Going a slightly different direction
Iran is afraid of us attacking them for pursuing nuclear weaponizaton, but somehow isn’t afraid of hassling our warships?
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I think it’s a matter of scale. They think they can harass our ships and we’ll likely exercise extreme restraint. This has been the case, but eventually they’ll fuck with the wrong Commander…
It’s a much bigger and more expensive gamble with nuclear weapons.
Completely agree.
Buzzing ships and the like amounts to “International Dick-Waving…”
Agreed scale is unmeasurable.
Leads me to wonder if it only chest puffing for home audience.
However what happens if it is dress rehearsal for another USS COLE or if some Capt sinks 3 or 4 of these shore boats?
Same thing with China and Russia buzzing our naval and aircraft.
It is a dangrous game of chicken.
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I think (I hope) the Iranians are smart enough to understand that an unprovoked attack on the U.S. could lead to their complete and utter destruction.
I think the Russian’s understand this as well and I think the Chinese don’t want to upset their fragile economy by pissing off one of their largest trading partners.
My personal opinion is that it is just posturing for the home audience like you said. We’re still top dog atop the hill and it’s only natural for those below to nip at our heels.
Right, exactly – but at the same time, we simply cannot abide chemical attacks like the one on Ghouta that killed more than a thousand people.
This gets at the major (if, perhaps, too implicit) theme of my long post to Gkhan. The formula governing our conduct – our actions and reactions – in Syria is not the kind your kid can do on a blackboard in school. It’s like logic: everybody wants to do propositional logic, because it’s fun and easy. But propositional logic simply does not have the structural ability to account for such a complex problem as this one, so you’ve got to move to first-order and higher-order logic, frameworks and languages that can reflect multivariability rather than flattening and destroying it:
– We have a strong, standing national interest in resisting the normalization of chemical attacks, and this interest intensifies as a function of the scale and severity of the chemical use. Non-proliferation (of both stockpiles and use) of WMD – and remember that for good or ill CBRN are connected to each other along an escalating continuum – may in the last analysis end up being the greatest human political concern.
– At the same time, we have a strong national interest in keeping any more Salafi jihadists from irrupting into any more power vacuums in the Middle East.
– At the same time, we have a strong national interest in preserving our ideological credibility. The world has not forgotten that we spent the early part of the present century talking openly and loudly about freedom and democracy as rights that inhere not only in Americans or Westerners but in every human being – with emphasis on those living in a certain arid, oil-rich part of the world. When I think of the year 2006, I think of American officials on TV justifying images of war with synonyms for “liberty” and “self-government.” This has a real impact, and though I would argue that we really shouldn’t have gone a’spreading our ideals the way we did in Iraq, our Enlightenment inheritance is not the worthless baggage that many of PWI’s Putin-admirers appear to think it is (aside: I’ve noticed that the regular posters who’ve served in the military or been around war tend to appreciate the reality of value and ideology as instruments of both power and righteousness: it seems that the coldest political nihilisms are the preserve of the chickenhawk). I don’t have time to get deep into soft power and ideological credibility; it will suffice to say that these things have material consequences that bear on the action of geopolitical forces. Furthermore – and it’s disturbingly telling that I’m treating this as an afterthought – we really do as a nation and hegemon have a moral dimension that is unique in world history. Don’t get me wrong, we have done hideous things, and we will remain a realist power operating among the grays and shadows of a complex world…but the far-Left Chomskyite impulse to draw lines of moral equivalence between the United States and [INSERT RIVAL POWER HERE] is an objectively fatuous one.
Taken together, these interests – and there are many more – go some way toward explaining how and why it was a good idea to engage in such delicate and in some ways self-contradictory behavior as TRYING to control Assad’s conduct of war (i.e., the "red line) WITHOUT wanting to directly take him out or even really tick up the aggregate chaos/American-involvement level with airstrikes against government targets WHILE ostensibly supporting the popular Syrian impulse to be free of their autocrat’s shackles WHILE doing what we could to tip the balance of power among the rebel factions TOWARD secular or at least moderate militias AND AWAY from AQ/ISI soldiers/sympathizers.
Add to this the fact that A. The Russians have different (though not perfectly divergent) interests in the region and B. Assad would not have much trouble figuring all of this out…and we arrive at the conventional wisdom that Assad (with Putin under the table) had been trying to calibrate the war in such a way as to just get by with what he could without triggering Western intervention. Under this scenario Ghouta was a mistake – a physical or Command&Control error that wasn’t supposed to be nearly as devastating as it was (I know this will offend the Gkhans and Pats who want to continue on in the ludicrously stupid belief that the greatest power on Earth is a geopolitical afterthought). So now we have: a client of a rival…occupying space in which Salafi death-cultists have been known to thrive…using weapons we can’t let him use in a war to which it isn’t remotely in our interest to become an overt party (remember that this is before ISIS was really ISIS). In other words…a mess.
And as I described in my very long post above: vis-a-vis chemical weapons, we generated a series of objectively positive outcomes despite the mess. It is important to note here that this administration represents the first time in a very long time that the West got the opportunity to write even a moderately good chapter in the story of WMD in the Middle East. Even if we would like to pretend, as Gkhan would, that any small-scale foreign-power defiance of an American admonition is a disaster calling for histrionic meltdown, then the present conditions are the least meltdown-worthy that have obtained in a long while. Imagine if Bush’s nuclear-program warnings had played out vis-a-vis the North Koreans or Iranians as Obama’s Syrian line did, mutatis mutandis. I don’t know what the analog would be (analogies are dumb, anyway), but it would be wonderful. A greater than 98 percent reduction in their nuclear programs? A confiscation of millions of pounds of material? There would be no JCPOA, and Lil Kim would be sitting on nothing more than some decrepit conventional arms.
We could go further and further, zooming in to the utilities of particular Syrian factions (here our business on that day in Benghazi would come up) or stepping out for a wide-angle look at the simple fact that our direct financial interest in the subterranean Middle East has been shrinking for years and is now proportionally smaller than Putin’s financial interest in Assad (again: so that he can remain GDP-competitive with the state of California [Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, etc. are objects of immense confusion and misinformation, but that’s a different thread]). Unfortunately, I don’t think I can spare too much more time for this particular subject.
Edited.
Indeed: that the Russians understand it about us, and vice versa, has been the guiding principle of world history for more than half a century.
I know this, but had US forces remained in Iraq, could they have as easily conquered as much territory as they did?
They weren’t really able to remain in Iraq.
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So we did the best we could and trained their forces…and we all see how that turned out. Spent billions to have them over run by guys in Toyota pick ups.
I think we trained them to the extent that they were trainable. Unfortunately, as it turns out, a lot of them really weren’t about to turn a gun on the people that they agree with.
Now we are in the process of doing it again. Announce timeline, pull out, wait till they come back under another name/flag.
Well by demanding that Syria refrain from chemical weapons under the assumption of threat of force we are asserting our jurisdiction over Syria. Not that I like us having to play the global cop but with some situations it’s an unfortunate necessity.
The eventual removal of chemical agents from Syria was a win with regards to the threat of chemical weapons but as you mentioned the real loss came from Putin out maneuvering us and enabling Assad to bypass our deterrent. The longer term problem that we will now have to deal with is that other actors will be looking towards Russia whenever they feel the need to ignore US directives.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. Thank you for taking the time to understand my position.
P.S. Not sure why Gkhan liked your post, given it doesn’t align with his understanding of events.
Eh, not really, imo. We’re threatening a sovereign nation with force. We’re using our greater power to deter the use of chemical weapons use because we don’t like it, but we don’t hold jurisdiction over Syria. Perhaps it’s a bit of semantics.
[quote=“smh_23, post:766, topic:210298”]Try as you might to stuff your empty head up your ass far enough to ignore it, the world is a collection of scales and degrees.
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Perhaps the UN special envoy for Syria has his head up his ass as well, or perhaps he didn’t get the memo from smh, but the UN seems to be taking last month’s attack pretty seriously.
Interesting for a weapon like Chlorine that [quote=“smh_23, post:766, topic:210298”] simply doesn’t kill well (what was the number I cited a week or so ago – 543 times less deadly than sarin and VX?), and therefore it simply doesn’t concern us to the extent that schedule 1 agents like sarin do [/quote]
Sounds to me like the UN IS concerned. But what would I, the BBC or the UN know after all?
There was one line I could agree with.
Perhaps the UN special envoy for Syria has his head up his ass as well, or perhaps he didn’t get the memo from smh, but the UN seems to be taking last month’s attack pretty seriously.
Interesting for a weapon like Chlorine that [quote=“smh_23, post:766, topic:210298”] simply doesn’t kill well (what was the number I cited a week or so ago – 543 times less deadly than sarin and VX?), and therefore it simply doesn’t concern us to the extent that schedule 1 agents like sarin do [/quote]
Sounds to me like the UN IS concerned. But what would I, the BBC or the UN know after all?
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This is obvious and pointless drivel. Nobody ever said anything whatsoever about not taking any attack seriously (in fact I was the one who taught you about the UN’s Joint Investigative Mechanism [convened in order to investigate and attribute chlorine attacks]…in the very post you’re trying and miserably failing to swat at now). That a +thousand-casualty schedule 1 event like Ghouta has – and ought to have – material geopolitical implications that dwarf those arising from a chlorine attack that killed four people is
A. An unambiguous fact you will never refute, and
B. Already settled.
What you are doing here is illegitimate and futile. It’s called a straw man. Instead of responding to the actual points and arguments I’ve made – which you will never do – you are limply tilting at windmills you yourself have built. In other words, none of what you tried here bears even slightly on the progression through which I held your hand the other day, or on the meticulous data I adduced. The article to which you linked contains exactly no information or implication that is mutually exclusive to any sentence I’ve written.
Furthermore, you are pretending to counter points without actually countering them. I proved that chlorine doesn’t kill at all well vis-a-vis the relevant schedule 1 agents, not only because it is less potent in a tested-in-a-laboratory kind of way, but also because, as I showed (and note here that you didn’t even try to push back against any of this), Assad’s use of chlorine corresponded with a greater than 98 percent reduction in the lethality of chemical attacks in Syria. Your wormish little innuendo above, which attempted to cast doubt on this fact by way of fallacy, doesn’t even scratch at the objective and unarguable reality.
In short, the evidence you haven’t countered supported a series of conclusions it isn’t even clear you understand. As I have already wasted too much of my time demonstrating, you are too stupid to do this. You lost this argument spectacularly and unambiguously. There is no question about whether or not you lost it. You never even really tried not to lose it.
Edit: I mean, just look at this parody of an exchange. You quoted a point I made (and proved) about international politics’ being an area in which scale and degree are consequential variables…and you tried to refute this point with an article that doesn’t even obliquely suggest otherwise. It’s ridiculous: you don’t even really seem able to keep up with the argument you yourself are limply trying to make. Give it up; it’s over.
Which was what, exactly?
Get over yourself buddy. I am wondering why the other people on this board who agree with my position have not come forward. Obviously not to have their position attacked with the same vehemence you have shown me. Or perhaps they don’t wish to waste their time with the likes of you. And if you claim to have singled me out for such attacks and continue to insult me know this: If you were trying to force me to counter attack you have miserably failed.
Never mind. Truly not worth my time.