Gas Attack in Syria

[CaptHawkeye]

From what i've heard the entire Gulf of Tonkin incident came down to a runaway case of confirmation bias. McNamara and Johnson both fixated on information and details that confirmed their belief that a US ship had been attacked. While downplaying or ignoring problems and inconsistencies in the information. It wasn't an open out conspiracy some believe, just simple, raw stupidity.

[Thanas]

No, Alyeska, what happened was that there was no second attack at all. The NSA (shocker, I know, that such an honest agency would ever do such a thing) deliberately distorted and fabricated evidence that was then given to policy makers. Read more about it here, including a link to a huge pdf file.

[Alyeska]

No, Alyeska, what happened was that there was no second attack at all. The NSA (shocker, I know, that such an honest agency would ever do such a thing) deliberately distorted and fabricated evidence that was then given to policy makers. Read more about it here, including a link to a huge pdf file.

There was no second attack. But there was a first. I never said Gulf of Tonkin was a justification for anything. Because when you provoke an enemy by going into their territorial waters, you lose all justification. But there still was an attack in the first place.

[Patroklos]

The first attack occured 24 nautical miles from the coast if you use recognized border, territorial waters ends at 12. There was a disputed island that NV based their claim of aggression on.

Obviously still provocative, we wouldn't appreciate a similar positioning of warships.

EDIT: It seems to be evey more complicated, as the wiki article mentions NV itself only claimed an 8nm territorial waters border. Apparently the 12nm standard is only from 1982 abd before that most countries had varying claims but usually much less than 12nm.

Here is the latest treaty:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nat ... of_the_Sea

[Zwinmar]

Territorial waters end ...where? That is a matter of perspective for each country, I think that China says theirs is out to 100 miles, but could be very mistaken there.

The importance there is perspective. According to them perhaps they were justified, just like if someone entered that perspective of 12 miles.

[Patroklos]

See my edit above. The standard is now 12nm, its a relatively new one though.

[Simon_Jester]

Excuse me. Just to be clear:

Thanas is saying that the second attack was completely made up, there weren't even imaginary radar ghosts, and the NSA did it? Or have I misunderstood?

[cosmicalstorm]

To get back on topic. Charles Stross wrote a piece on Syria that was very entertaining the other day.

And I'm sorry, but I can't stay away from the clusterfuck of our security policy and the inane side-effects of the war on terror. Like a dog returning to its vomit, I've just got to circle back to middle-eastern politics.

Short version: proposals in the UK and USA to carry out bombing strikes against the Assad regime in Syria are not only criminal (in the absence of a firm UN Security Council ruling on the matter), they're stupid. One such imperial adventure might be an accident, two might be a coincidence, but embarking on a third one within a decade of the blood-spattered fiasco that was Iraq and the traumatic counter-insurgency occupation that was Afghanistan should be grounds for incarcerating any western politician proposing it in an institution for the criminally insane.

Syria, lest we forget, is in the throes of a civil war. The government—a nastily dynastic version of the Ba'athist quasi-fascist ideology that dominated many Arab nations between the mid-1950s and the early noughties—is fighting a varied bunch of rebels. Note that the government is largely dominated by secularized elements of the Shi'ite Alawite minority, who make up around 12% of the population; the majority are Sunni (74%), Christian (10%) and a variety of other sects.

If this sounds like the same sort of demographic split as Iraq, with Christians instead of Kurds, then give yourself a gold star: both "nations" were carved out of the bleeding carcass of the Ottoman Empire by France and the UK in the wake of the First World War under the auspices of the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

The UK and France had a lot of experience of running colonial empires, and had devised a recipe for establishing puppet states. You carved up the blank areas on the map, deliberately cutting across tribal/national boundaries, to establish zones with a 70/25/5 percentage split. The 70% majority were to be ruled and policed by representatives drawn from the 25% minority, armed with clubs and possibly rifles, while the 5% of imperial merchants and administrators enforced colonial rule over the 25%ers with machine guns and gunboats.

With the draw-down from empire, many of the 5% left; often a puppet monarchy would be left in power, but be deposed by a coup some few years later. The coup ideology would be attractive and post-colonial, and the coup plotters were the educated mid-ranking officers who had worked for the imperialists and now rose through the armed forces the former colonized nation. In some, it was Communism; in large chunks of the Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya ...) it was Ba'athism or its close cousin Nasserism.

I'm going to tip-toe around the reasons for the Syrian civil war, not to mention the Arab Spring in general; I'm not an Arabist or Middle Eastern scholar, I'm just an interested layman. However, the point I'd like to make is that the demographic mix in Syria, as with the situation in Iraq, is ripe for civil war, ethnic cleansing, and (whisper it) genocide. It's the same shit-stinking mess we—the west—left all over Africa: the 70/25/5 split coming back to bite us. (You can see it in Rwanda, with the largely artificial Hutu/Tutsi split that descended into mass murder: in Zimbabwe, with the Shona/Ndebele split; and just about everywhere you look. Even, dare I say it, in the demographics of the Indian Empire as created by John Company—now split into India, Pakistan and the former East Pakistan, Bangladesh.)

Now, nerve gas is nasty stuff. But what was it doing there in the first place? I suspect the key answer can be found to the south-west, in the hulking Arab geopolitical spectre that is Israel. Israel has nuclear weapons. Nerve gas is the poor man's nuke. Presumably the Assad family's thinking was that, in the final contingency of a hot Israel/Syria war breaking out and escalating beyond control, they could threaten the Jewish settlers in the Golan Heights as a deterrent against Israeli use of battlefield nuclear weapons. Luckily for us, even such head-bangers as Hafez al-Assad, Benjamin Netenyahu, and Ariel Sharon were saner than Tony Blair (who managed to start five foreign expeditionary wars in his first six years in office, more than any other British Prime Minister ever). So that Syria/Israeli chem-nuke exchange never happened. Phew.

So: Rewind to 2010. We had an unstable dictatorship ripe for civil war, ruled by the relatively ineffectual younger son of a strong man. Bashar al-Assad was reputedly happiest when practicing as an opthalmic surgeon in London; only after the death of his elder brother Bassel in a car crash did his father Hafez designate him as his anointed successor, probably because the alternative—his brother Maher—was a hot-tempered thug. The Arab Spring breaks out all over, blood flows, and by-and-by the Arab Spring comes to Syria. Finally, in 2013, it is alleged that nerve gas (probably Sarin) has been used against the Rebel forces by the Syrian army.

Allegations are flying left and right; the Syrian government protests that the rebels used gas, the rebels say the government used gas, and nobody can get access to the bodies of the victims; this report from Medecins Sans Frontieres raises as many questions as it answers. Some of the more plausible speculation is that Maher al-Assad may have ordered the use of gas without authorization from above. But it's not impossible that the whole incident was a cock-up; with shells whizzing back and forth, and gas shells presumably stored where they could be used if needed, what is the probability that a nerve gas storage facility was inadvertently damaged?

But let's leave the right and wrong of it alone. It's horrendous stuff, and deliberate use of gas in war is a war crime, but assigning blame is something for the International Court in the Hague to untangle.

Here's the problem, as I see it: it's being used as a rallying cry to drag the US military—and the UK—into yet another colonial war in the Middle East.

If the USA and UK go down this route, we will end up killing innocent civilians. And not just a handful; we don't have the expertise to tell Syrian rebels from government loyalists. It's a civil war. They're fighting battles within built-up areas inside cities. Sending in the bombers will work about as well as it ever did (i.e. somewhere between "broke a lot of windows" and "killed a couple of million civilians who were minding their own business"). It won't solve the essential political problem, which is the legacy of the imperial 70/25/5 divide-and-conquer principle. If it does succeed in targeting the Syrian government forces to the point where the rebels emerge as victors, it may even be setting up the preconditions for anti-Alawaite pogroms and genocide.

Also, we'd be back to doing the same dumb thing for the third time in a decade. No current front-rank politician can have any excuse for being ignorant of the events in Iraq and Afghanistan; why are they now so eager to repeat them? It's not even as if Syria has any oil. (Oh, wait ...) Bombing people, far from preventing radicalization and terrorism, generates it; it's almost as if, seeing the engines of the war on terror running low on gas, some fiendish entity decided it was time to stoke the flames again. Why are we going here?



EDIT: There is one thing the West can do that would be unambiguously good. Also, cheap; and it wouldn't involve killing anyone.

Nerve agents like Sarin aren't black magic; they're close relatives of organophosphate insecticides. Medical treatments exist. In particular there's a gizmo called a NAAK, or Nerve Agent Antidote Kit. The drugs it relies on (neostigmine, atropine, and diazepam) are all more than fifty years old and dirt cheap; they won't save someone who has inhaled a high lethal dose, but they'll stabilize someone who's been exposed, hopefully for long enough to get them decontaminated and rush them to a hospital for long-term treatment. Mass Sarin attacks are survivable with prompt first aid and hospital support.

We should be distributing gas masks, field decontamination showers, NAAK kits, and medical resources to everyone in the conflict zones. Government, civilian, rebels, it doesn't matter. By doing so we would be providing aid that was (a) life-saving (b) cheap, and (c) put a thumb on the side of the balance in favour of whoever isn't using nerve gas. We'd also be breaking with the traditional pattern of western involvement in the region, which is to break shit and kill people, mostly innocent civilians who were trying to keep their heads down. It wouldn't fix our bloody-handed reputation, but it'd be a good start.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-st ... syria.html

[Esquire]

I'm curious as to whether redrawing the post-colonial map (obviously not going to happen) would even be a helpful thing to do. If Africa and the Middle East somehow ended up split into nations based on tribal/ethnic divides rather than British divide-and-conquer tactics, would we simply get international instead of civil wars? Or would not having to share power with other ethnic groups help keep tensions down?

[Zwinmar]

I'm going to tip-toe around the reasons for the Syrian civil war, not to mention the Arab Spring in general; I'm not an Arabist or Middle Eastern scholar, I'm just an interested layman. However, the point I'd like to make is that the demographic mix in Syria, as with the situation in Iraq, is ripe for civil war, ethnic cleansing, and (whisper it) genocide. It's the same shit-stinking mess we—the west—left all over Africa: the 70/25/5 split coming back to bite us. (You can see it in Rwanda, with the largely artificial Hutu/Tutsi split that descended into mass murder: in Zimbabwe, with the Shona/Ndebele split; and just about everywhere you look. Even, dare I say it, in the demographics of the Indian Empire as created by John Company—now split into India, Pakistan and the former East Pakistan, Bangladesh.)

Sorry, what? Ethnic cleansing is genocide.


As for the Tonkin incident: I could be mistaken but my perception is that the same attack was effectively reported twice, one a day later and nobody looked at the date stamp, if there was a stamp.

[Patroklos]

I'm curious as to whether redrawing the post-colonial map (obviously not going to happen) would even be a helpful thing to do. If Africa and the Middle East somehow ended up split into nations based on tribal/ethnic divides rather than British divide-and-conquer tactics, would we simply get international instead of civil wars? Or would not having to share power with other ethnic groups help keep tensions down?

There are a few instances of blatant spliting of nationa groups for reasons, but for the most part there simply are not magic lines that gets you "Turks on one side, Kurds on the other." The second you encasulate one group wholesale into a border, you turn around and realize you just gut five others in half to do so.

The sad fact is ethnic cleansing and or brutal supression is really the only reason some other reasons of the world look a bit more heterogeneous than others as they were mostly stabalized in their current form when those two things were still in fashion. The Middle East has been an ever shifting series of imperial borders moving back and forth from East to West and North to South and every direction in between for the better part of a 1000 years and have seen migrations and settlements and refugees and expulsions reshuffling the deck constantly. Even when borders did seem relatively stable for extended periods of times (some Ottaman pocessions for example) they were organized based on the needs and desires of that now defunct state and its now erased lines.

There is never going to be a "homeland" solution. The peoples of the area will just have to learn to get along and I don't pretend that will be easy or forthcoming any time soon.

As for the Tonkin incident: I could be mistaken but my perception is that the same attack was effectively reported twice, one a day later and nobody looked at the date stamp, if there was a stamp.

This is not the case. Outside the ships themselves expending ordinance on both occasions there were differnet airstrikes called in on different days in response to both incidents.

[Grumman]

Sorry, what? Ethnic cleansing is genocide.

All genocide is ethnic cleansing, but not all ethnic cleansing is genocide.

[Thanas]

Excuse me. Just to be clear:

Thanas is saying that the second attack was completely made up, there weren't even imaginary radar ghosts, and the NSA did it? Or have I misunderstood?

Read the report. And what I linked to.

[Broomstick]

Well, it's not much but I've contacted my Federal representatives to state my opposition to airstrikes or involvement in Syria at this time. Right now it looks like the only thing that could stop US airstrikes is a sufficient groundswell of support to get a "no" vote in Congress. Is that guaranteed to stop it? No. But realistically there's not anything else I can do at this time.

[Thanas]

Kudos for doing it though.

[TimothyC]

No link because I'm on my tablet, but Russian sources are releasing a report onthe March 19 chemical attack - and it allegedly (I haven't seen it, nor a translation yet) shows that that attack wasn't by Government forces, but by the rebels (based on such things as the munition used was not a standard Syrian army CW round).

[Broomstick]

>sigh<

Yet another reason to not rush in. So, was it just a matter of some anti-Assad folks in the US government seeing an opportunity to send someone else's children in to kill yet other someone's else's children to force regime change at all costs?

Although there are flaws to the notion, I think there is also merit in not getting involved unless a nation steps over its borders. Atrocities will occur, yes, but I don't see where these endless little wars benefit anyone, either. Either way, people are killed and maimed and infrastructure destroyed.

[Thanas]

I would not put much trust in an unpublished Russian report.

[Broomstick]

Frankly, I don't put too much trust in what my own government has so far published, either.

[Pint0 Xtreme]

Is it reasonable at all to surmise that the real motivation of Syrian military intervention is to knock the US' regional rivals down a peg? There's virtually no benefit to the United States that can come from removing Assad from power. But nations such as Russia, China and Iran have a lot to lose economically and politically in the region. In fact, as I understand it, Syria houses Russia's only military base in the middle east.

[Borgholio]

Wouldn't be the first time proxy wars were fought for that very reason. Although with Russian warships in the area, I wonder if any such conflict would remain just a proxy war...

[sarge360]

I'm still not sure what our ' official ' position is in this matter. As a veteran, I'm probably expected to utter a pithy, profane, Pattonesque quote. As a Libertarian, and more importantly, somewhat rational individual, I want answers. How do we go in, what do we do while we're there, who are our allies ( or does that change day to day ) , what's our goal, how do we leave, and when do we leave? If we can't answer even one of those questions logically, I don't see why we even consider going. Let's not forget that that part of the world has been at war for over 4000 years. Tribalism is a way of life; " enemy of my enemy is my friend " , that kind of thinking. All we'd be doing is giving them a common target. As Mrs. Palin recently said, " We're bombing Syria because Syria bombed Syria? And I'm the idiot? " . Has this entire scenario been thought out to all logical extensions? If not, we need to decide where we stand. Am I a coward? No. Am I a traitor? Certainly not. But, we've lost enough sons, daughters, fathers, brothers, and uncles for causes that were more thought-out. And, finally, if this is going to be a military action, let's move the amateurs ( can anyone say politicians? ) out of control and put in the professional warriors. After all, it's their field of expertise.

[cosmicalstorm]

I doubt Moscow will be traded for Damascus in a nuclear war.

[TimothyC]

Unconfirmed (I haven't seen the Power quote any other place), but if correct it shows just how out of touch with reality the current administration is.

Obama team thought Iran would not tolerate Bashar Assad's use of WMDs
By JOEL GEHRKE | SEPTEMBER 6, 2013 AT 4:10 PM

Iran is enduring economic sanctions designed to slow the country's nuclear weapons program, but President Obama's team thought the regime might abandon dictator Bashar Assad over his use of chemical weapons in Syria's civil war.

Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, hoped that a team of UN investigators — many of whom, presumably, have a longstanding relationship with Iranian leaders -- could write a report that would convince Iran to abandon its ally at the behest of the United States.

"We worked with the UN to create a group of inspectors and then worked for more than six months to get them access to the country on the logic that perhaps the presence of an investigative team in the country might deter future attacks," Power said at the Center for American Progress as she made the case for intervening in Syria.

"Or, if not, at a minimum, we thought perhaps a shared evidentiary base could convince Russia or Iran — itself a victim of Saddam Hussein's monstrous chemical weapons attacks in 1987-1988 — to cast loose a regime that was gassing it's people," she said.

Rather than "cast loose" Assad after the latest chemical weapons attack, as the Obama team hoped, "Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei has warned the Obama administration against any proposed military strike on Syria," as the International Business Times reports.

[cosmicalstorm]

It's strange to see Obama turning into a war-monger. He seems to literally spend all his waking time pushing for a war now.