red line" wasn't in a speech.
He had left TOTUS behind and was working without a script.
It was an impromptu comment...
Scripted or not, he went out on a limb with a very specific criterion for going to war in Syria. It was as if he knew that there would be intelligence information for what he described and that his day to set off a regional war, or worse, would definitely be coming.
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