Syria Expedition

Syria expedition is inevitable. But more dramas are yet to unfold.

The evolving expedition and the expedition related dramas, already staged in London, Washington DC, Paris and St Petersburg, and to be staged again in Washington DC, distinguish days the world is passing through.

The expedition to “deter and degrade” Syria’s chemical weapons capabilities is neither dependent on broad international support nor on UN approval. Nor even it is concerned with a few essential questions related to the much told chemical weapon. It legitimizes itself, by its own act of crossing the limit of legitimacy. It’s the deliverer of legitimacy! Isn’t it a quirk-time? It’s a time of unbridled imperialism.

In this “strange” time, incidents don’t always heed to dictation, and prime actors feel compelled to search new moves as their planned motions face gathering resistance, and unimagined reality emerges.

Who imagined the Commons defeat? And, who imagined Obama’s turning to Congress? And, who imagined Hollande’s revised decision to go slow in his journey to join the planned Syria expedition? And, who imagined the composition in the proxy war alliance – avowed enemies helping each other? And, who imagined power of people voice that is trying to prevail amidst sounds of saber?

The Water and Music Show at the Grand Palace in Peterhof, the czarist summer estate, failed to provide rest to Obama in the G-20 summit. The sole superpower failed to carry all in the summit!

Obama is now going directly to the American people as he finds congressional authorization for “punitive strikes” against Syria is an acclivitous task. Appealing to public is not a surprising turn as Congressional wind was not blowing favorably since he made the dramatic move: Go to Congress.

Tony Blinken, the US deputy national security adviser, told National Public Radio that Obama would not launch military strikes against Syria without congressional authorization.

The statements sound confusing. Or, the public opinion molding strategy is puzzling. However, there is still pressure of public opinion.

It will be difficult for John McCain and Lindsey Graham to make majority in the Congress jump into their wagon destined for Damascus. A revised resolution can be expected.

Senator McCain’s already gathered experience in an Arizona town hall meeting was not so pleasant. In his home state, the senator, known for his support for the Syrian proxy warriors, was forced to repeatedly deny that US troops would be a risk from such engagement. McCain had to insist he still owns an open mind on US intervention.

Syria expedition-mongers find no encouragement from opinion polls in the UK, US and France. Public opinion is against any military action in Syria. In the US, public opinion against the planned Syria War is strongest in decades.

There is shortage of suppliers of soldiers for the Syria war. Jordan? No. Turkey? No. Australia? No. Germany? No. The UK-Commons-story is now old news. Hence, there is, till today, no effective “coalition of the willing.”

The Washington Post (August 30) headlined a story by Ernesto Londoño: “U.S. military officers have deep doubts about impact, wisdom of a U.S. strike on Syria” that carries a deep meaning. Ernesto writes:

The “plan to launch a military strike against Syria is being received with serious reservations by many in the U.S. military.

“[T]he Defense Department has been thrust onto a war footing that has made many in the armed services uneasy, according to interviews with more than a dozen military officers ranging from captains to a four-star general.

“Current and former officers fear the potential unintended consequences of a U.S. attack on Syria.

“Former and current officers, many with the painful lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan on their minds, said the main reservations concern the potential unintended consequences of launching cruise missiles against Syria.

“Some questioned the use of military force as a punitive measure and suggested that the White House lacks a coherent strategy. If the administration is ambivalent about the wisdom of defeating or crippling the Syrian leader, possibly setting the stage for Damascus to fall to fundamentalist rebels, they said, the military objective of strikes on Assad’s military targets is at best ambiguous.

“‘There’s a broad naivete in the political class about America’s obligations in foreign policy issues, and scary simplicity about the effects that employing American military power can achieve,’ said retired Lt. Gen. Gregory S. Newbold, who served as director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the run-up to the Iraq war, noting that many of his contemporaries are alarmed by the plan.”

The report cited a commentary by Marine Lt. Col. Gordon Miller, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security: “If President [Bashar al-Assad] were to absorb the strikes and use chemical weapons again, this would be a significant blow to the United States’ credibility and it would be compelled to escalate the assault on Syria to achieve the original objectives.”

Ernesto adds:

“Still, many in the military are skeptical. Getting drawn into the Syrian war, they fear, could distract the Pentagon in the midst of a vexing mission: its exit from Afghanistan, where U.S. troops are still being killed regularly. A young Army officer who is wrapping up a year-long tour there said soldiers were surprised to learn about the looming strike, calling the prospect ‘very dangerous’.

“‘I can’t believe the president is even considering it’, said the officer, who like most officers interviewed for this story agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because military personnel are reluctant to criticize policymakers while military campaigns are being planned. ‘We have been fighting the last 10 years a counterinsurgency war. Syria has modern weaponry. We would have to retrain for a conventional war.’”

Public opinions may appear mysterious and dampening to interventionists. Strategic and tactical plans of big interests don’t always go smoothly with public opinion. It turns difficult if the interest is with oil or pipeline or trifurcating a country.

The chemical question

Chemical weapon has been made the central question in the expedition.

While discussing with The Huffington Post UK Jean Pascal Zanders, one of the world’s leading experts on chemical weapons and former EU chemical weapons expert, expressed his doubts about the identity of the chemical agent widely blamed for the deaths in Ghouta, the Damascus suburb.

“We don’t know what the agent is”, said Zanders. “Everyone is saying sarin. There is something clearly to do with a neurotoxicant [such as sarin], but not everything is pointing in that direction.”

He said the agent used is a crucial piece of information, because the family of neurotoxicants that includes military weapons such as nerve agents also encompasses industrial products like those used to control rodents. Until the actual agent can be identified, any link to the Assad regime is tenuous.

“If say, for example, a neurotoxicant was taken from a factory and used at [Ghouta], then the number of actors who might be responsible for that then increases,” said Zanders.

Zanders argued that outsiders cannot conclude with confidence the extent or geographic location of the chemical weapons attack.

The CW expert pointed to the images of victims that have circulated widely.

He said: “You do not know where they were taken. You do not know when they were taken or even by whom they were taken. Or, whether they [are from] the same incident or from different incidents. It doesn't tell me who would be responsible for it. It doesn't tell me where the films were taken. It just tells me that something has happened, somewhere, at some point.”

Lawrence Wilkerson, who reviewed the intelligence presented by then-US secretary of state Powell as justification for the war in Iraq, told HuffPost that the preparations for a Syria strike seem devoid of authority.

Lawrence likened the current debate to a repeat of the days he spent preparing for Powell’s since-debunked testimony, “with people telling me Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction with absolute certainty.” He added: “It seems like the same thing again.”

Alastair Hay, a chemical weapons expert who helped with the investigation at Halabja, said the UK JIC report added little new information. "There are no hard facts. It is more a case of 'believe us and our experts'," he told the Guardian.

Dan Kaszeta, a former White House adviser on chemical weapons, was “uncomfortable” with the UK’s confidence that sarin had been used. “The JIC statement shows a level of certainty in the absence of physical evidence. But I can’t buy into this consensus. Looking at the same video as everyone else, applying my 22 years of experience in chemical defense, I just don’t share their apparent certainty. We need some physical evidence.”

During the now famous defeated Syria motion debate George Galloway threw a question in the Commons: The Assad regime is bad enough to use chemical weapons. The question is: Are they mad enough to do it? Would they really launch a chemical weapons attack on the day UN inspectors were arriving in Damascus? To launch a chemical weapons attack in Damascus on the very day that a UN chemical weapons inspection team arrives in Damascus must be a new definition of madness. And of course if he is that mad, how mad is he going to be once we’ve launched a blizzard of Tomahawk cruise missiles upon his country?

Galloway said:

The Syrian rebels definitely had sarin gas because they were caught with it by the Turkish government. The truth is this – the Syrian rebels have got plenty of access to sarin.

Galloway’s argument went unanswered.

The most pertinent questions – who used the weapon and who supplied it – are still being avoided. There is political dynamics behind the silence.

“The political dynamics”, Hans Blix, the former chief UN arms inspector for Iraq, said in an interview with Nathan Gardels, “are running ahead of due process. I do not go along with the statement by the US that ‘it is too late’ for Syria now to cooperate. That is a poor excuse for taking military action.”

A Žižekian idea

Confusion is seeded by other quarters also.

Slavoj Žižek writes: “[T]he ongoing struggle there [in Syria] is ultimately a false one.” Terming the Syria intervention as “pseudo-struggle” Žižek argues: This “pseudo-struggle thrives because of the absent third, a strong radical-emancipatory opposition …”

He suggests “the radicalisation of the struggle for freedom and democracy into a struggle for social and economic justice.”

And, Žižek identifies the Syria intervention: “So what is happening in Syria these days? Nothing really special, except that China is one step closer to becoming the world’s new superpower while its competitors are eagerly weakening each other.” (“Syria is a pseudo-struggle”, theguardian.com, September 6, 2013)

Žižek misses the imperialist intervention, a proxy war, and the motive of the masters of the intervention. He misses the proxy war alliance. He misses the new type of proxy war. And, he misses the “pseudo-struggle”’s implication for countries having strategic resources and for geostrategically positioned countries, and for life of people and for democratic struggle.
The intervention appears to him “a false one”, a “pseudo-struggle”. Absence of “a strong radical-emancipatory opposition” doesn’t evaporate the facts of imperialist intervention, the design and motive to control a country/region, the reinvigorated aggressive behavior of imperialism at present time. The reinvigorated aggressive behavior of imperialism at times now is turning reckless, desperate, and at times, it doesn’t exactly know its exact position.

Identifying these facts helps key out strengths and weaknesses of concerned actors and masters and of people. This also helps chalk out program for, using Žižek’s term, “a strong radical-emancipatory opposition”.

Struggle for freedom and justice is not separate from struggle for social and economic justice. So, the task does not arise to put one into another as he suggests: “the radicalisation of the struggle for freedom and democracy into a struggle for social and economic justice”.
Building up a, using his term, “radical-emancipatory opposition” is the first task if it’s absent, and that “radical-emancipatory opposition” can carry on this and that, as Žižek suggests. Actually, his suggestion, if analyzed, is juggling with words and meaningless ideas with an appearance of deep meaning.

Dynamics for intervention

Now, it seems, new doctrines are being created: Liberal interventionism; punishment; legal, proportionate and focused military action. Already there is UN’s R2P – “Responsibility to Protect” – doctrine that requires such action must be through the Security Council.

In the Lords, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, referred to the Christian theory: “International law is based on the Christian theory of just war”, he said.

But mongers of interventions, expeditions, aggressions don’t lend their hearts to the “Christian theory of just war”. They invent LIP – liberal intervention as punishment.

Exerting dynamism into intervention has its way.

In a letter to the US president Obama, 66 former government officials and foreign policy experts said: The president must respond with military force as the Assad regime apparently did use nerve gas.

But the optimal result of the intervention is unknown to all. What was the post-invasion Iraq and Afghanistan picture imagined by the perpetrators of those invasions before those countries were invaded? Are those imaginations in harmony with the present reality?

It’s being said that credibility of US will be lost if the power doesn’t move into Syria.

Has not that credibility been lost in Iraq, the land suffering from depleted uranium shells and sectarian strife, the land invaded with WMD lie? Has not that been lost by the false intelligence, the “Iraq Dossier”, the exposed memo, the false vial? Were not these traded for the Iraq invasion? Have not these expropriated expedition-mongers’ credibility?

Despite the fact there is still zest for invasion. The cause for this zest is interest, and to a section, interest stands above credibility. And, narrow interest never cares any country, neither Syria nor the US.

With a sad tone, Jack Kelly writes in The Pittsburgh Press:

“To intervene militarily in a conflict between bitter enemies of the United States is madness. To intervene in a deliberately ineffective way is madness on steroids. That President Barack Obama, prodded by most in the political class, plans to do precisely this indicates how frivolous they are, how out of touch with reality they've become.

“On one side in the bloody civil war in Syria is the regime of dictator Bashar Assad, Iran’s foremost ally. On the other is a rebel coalition dominated by al Qaida.

“No matter who wins, America loses. Our interests are served best by a bloody stalemate.”
(“In Syria, no matter who wins, America loses”, August 30, 2013)

Invaders are not spared by dynamism of invasion. The planned Syria intervention shall produce far-reaching implication for all involved.

The upcoming Congressional debate, Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale, writes in Foreign Policy, “will signal the beginning of the end of the 9/11 era.”

Bruce adds: “The crucial point to recognize is that something special is happening. A dispute with a minor-league despot is provoking a major turning point in American foreign policy.” (“President Obama’s Middle East bait and switch”)

And, for the world, questions are there:

Shall not the UN inspectors be allowed to complete their report ahead of any military action? Shall UN process be followed? Shall missile strikes and bombing follow legitimacy?

Should the legitimate international institutions be overlooked? Should international law be devalued? Should the Security Council be ignored? Should military intervention outside of UN process be carried out? Shall not that be an aggression? And, does democracy allow aggression? In democracy, people prevail. And, people are not aggressive.