War with Syria

Azeth_sl said:

DO TELL

edit: forgot about google

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Well son of a bitch. I was okay with a Canadian having the record since he probably grew up hunting wolves with his grandfather in the Yukon like the guy from Enemy at the Gates, but having some tea drinking English pansy with the record is just not right.

Iran is bluffing BTW. They couldn't beat Israel in a straight up war, let alone with the US backing them, and if they did start to get the upper hand, Israel would probably just nuke them. Obama might be saber rattling, but Iran definitely is.

Gwynne Dyer: An appalling attack and an unwinnable war

After that, however, we run out of facts. The rebels claim that the Baathist regime was responsible, while the Syrian government says that the rebels did it themselves in the hope of triggering foreign military intervention. Sending United Nations inspectors will not settle that argument:if nerve gas was actually used, it must have come from government stocks, but that doesn't mean that the regime did it.

Everybody knows that the Syrian military have stocks of poison gas, but what's happening in Syria is a civil war. The rebels have not overrun any of the known storage sites for Syrian chemical weapons,but they could have secret supporters inside those sites who smuggled some out to them.

If you apply the old test of "who benefits?", the rebels, who are currently losing ground, have a strong incentive to get the Assad regime blamed for using illegal weapons. If that gets the United States and other Western powers to impose a no-fly zone, or bomb the regime's military bases, it helps the rebel cause. So maybe they acted to provide the necessary "evidence": some of them are certainly ruthless enough.

It's easier to imagine the regime using chemical weapons: it's just as ruthless, and it actually owns them. But it is manifestly not to its advantage to do so. President Bashar Assad's troops are winning the war without them, and the last thing he needs is foreign military intervention. Using chemical weapons could lead to just such an outcome, and it would be exceptionally stupid for the regime to do so.
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The Intercepted Phone Calls that Convinced Obama that Syria Used Nerve Gas

Last Wednesday, in the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people. Those conversations were overheard by U.S. intelligence services, The Cable has learned. And that is the major reason why American officials now say they're certain that the attacks were the work of the Bashar
al-Assad regime - and why the U.S. military is likely to attack that regime in a matter of days.

But the intercept raises questions about culpability for the chemical massacre, even as it answers others: Was the attack on Aug. 21 the work of a Syrian officer overstepping his bounds? Or was the strike explicitly directed by senior members of the Assad regime? "It's unclear where control lies," one U.S. intelligence official told The Cable. "Is there just some sort of general blessing to use these things? Or are there explicit orders for each attack?"

Kucinich: Striking Syria Will Make U.S. Military 'Al-Qaeda's Air Force'

Former congressman Dennis Kucinich (D., Ohio) said today that striking Syria would turn the United States military into "al-Qaeda's air force."

Kucinich, who voted against the Iraq War and campaigned for the Democratic nomination for president in 2004 and 2008, lambasted the idea that Obama could act without congressional authorization, which he said would be a violation of the Constitution. He also warned that intervening in Syria would entangle the United States in another war in the Middle East and encourage Islamists who are fighting the forces of Syrian president Bashar Assad.

"So what, we're about to become al-Qaeda's air force now?" Kucinich sarcastically asked The Hill.

He went on to warn against attempting to "minimize" an intervention by terming it a "targeted strike." Such a strike, he said, would still constitute an act of war.

Kucinich also blasted the Obama administration for "rushing" into what he said could become a third world war, and he cast doubt on reports by rebels of governmental forces using chemical weapons. He declared that the use of chemical weapons in Syria was a "pretext."

"The verdict is in before the facts have been gathered," Kucinich said. "What does that tell you?"

Lleauaric_sl said:

The Syrians present quite a dilemma.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/26/opinio...rticle_sidebar

Pretty good read about how Al-Assad has shit in his own pool to prevent anyone else from jumping in. His greatest protection after using chemical weapons is the same that protects Somalia and North Korea... Does anyone wanna be responsible for that mess?

What are our options? We REALLY don't want troops on the ground there. It's got Mogadishu x 20 written all over it. We could probably destroy the regime and allow the Rebels to take over with pure drone bombardment. Drones would paralyze their forces and allow rebels complete freedom... But then what? Al-Qaeda is all over Syria, very anxious to obtain access to WMDs.

I have no doubt Obama would rather see Syria like it was 3 years ago than what it is and what it will become once the Regime falls. But we are where we are.

Syria has used chemical weapons. So now what? If we attack, we create a massive shitstorm and Obama loses whatever international goodwill he had. He suffers at home, abroad and he creates an unstable situation with possibility of 9/11 level blowback.

If he doesn't he becomes the president who opens the floodgates and destroys the unified front the world has taken against the use of WMDs. This decision has the potential to be viewed historically as bad a Europes appeasement or turning a blind eye to the Armenians. It would signal to the world the end of United States as a credible superpower, affirming what the Russia's have been alleging, that the US is a paper tiger, lacking the courage of its convictions.

So Obama has to choose between short term pain or long term pain.

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what's the point of decapitating the government, you'll kill far more people than you'll save, it cannot be "humanitarian" reasons that's a red herring. chemical weapons aren't even really a "weapon of mass destruction" like nuclear/biological, they pale in comparison to those weapons, it's more of they are a relic from ww1 fears about trench warfare so there are international laws still around about them that have been re purposed to give cassus belli for invasions.