Anyone referencing “surgical” airstrikes should be forced to undergo re-education at Trump University.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The ranking Senate Foreign Relations Committee Republican is urging a “surgical” U .S. air strike against Syria in reprisal for Bashar Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons.
That will be $35,000, Senator Corker, paid up front.
Wag
I’m sure The Koch brother’s would offer a full ride scholarship to any member of the GOP who wanted to attend
MikeJ
Why do you want to make dumb people even dumber?
Elizabelle
Second rule: Senators and House members cannot warmonger unless they, or members of their immediate family, have served or are presently serving in the US military. And will be sent to the conflict. Skin in the game, ‘holes.
This leaves us with constant warmongering by McCain and Graham but hey, they would have been grandfathered in somehow.
And Lindsey’s got him a Senate primary to win.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/us/politics/challengers-to-south-carolina-senator-are-lining-up-on-the-right.html?hp
piratedan
if it’s a surgical strike, doesn’t that mean we need to ultrasound them first? What if they don’t have insurance?
Comrade Jake
I commented on this below. Shocker that these assclowns are cheerleading for another war in the ME. What could go wrong?
Villago Delenda Est
The fantasy of the “surgical” airstrike has been with us since Douhet’s time, and the name has changed over the years…”pin point” bombing was all the rage in WWII. Then of course we had television guided bombs against rice paddies in Vietnam.
The brouhaha over drones is such crap, because it is little different from delivering ordnance from manned aircraft, it’s just got a more science-fictiony feel to it.
Redshirt
We have too many bombs and missiles in storage. We need to use them up so we can make more – made by Americans. Jobs for Americans.
See? The Republicans do have a laser (guided munitions) focus on jobs.
xian
I was just going to say how pernicious that word is. There’s nothing surgical
about tomahawks.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Getting involved in yet another Middle Eastern conflict sure sounds fiscally responsible to me.
Soonergrunt
The thing that the people who advocate this kind of thing can never explain is “what exactly is surgical about bombs or cruise missile warheads?”
Assad doesn’t give two shits what the international community does. He’s in this fight for his life. If he loses, he and his whole family end swinging from Damascus lampposts. If he wins, the IC will deal with him because they won’t have a choice. There is NO leverage here that the US (or anyone else, for that matter) can exert against him.
No matter what happens or doesn’t happen, no matter what we do or don’t do, we’re going to get blamed. Given that, I say save the taxpayers’ money and don’t risk American lives, and do nothing.
MomSense
@piratedan:
I thought it was the reaction of surgeons to the government takeover of the greatest health care system in the world!!
fuckwit
So tired of propaganda. “Surgical” sounds so clinical, so beneficial, so benign, so sterile, and makes them sound like doctors saving lives. It’s a nonsense term. That adjective should be banished from any serious foreign affairs reporting, and anyone using it in political discourse should be called out on it.
Yeah, sure, it’s just like surgery. You put the whole country under anesthesia, carefully monitor their vital signs, cut them open and remove the bullets, then stitch them back up and help them recover and heal with bedrest and antibiotics. With their consent, and payment afterwards for services rendered. Not.
There’s nothing surgical about war, even with drones, which are probably the closest thing we have to what these clowns think war is, and they still leave a crater in the ground the size of a fucking house.
If you want war, then call for war. If you don’t have the stones even to call it that outright, then STFU.
Also too, this goddamed job needs to be done by the fucking UN, and if they can’t get their shit together, fix that problem first. I’m tired of our military being the policeman of the world. I’d be happy to kick in some $$ to support UN forces and have them perform busybody clusterfucks like intervening in someone else’s civil war, or idealistic missions like attempting to rid the world of dictators.
Speaking of dictators, I wonder WTF is going on in Hungary and how that will resolve.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Better yet, they should be forced to undergo surgery performed by Donald Trump himself, because the man in no way resembles a rage-driven alcoholic who wouldn’t know the difference between a scalpel and a bottle opener.
Roger Moore
@Comrade Jake:
Well, strictly speaking they aren’t cheerleading for another war; they’re cheerleading for us to get more heavily involved in a war that’s been going on for a while and we’ve been associated with the very edges of. I’d like to see some suggestions about the practical details of these airstrikes, though. Where are we supposed to be launching them from, and whose airspace would we be flying over? How are we going to pay for it? What is the desired outcome? You know, the kinds of details that are necessary for the air strikes to be anything more than a campaign issue.
giterdone
It’s been at least 4 hours since your last paranoid “The NSA knows what porn I watch” click bait story. Surely you can find more totally BS outrage porn you fukin moron.
Soonergrunt
@Villago Delenda Est: they constantly confuse (frequently intentionally) ‘precise’ for ‘discrete.’
TLAM-C and JDAM can strike a target within 2 or 3 meters of the intended targeting point. Both systems are hyper-precise. But the lack of target discretion comes in when that 1000-lb of high explosive and fragmentary casing detonates.
GregB
It is a moral outrage that Bashar Al Assad is killing his own people!
We have to get in on that action pronto.
Fucking warmongers gotta get their war on.
KG
@Soonergrunt: the International Community does have some leverage. A blockade or invasion is the biggest form of leverage. But a blockage won’t work because someone will see not participating as an opportunity to develop a new client state. And invasion is out of the question because most of the populations of the west are still war weary. So, that leaves the rest of the world with offering a 30 acre compound and the promise of not seeking to prosecute for war crimes/crimes against humanity.
Cacti
@Soonergrunt:
And that’s to say nothing of the group that stands to benefit most from any intervention against Assad:
Al-qaeda affiliated Islamist militants, who are already receiving financial and logistical support from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and are brutalizing local civilian populations.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
The same way we paid for the deserting coward’s great Mesopotamian adventure. Put it “off budget” and send the VISA bill to our grandkids.
The Red Pen
Shouldn’t we give the neo-cons a little credit here? After all, it shows that they are open to paying for other people’s surgery with public funds.
catclub
@Soonergrunt: “Given that, I say save the taxpayers’ money and don’t risk American lives, and do nothing. ”
Yep. Obama just has to look strong while doing this. Also principled. Also resolute.
Oy.
Roger Moore
@Soonergrunt:
The only possible leverage would be an offer of personal and family safety in another country he can reasonably trust not to turn him over to ICC as soon as the furor dies down. Even that kind of personal offer won’t do any good as long as he believes there’s any chance that the fight might help to protect the Alawite minority. I doubt assassinating him would do much good, either, since the next leader is going to be driven by the same idea.
Villago Delenda Est
@Soonergrunt:
Collateral damage, sarge. You know the deal!
Artillery is “precise”, too, at least in targeting the ordnance. The US Army excels at this. Unfortunately, the boom tends to be, rather, enthusiastic, as you point out.
catclub
@Villago Delenda Est: The smart thing Obama did was put the wars ON the budget, so that when they end, they reduce the actual budget, not some off-budget item.
Roger Moore
@Villago Delenda Est:
I suspect that the way we’d actually pay for it is to put it on budget and take the money to pay for it out of food stamps and Obamacare subsidies. Two birds, one stone.
Redshirt
Oh, the Repukes will cheer on war until we actually do anything, and then they critique/condemn everything that happens, because…. Obama.
Chris
The best line I’ve ever heard about the concept of Surgical Air Strikes came from, of all places, a Tom Clancy novel;
“You don’t do surgery with bombs.”
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
It’s highly likely that the Al Qaeda types leading the rebellion now will seek to wipe out the Alawite heretics. This is classic Sunni v Shia stuff, and these guys give 16th/17th century Catholics and Protestants a run for their money.
AliceBlue
Is there some unwritten rule somewhere that says the US has to get involved if a dictator uses poison gas on his people? Why the sudden “oh my god, we’ve got to do something!”?
Villago Delenda Est
@catclub:
Absolutely agreed, and of course it gave the teatards the talking point that Obama “exploded” the deficit by not lying about the cost of welfare for the MIC (and Halliburton in particular) on the balance sheet.
The deserting coward picked up this trick from his vile shitstain of a sire, who put the entire S&L bailout “off budget”, in part to cover up for son Neil’s bank robbing.
TAPX486
@Soonergrunt: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result. I have been watching this insanity from at least the Gulf of Tonkin and the results never change. The gung-ho warmongers at the front end whose kids have more important things to do, right thru to the ‘war what war’ attitude at the back end. Oh and way do we need a VA again?
Simple solution put them in the cockpit of the strike aircraft or glue them to the nose cone of the smart bomb and let them go play little tin-soldier. Save the lives of the real soldiers for something more important, like living long enough to see their kids go to college or dance at their daughters wedding.
Cacti
@Villago Delenda Est:
The whole damned thing is a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia for regional influence.
We have nothing to gain from picking a side in this one.
Roger Moore
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yes, exactly. People like to treat people like Assad as pure evil and doing things for no good reason, but it’s clear that he is genuinely interested in the well being of his group and sees the exercise of state power, even a violent civil war, as a legitimate way of protecting them. I really think the only thing to do in a case like this is to do our best to protect innocent civilians from both sides and hope the combatants do as much damage to each other as possible.
Botsplainer
Syria is a shit sandwich with no mustard to knock back the taste.
You have a number of American born and raised young men serving in the Syrian Army due to their draft. Doubtless another number of American born and raised young men among various factions of fighters. Large communities of expatriate Syrians and Lebanese are in every city in America, and there are a number of politicians only a generation off the boat in municipal offices, statehouses and the US Capitol. Further complicating things is the number of politically active Antiochian Orthodox and Maronite bishops near centers of power in NYC and DC.
There are no good answers.
beltane
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yes, and this against a background of an escalating war between Al Qaeda and Hezbollah. The only surgical strikes called for here are lobotomies for anyone demanding that we jump into another quagmire.
TAPX486
@Roger Moore: If he took that deal his Alawite allies would cut his throat and the throats of every member of his extended family before he had time to hang up the phone
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yeah. I think it’s in the late 2000s (so, four or five years ago) that I started reading stuff about how the Sunni/Shi’a conflict had become the definitive polarizing line in the Middle East, above and beyond conflicts with the West or even Israel. My first thought at the time; “… so, that puts us on the same side as al-Qaeda.”
It’s only now, years later, that I’m finally reading stuff in the mainstream media indicating that it’s finally occurred to them too.
Roger Moore
@Cacti:
It’s not just a proxy war, though. The whole thing started over local issues, and the proxies only became involved later. Now that it obviously is a proxy war, we should stay the hell out of the way.
Comrade Dread
Christ Almighty, so the Senate’s brilliant solution to a lunatic firing off deadly rockets into a populated area will be to fire off some of our deadly rockets into a populated area?
But it’s totally different because our rockets would kill you with fire!
beltane
@Roger Moore: I am 100% in favor of providing whatever assistance is needed by the civilian victims/refugees of this conflict, i.e. actual surgeons instead of “surgical strikes”.
Belafon
@AliceBlue: There are international agreements against the use of chemical and biological weapons. As with any agreement, though, it’s only as good as the implied force behind it (if everyone followed it, we wouldn’t have needed it in the first place).
The UN should hold a Security Council meeting and agree to deal with it. Then we can have Republican’s heads explode trying to decide whether to agree with the UN or not.
catclub
@beltane: Islam is about 600 years younger than Christianity. Holy wars around year 1500 of the religion are apparently a common feature of both.
MattF
Surgery with missiles. What could go wrong? Can we get a second opinion? What would constitute a ‘cure’?
ETA: I’m out of snark on this subject. Bye.
Belafon
@Comrade Dread:
FTFY
catclub
@Belafon: “Then we can have Republican’s heads explode trying to decide whether to agree with the UN or not.”
Better yet, heads explode when we offer to send US troops under UN command.
Chris
@Roger Moore:
True.
It’s a proxy war and not a proxy war, just like all the battlefields of the Cold War were. The Yemen civil war back in the day was a proxy war between America and Russia (or between Saudi Arabia and Egypt), and a tribal war between different groups in Yemen. The Afghanistan war was a proxy war between America and Russia, and a civil war between different Afghan factions, and a competition for leadership of the Islamic world between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Etc, etc, etc. There are local issues between local actors, but then outside actors get in on it too.
Cacti
@Comrade Dread:
American bombs are big fluffy love bombs of democracy.
Roger Moore
@MattF:
The people proposing surgery aren’t after a cure. They just want an excuse to operate and a nice fat medical bill when the whole thing is over.
beltane
@catclub: And in the 16th century, neither the Protestant nor Roman Catholic camps desired to be ruled by Muslims.
max
Anyone referencing “surgical” airstrikes should be forced to undergo re-education at Trump University.
I linked one from Even the Liberal New Republic in comments a couple of days ago. I’d like to know when the fuck ‘surgical airstrike’ came back into vogue, because I seem to remember even Bush administration officials laughing at the idea a decade ago. Plus someone is doing this ‘coalition of the willing’ shit again, because Fred Kaplan is going on about getting the Turks to lead a NATO charge against Syria, thus allowing for a veil of international agreement in favor of blowing shit up. (And there’s this thing about Clinton’s uh, success in Yugoslavia, where we barely avoided starting World War III with Russians, according to Wesley Clark.) Additional bonus points: the naval forces moving to the Eastern Med appear to be four ships split up between a couple of cruisers and a couple of destroyers. We have some F-16s in Jordan but that’s not going to hold back any kind of Syrian retaliation.
Gah.
max
[‘Why o why has the Clinton administration (particularly the late Clinton administration) become the touchstone for high muckety-muck Democrats?’]
daveNYC
They say ‘surgical’, but they mean ‘magical’.
TAPX486
@Chris: Maybe Ann Coulter had it right – kill them all (or in this case let them kill teach other ) and let Allah sort it out. (that is meant as very depressing gallows humor by the way. Not really a valid solution)
catclub
@Chris: Isn’t the present Afghanistan war also a proxy war between Pakistan and India? Pakistan does not want an ally of India on both sides of it.
Villago Delenda Est
@catclub:
It’s been bubbling under the surface for centuries, though, and Christianity had split before on doctrinal issues. When the deserting coward said something along the lines of “all the sons of Mohammed need to get along like family” he inadvertently stumbled onto a truth, without having the slightest fucking clue he did so. The pride of the Yale History department.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@catclub:
Except that in this case, the war has been going on almost since the foundation of the religion. It would be as if Thirthy-Years War began during the reign of Marcus Aurelius and was ongoing during the reign of Napoleon.
flukebucket
I cannot believe we are even considering this shit. It is very disheartening.
Villago Delenda Est
@catclub:
An untold reason for being in Afghanistan is the fear that the wrong people will get their mitts on Pakistan’s nukes. So, yes, there’s some India/Pakistan concern here.
TG Chicago
Besides the silliness of the “surgical” thing, what happens if we lob missiles over there and it doesn’t change the calculus?
That makes us look like a paper tiger. So the next step is further escalation.
Anybody who calls for strikes needs to go much further and explain what we do after the strikes. Are they willing to accept a solution short of regime change? I bet not, and I bet they’d never be willing to say so.
So we need to ask them.
Roger Moore
@Chris:
I guess you could argue that all proxy wars involve some kind of local issue, since the locals aren’t going to get involved just to satisfy their outside supporters. Or maybe the outsiders wouldn’t get involved if there weren’t an existing dispute that caused the locals to look for patrons. I think the bigger deal here is that the civil war seems to have started first and sucked in al Qaeda only after it had been underway for a fair while. If we had gotten involved off the bat, we might have been able to forestall AQ involvement- not that keeping AQ out in any way would have justified our involvement.
KG
@catclub: on some level, every war or conflict is a “proxy war.” When fighting breaks out, regional and world powers typically have an interest in which side wins. So they either explicitly or implicitly support and aid one side or the other. So it has been since the first two tribes to permanently settle a region saw a third tribe settling, and so it shall be until first contact.
catclub
@max: Since Turkey is a NATO member, we have a mutual defense treaty with them (but not with Israel, interestingly enough), so every time Syria launches some mortars into Turkey, it is a touchy thing. Kind of like how we have not really declared the military coup in Egypt a coup. Brings on too many official legal consequences.
Roger Moore
@max:
Because Obama cut a lot of them out of his administration, making the late Clinton era the last time they were relevant.
Paul in KY
@Soonergrunt: I guess they would be ‘surgical’ when compared to ‘Bomber Harris style’ carpet bombing.
Roger Moore
@TG Chicago:
I wouldn’t be surprised if they were willing to admit it on direct questioning, but they sure as hell aren’t going to volunteer it. That said, anyone who looks at the people cheering for US involvement and doesn’t see regime change as a major motivation just hasn’t been paying attention.
Paul in KY
@giterdone: The NSA knows I have good taste when it comes to my pron ;-)
You might be sweating though…
Punchy
OT, but some serious religious Darwinism going on here…
Roger Moore
@KG:
Every war involving only minor powers, at least. I don’t think WWI or WWII were proxy wars, and I don’t think the colonial wars of conquest (including most of the Indian Wars here in the US) qualify, either.
Paul in KY
@AliceBlue: It is because poison gas is technically a ‘weapon of mass destruction’. So is a nuke, and (IMO) poison gas pales a bit when compared to one of those.
Back in the bad ole days, when Darth Cheney & his goons were wailing about Saddam’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, they were talking about mustard gas & the like.
While doing everything to suggest they were talking about nukes.
Paul in KY
@catclub: Great!
Paul in KY
@beltane: Back then, if you were a serf, you probably had it better under Islam (provided you were Muslim).
Yatsuno
@catclub: All Turkey has to do is invoke its rights under NATO for mutual defence and the US will step in. And since we have military bases in Turkey, we’re in the best position of all of the NATO members to help out. I’m hoping a no-fly zone will be sufficient here, since we are quite good at enforcing those. And those tend to have a desired effect without committing too much in the way of resources.
Villago Delenda Est
@Punchy:
Am I a bad person if I root for the measles to win this one?
Ben Cisco
How about we drop HIS ass on Damascus?
Paul in KY
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Good point. Although it would have been going on in a generally more low-key way than the 30 Years War (for that 1300+ years)
Villago Delenda Est
@Yatsuno:
Yeah, but the Turks are understandably hesitant to escalate things to that level. They have their own ethnic minorities in that part of their territory to worry about (Assyrians, Kurds, etc) and the instability is something they simply do not need, what with all their own other domestic issues going on right now.
Paul in KY
@Villago Delenda Est: Probably. It’s not the kid’s fault they have idiot losers for parents.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ben Cisco:
Only if we drop him naked with “Fuck Allah” tattooed on his ass.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Paul in KY:
If you’re talking about 2002-2003, they presented dairy equipment as centrifuges used in the production of radioactive material. And, iirc, yellowcake isn’t used to produce chemical weapons.
fuckwit
@TAPX486: That wasn’t Ann Coulter, it was another vile specimen, Henry Kissinger, who said it regarding the Iran/Iraq war in the 1980s.
Face
I thought a “Surgical Airstrike” was the helicoptor EMTs walking a picket line over their benefits package.
KG
@Roger Moore: yeah, obviously wars between major powers and wars of conquest are different, that’s what I was trying to get at when I said “regional or world powers”
Yatsuno
@Villago Delenda Est: If the Turks were going to pull that trigger they would have done so several months ago when Syria basically chased some rebels over the border and just bombed where they thought they were. Hell there was an expectation that Turkey might have invaded then but domestic affairs intervened and they decided not to risk potential further instability. Luckily for all concerned.
The Kurds are watching closely. If Turkey concentrates on Syria they will try to move for that independent state they’ve always wanted and Turkey might not have the resources to recover it. This will directly affect Iran and Iraq as well, so there are lots of ways this could go south really fast.
Soonergrunt
@Roger Moore: As I noted earlier, Assad sees himself as being in a “win everything or lose everything” situation. He’s correct in that assessment, too. So bombing him to take away his CW only hastens his demise IF it actually accomplishes the destruction of his CW. Anything we do will most likely have the effect of shortening his lifespan if it has any effect at all. And since the actual destruction of his CW arsenal will be problematic at best, we’ll keep shooting missiles and dropping bombs. And we won’t stop so long as there’s a chance that he might still have usable CW. If we start bombing to maintain credibility, we can’t very well stop bombing if the CW still exists because then we’d lose credibility.
Once we drop the first bomb or launch the first missile, we become committed to regime change.
fuckwit
@KG: Who actually wants this fucknut in their country? Presuming he’d leave alive anyway?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Paul in KY:
Yeah. It’s had breathing periods, like the Hundred Years’ War.
Paul in KY
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): They didn’t have any ‘yellowcake’ & I don’t think the centrifuges would have worked for making your own atom bomb.
I guess they crafted a compelling story for you ;-)
Remember, they had hollow aluminum tubes too!!!!
Ben Cisco
@Villago Delenda Est: DEAL!
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Paul in KY:
I didn’t say I thought they had nukes, but that nukes were that about which Cheney & pals were wailing in order to drum-up war.
Soonergrunt
@Yatsuno: For a no-fly zone to have any staying power at all, that will require bombing airfields, which will require suppressing enemy air defenses.
No matter what we do, we have to put people in harms way for exceptionally little benefit or gain to us.
And as far as protecting Turkey (or any other NATO state) under Article 5, I submit to you that for most of our NATO “partners,” Article 5, like the rest of the treaty, is more a matter of subjective convenience than consistent philosophy about military force.
If Turkey were to invoke Article 5, I’d tell them to have fun with that.
Roger Moore
@Yatsuno:
I think the treaty would only require us to help with the immediate problem; anything beyond that would be optional. If Turkey decided to launch a full-scale invasion, we could- and I assume Obama would- claim they had gone beyond the needs of defense and refuse further assistance. This is similar to the way we weren’t able to compel NATO assistance in Iraq; we could ask for it, but other NATO countries decided it wasn’t a legitimate mutual defense action and refused to help.
Roger Moore
@Villago Delenda Est:
I don’t think they’d be able to read it after impact, or were you suggesting we supply him with a parachute?
Chris
@catclub:
Kind of; I think it’s mostly that Pakistan likes to have Afghanistan as both a training ground and a source of fanatics that can help them fight India (especially in re Kashmir). In the hypothetical event of an Indian invasion, they probably also wouldn’t mind having Afghanistan, or the Af/Pak border area, as a place to retreat to (though I don’t know if that’s relevant anymore now that both have nukes). And of course India’s attempts to build connections in Afghanistan has them scared shitless.
I don’t know if India has any “proxies” in Afghanistan in the same way Pakistan does, though.
Yatsuno
@Roger Moore: Turkey does have a claim to being attacked, but the scope of the attack was limited in both duration and scope. Nevertheless if some ambitious Turkish general got his druthers up it could get ugly really fast and you bet your bippie Turkey will be yelling at the kid with the most toys to help out. And Grandpa Walnuts and his Huckleberry will be on every Sunday show screaming how we need to be getting our war on because allies and world standing and WOLVERINES!!! Too many ways for this to go from zero to fucked too fast.
Chris
@Roger Moore:
That’s actually been my thought about the conflict, too. There’s also an argument to be made that that’s what we did in Libya – getting involved early, and limiting our involvement the way we did (we never occupied the country, for example) probably helped buy us the kind of goodwill that, after the Benghazi attacks, had Libyans out in the streets protesting Stevens’ death and, in one case, even marching to a jihadi militia compound and tossing them out.
In Syria, though, even if something like that were ever possible, the ship sailed a long time ago, and the jihadis are well and truly in the thick of it now.
Yatsuno
@Chris:
Keeping them out would have been quite difficult. Syria is closer to SA and Yemen, plus Assad had a wink-wink nudge-nudge relationship with them already because they were useful for keeping things unstable in Lebanon so Syria was “forced” to protect (read: dominate) them. I’m not surprised they flexed their muscle in a power vacuum especially to take out a hated religious minority like the Alawites. It’s like jihad catnip.
Also: Qadafi had his own ways of dealing with any jihadist movements. Namely, he shipped them off somewhere else to fight and stay out of his hair.
danielx
Probably beating a dead horse, but the only thing surgical about a 500 lb bomb is when one of its fragments removes one or more of someone’s bodily appendages.
Suffern ACE
I actually support willy nilly random carpeting the place with tactical nuclear weapons. That will teach Assad not to defy us, as well as teach those rebels that they need to fight harder next time.
Omnes Omnibus
Has anyone in the Admin made any moves toward doing anything? My understanding is that the UN inspectors are now on the site of the alleged attack. I would be surprised if anything happens until they have finished doing their thing.
Paul in KY
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Right. But if you actually asked them & pinned them down about those ‘weapons of mass destruction’ they thought Saddam actually had (which I saw done once or twice), they then were forced to answer ‘chemical weapons’ (but we’re ever-so-sure he could have nukes too).
Paul in KY
@Roger Moore: Like the way you think!
? Martin
@Villago Delenda Est:
Mostly agreed, until the Navy got into the game. Their drones have no pilot – anywhere. It’s all silicon. That’s the point where we should really start to pay closer attention.
But my main concern with the drones is that the risk of loss of life for our own guys has always added significantly to the cost (primarily political cost) of military action. Drones eliminate that risk. And that means that the marginal cost to act gets a LOT cheaper and it fairly begs the question – if a strike costs nothing more than fuel, maintenance and a $25,000 Hellfire missile, how many craters are you willing to put in the ground at $35K per? The FBI’s most wanted list starts at a $100K reward. It’d be more cost effective to take them out from the air.
At some point Congress and the Executive branch start thinking in those terms – the same as CEOs think about labor wages and benefits.
Soonergrunt
@Omnes Omnibus: Not yet. And the post isn’t actually about that. SECSTATE Kerry is supposed to speak at 3:00 PM Eastern about that very subject.
Chris
@? Martin:
Isn’t that just filling the niche that already exists with cruise missiles? In the nineties when our embassies were bombed and we wanted to mark our disapproval, we threw Tomahawks at the Sudan, now it’ll be drones strikes – same basic principle.
For that matter, I feel like the “cheaper marginal cost of action” ship sailed when we dropped the draft and instituted the all volunteer force. It’s why national outrage over Iraq never reached the same levels that it did over Vietnam.
Cain
@Yatsuno:
Fuck, give the damn Kurds their home land, they are probably the most reasonable people in that area.
max
@Omnes Omnibus: Has anyone in the Admin made any moves toward doing anything? My understanding is that the UN inspectors are now on the site of the alleged attack. I would be surprised if anything happens until they have finished doing their thing.
Leslie Gelb:
Further to that:
That is, ‘a collection of the usual idiots is arguing that we would look bad on national TV unless we bomb something and make some loud noises’.
Obama made a mistake talking about red lines, but the usual idiots are trying to use it as a pure ‘win the day’ lever to force the President to do something stupid.
And some of the usual idiocy from Even the Liberal New Republic:
{mutters} ‘No shit, Sherlock.’
So, because Assad used chemical weapons, we should launch an all out air war (from what fucking air bases? and with what fucking aircraft?) to destroy *all* of Syria’s equipment. ‘Massed fires’ == artillery. To get rid of all the ‘massed fires’ you gotta destroy all their equipment. This is possible, but it’s going to take a hell of a lot more airpower than can be managed by a small naval task group, and it’s going to kill a lot of innocent Syrians and it sure as fuck is not going to be ‘brief’. (Pardon: BAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Ok, I feel better.)
max
[‘Jesus Christ.’]
? Martin
@Omnes Omnibus:
The WH did some undisclosed things after the first suspected chemical weapons attack. We don’t have the details of that – could have just been money/small arms/medical/etc.
Hagel indicated that he’s doing things in anticipation of action – keeping ships in the area, that kind of stuff.
I’ll note again that one difference between Syria and Libya is that Libya basically had no friends. There was nobody on the outside helping them, and there was nobody on the outside that would take specific affront to Qadafi being gone (any more than they were already offended by the US). Syria is a different thing altogether. They do have friends helping them, and that will take specific objection to our intervention. Even if all other things were the same, that difference alone has to shape what we do (whether we like that or not). There’s just no good ending to this. Acting or not acting will likely leave the casualty count the same. The only difference is how long it takes to reach the end – we can speed it up by acting (which at least allows the millions of refugees to make a decision) or let it play out for a few more years. Either way a lot of people will die, the region will be a disaster as everyone rushes in to try and take control, any number of groups will be rightly pissed off and vow vengeance, and the cost of this will be felt for decades. Those things are unavoidable.
Yatsuno
@max:
Aviano is within operations distance of Syria, plus IIRC there is another AF base in Turkey which name escapes me. So unfortunately the logistics are there. The will to use them is the big open question here.
Paul in KY
@Chris: Certainly the ‘Considering cost of people’s kids who went in military unvoluntarily’ boat left the port when the draft was ended.
Good points in your post.
Chris
@Yatsuno:
Incirlik and Izmir, Incirlik being the one close to Syria. http://militarybases.com/overseas/turkey/
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Paul in KY:
Hell, you could only pin them down on Saddam’s capability to manufacture chemical weapons, since there was absolutely no proof that he’d been able to rebuild any after his old stockpile had been destroyed pursuant to the first Gulf War. They couldn’t sell that capability as a reason for going to war, so they had to manufacture evidence of a nuclear program, something that scares more of the American public. Blame the Cold War for that.
Paul in KY
@Yatsuno: Assume they could fly out of Incirlik, if Turks OKed it.
Suffern ACE
@max: I will take the hit to our credibility. We will lose the credibility we have by intervening here anyway. Please, for once, take the goddammed hit to our precious ME credibility.
Hell, I’ll even lie to our foreign policy establishment. “Your balls are so big and beautiful. I wish I had balls that big.” That’s all they really want to hear anyway. How much money can we pay to erect a statue to our foreign policy hawks’ balls?
Paul in KY
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Right you are. My point has been that they would give you the hard sell on intimating that Saddam had nukes (whenever they spoke about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ on Fox or CNN), but if they were cornered about that, they would grudgingly admit that the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ they were talking about where chemical (even though when they were trying to hint like Hell that these weapons were nukes).
Just splitting a few hairs…
? Martin
@Chris: Yeah, but cruise missiles are still expensive at about $1M per. From the sociopath CEO perspective, you can blow up 30 houses with Hellfires before hitting the right one. With a Tomahawk you have to get it right the first time.
And cruise missiles are only effective against relatively static targets and they have a long lead time (because they usually have to travel some distance). Al Qaeda IS the asymmetrical response to the cruise missile – they’re independent, mix in with the public, don’t have permanent installations, tend to be very mobile. The drone is the response to that response – it’s agile, can loiter over an area and pick out individual targets, and it’s response time is very short. It can follow a car to a location and immediately kill the target. AQ (or some other group) will find a response to that – and it’ll probably be to move their operation inside the US where they are free from drones and surveillance. That’s pretty much what the right wing militia/sovereign citizen/doomsday prepper movement is – and we fucking put them on TLC.
And yes, moving from a draft did lower the marginal cost of action, but that stayed in balance by a public that is increasingly intolerant of loss of life. It may not seem that way with the stand-your-ground and whatnot, but it’s really true. It took 58,000 US military deaths to get Vietnam to end. It took less than 10% that many to end Iraq. I don’t think the public would tolerate even hundreds in the case of Syria. So, that hasn’t really materialized. But blowing through taxpayer dollars is a different matter – we’re not providing any real opposition to that, nor are we providing any real opposition to dollars/death – so long as the people we kill aren’t US citizens nobody seems to give a shit.
KG
@fuckwit: there’s a long history of countries accepting exiled rulers from other countries, particularly if it meant avoiding a big war that they weren’t really interested in getting into. Portugal took in Batista, we took in Ferdinand Marcos… So, it’s not entirely out of the question. I would suspect that it’d be someone in the region though, and not a western state.
Shakezula
Fxd.
Morbo
Well, this picture doesn’t look very different from how it did when it was first made.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Paul in KY:
I understand your point and certainly recall chemical weapons as their fallback position- but I don’t think that that fallback, which never carried much weight amongst the population of the US after the first Gulf War, can be described as “wailing”. It came across- to me, anyway- as an afterthought, as half-hearted. Am I splitting hairs here, too? Yeah, okay, maybe. ; )
The Dangerman
@Roger Moore:
No, they just want another club to beat Obama with; they know Obama will do nothing (i.e, it’s the clusterfuck to end all clusterfucks) and they can bitch about red lines and feckless Obama and …. in other words, more of the same, ad infinititum.
Roger Moore
@max:
The idea of airstrikes also leaves out the important detail that Syria has a much better and more modern air defense system than Iraq did when we invaded. We substantially destroyed Iraq’s air defense system during Desert Storm and didn’t let them rebuild, which is a big reason we didn’t need the same extensive air campaign before the ground attack the second time around. Syria, OTOH, hasn’t had its air defenses destroyed the same way, and in fact they’ve continued to get fairly up-to-date equipment from Russia. Shutting down their air defenses to the point we could launch an effective attack against their ground forces would not be easy, cheap, or guaranteed to be without substantial losses on our part.
Roger Moore
@? Martin:
Trying to mix this up with the NSA business, ? Martin? We’ve been worried about AQ coming here for quite a while, without any apparent success on their part. That would be the correct response, but it seems as if our attempts to keep suspicious people out have been fairly successful at preventing AQ from getting a foothold here.
Roger Moore
@Morbo:
Except that we’ve actually moved to the lower left hand corner, and it’s only fools who think any of the options toward the top are still relevant.
Paul in KY
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): They were quite successful in making the great unwashed think ‘nuclear’ whenever they heard the term ‘weapons of mass destruction’.
Our courtiers in the press never pushed back against that malarky at all.
Roger Moore
@The Dangerman:
I think they really want to bomb somebody, also, too.
? Martin
@Roger Moore: Mix it up? Well, it’s all part of the same apparatus so of course. The intel community isn’t stupid – they know that if they eliminate safe havens overseas, but leave it so the US is seen as a safe haven, then they’ll just move to the US – and they’ve at least been trying to do that. We think unsuccessfully, but we don’t really know for sure, but I don’t see any reason to believe that we have been successful at keeping AQ from organizing here.
But there’s two ways of handling this – one is to clamp down on domestic security so it isn’t seen as a safe haven (which is what’s been happening), and the other is to ease off everywhere and rely on the fact that launching an attack from Yemen or Somalia or wherever the fuck they are is much harder than doing it locally, and hopefully in the process create somewhat fewer people pissed off at us. That’d be my personal preference. I’m not really a big advocate of the security state – but if we’re going to do it, better to do it well than poorly. Mostly, though I’m reacting to people screaming at ghosts – to some noise they hear and assume it something that can’t exist and then demand that Barry launch a war on ghosts or some fuckery. I can’t help but conclude that most of the people shrieking about the NSA are simply looking for an excuse to feel like a victim of something.
? Martin
@Paul in KY: And then on the flip side, we now treat pressure cookers as weapons of mass destruction. Too broad when it suits us and too narrow when it suits us.
Suffern ACE
@Paul in KY: I couldn’t even look at a portabello sandwhich without being reminded Saddam was out to get us.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Paul in KY:
Because Americans tend to think of nukes as having global reach- that is, that nukes can directly effect us at home- but don’t think of chemical weapons that way. We tend to think of chemical weapons as something that effects other people in other places, and even if doughboys were gassed in WWI, many more died from the flu…And it was all, like, when Lincoln was President, amirite?
Roger Moore
@? Martin:
There’s one good reason: they haven’t succeeded in launching any attacks here since 9/11. It’s hard to believe that they’d have an active group in the US without doing something, so if they have one, it’s almost certainly small and/or staying close to ground. I suspect that the underlying issue is that AQ really depends on a friendly Muslim population to survive and thrive, and there simply isn’t the kind of Muslim population- both in size and theology- for them to do well here.
? Martin
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): We have no societal notions of chemical or biological weapons – no experience with them, no imagery of them to hook into. Everyone knows from countless sources what a nuclear bomb looks like, what the effect looks like from afar, what the effect looks like up close. They’re used often in movies, so if you want to communicate the consequence of such weapons, you really only have the nuke to evoke that kind of imagery.
The Dangerman
@Roger Moore:
Sure, but the length of time from Obama dropping bombs to a Republican bitching about getting us into that shithole will be the 2nd shortest time ever measured (the first being, of course, the length of time in LA from a light turning green to the second car in line honking at the first car in line).
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@? Martin:
Well, the thing is that we’ve got more experience with chemical weapons than nukes. The imagery is out there, the stories are out there, but no one in the media puts it out front. A lot of Americans were gassed during WWI. How many Americans were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
? Martin
@Roger Moore:
Sorry, that should have been:
Too clever with the negatives there.
But Ft Hood was one such success. Limited in reach, and maybe an outlier, but AQ is really a movement of individuals as much as an organized agency, so I would still count it as a successful attack. And if anyone was wondering why al-Awlaki was put on the kill list, Ft Hood is very likely why.
? Martin
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Which is part of the reason why the imagery sticks as it does. Having Indiana Jones escape something that might have killed his immediate relatives is dark and morbid. But escaping something that we did intentionally as a so-called moral act (even if it did kill 200,000 people), can be fun and lighthearted.
But much more than that, you can’t create imagery of chemical weapons that does not show people dead or dying. That’s the only visual clue you have. But a nuke leave a very clear visual cue from a great distance. So you have a sanitized image that allows everyone to acknowledge the destruction implied, without having to face it directly. Chemical weapons must be faced directly so we don’t do it.
Ted & Hellen
lol
You have to love it.
The SOS of the United States, which invaded two countries on a whim based on lies, and killed, displaced, and maimed hundreds of thousands of people, lecturing the rest of the world on MORAL ATROCITIES.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…
Kerry is a clear and present douche bag.
When will Obama drone strike Crawford, TX and that obscene and grand monument to Shrub’s barbarism in Dallas?
Guess that would be hypocritical though, since he sat in on the dedication and schmoozed with Barbara Beautiful Mind Bush, laughing their asses off like good fellow oligarchs should.
Amir Khalid
So Senator Corker wants a “surgical” strike, but he doesn’t say on what target. He hasn’t thought through the practical issues of launching an air strike, or its likely political consequences. He hasn’t even thought about what to hit — which is surely fundamental in considering any offensive military action. He must believe a strike in itself, just by being “surgical”, will impress the warring parties in Syria in the right way: the shock-and-awe approach by another name.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@? Martin:
But we CAN face chemical weapons directly. They CAN be delivered the same way that nukes are delivered. Ironically, we haven’t seen either nukes or chemical weapons used by major powers since Nagasaki, but we have seen chemical weapons used by lesser powers.
Robert Waldmann
Any man suggesting “surgical” air strikes should have a surgical testicle removal as he has much more testosterone in his blood than does him (or us) any good. I have no proposed cure for women who favor surgical air strikes (but it isn’t as if there have been many of them).
srv
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
http://www.thenation.com/blog/162596/hidden-history-american-pows-were-killed-hiroshima#
boatboy_srq
@? Martin: And yet there are some among the Teahad who think it not only acceptable but Appropriate, Right and The Only Choice for dealing with
USSRIraqLibyaIran and Syria.Mike G
Anyone referencing “surgical” strikes is invited to go stand next to the target receiving surgery in order to describe for the rest of us the accuracy of the operation.
nitangae
@beltane: I guess you haven’t heard of the Principality of Transylvania. If given a choice between Islamic rule and Catholic rule, plenty of Protestants, Greek Orthodox and Jews preferred Islamic rule in the Ottoman empire.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@srv:
And how many thousands of Americans were gassed in Europe during WWI?
Paul in KY
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): To me, chemical weapons are not weapons of mass destruction.