RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump’s order last Friday to launch missile strikes against Syria’s chemical weapons infrastructure has exposed the divisions among Americans over foreign policy. Some Trump supporters think the President has walked back from his America-first nationalism. Globalists of both parties agree that Bashar al Assad needed to be punished for brutally violating international conventions against chemical weapons. And the rabid anti-Trump left views the attack as a “wag-the-dog” diversion from Trump’s legal troubles.

So is there a legitimate reason for bombing Syria and possibly provoking Russian retaliation that risks dragging us deeper into the Middle East quagmire?

Many Americans, sick of a decade-and-a-half of American military presence in the region believe that “we don’t have a dog in that fight,” as the first Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker said of the brutal conflicts in the disintegrating Yugoslavia of the early nineties. Some may remember George W. Bush’s willingness to be the “world’s policeman” ––after he campaigned against “foreign policy as social work” ––when he launched two wars in the region. They voted for Donald Trump in part because he was a critic of the endless war in Iraq and the still active war in Afghanistan and their delusional nation-building aims, and vowed to put “America first.”

The problem with this understandable “pox on both their houses” attitude to foreign conflicts is that American security and interests have long been intimately bound up in a world that for more than century has been growing closer and more interdependent. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were the gruesome illustration of that reality. The attackers easily travelled by air thousands of miles from their homes, and lived freely in this country as they prepared the attacks. Armed only with box-cutters, they turned commercial airliners into the smartest of smart bombs simply by navigating them into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, killing in a few hours about the same number of Americans who died in the British invasion between 1812 and 1815. At the cost of half a million dollars––less than half the cost of one cruise missile–– they struck devastating blows against history’s greatest military and economic power, onw they knew intimately from globally distributed news and entertainment, and had grown to hate because its very existence challenged orthodox premodern Islamic doctrine.

The U.S. strikes last week on suspected chemical weapons sites near Damascus and Homs exemplify how not to use military force. Their only consequence is to highlight the poverty of the foreign policy of which they are part: driven by questionable intelligence, the “CNN effect,” and an inability to come to grips with real problems.

The strikes did a little harm to Syrian leader Bashar al Assad, who is a dependent of Iran and Russia and who is nearly helpless vis à vis our newest enemy, Turkey. Iran is extending its reach to the Mediterranean and threatening war on Israel. Russia is solidifying hegemony over the Middle East. Turkey is making war on the Kurds, the only real allies the United States has had in the region in a generation. Instead of braking any of these ominous developments, the U.S. government, reverting to type, destroyed a few buildings and hyped its own virtues in garbled neo-Wilsonian lingo.

The U.S. government’s claim that the Assad regime used chlorine gas and sarin together (that would be a first) against civilians separately from movement of ground troops (military nonsense) may or may not be correct. The government presented no evidence except videos. When it does have evidence, it usually crows. “Tin foil hats” are not necessary for skepticism, given U.S. intelligence’s historic and unbroken allergy to checking information that comes over the transom, its reflexive reaction to cable news reports of reported atrocities, and its own penchant for grandstanding.

No Geopolitical Significance
But the provenance of those chemical attacks, if any, is irrelevant to policy.

U.S. intelligence does not know what was in those buildings. But their destruction has little to do with the production of simple chemical weapons. Tokyo terrorists cooked up sarin in garages. Strikes at 3 a.m. did nothing to degrade the Assad regime’s human expertise in this field. Moreover, if Russia and Iran were complicit, as claimed, they can easily make up what was destroyed.

In short, the strikes’ military significance is tiny, and the geopolitical significance is nil.

Russia is said to have poisoned a defector with a nerve agent that has Moscow’s fingerprints all over it. Why so careless? In Syria, one chemical incident among many prompts a massive air blitz. Again, why now? Only one truth shall can set free the questing, restless mind

“The world ain’t what it seems, and the moment you think you got it figured out, you’re wrong.”
– Levon Helm as Mr Rate in the movie Shooter

I often find it hard to be sure that the putative perp did the dirty deed. In the early 1980s I was foreman of a jury in a trial of a young man charged with receiving stolen property. He had plead guilty to a number of other receiving charges, for which he had been given a non-custodial sentence. If he were found guilty this time around he would almost certainly go to jail. It was touch and go in the jury room. But I thought that there was reasonable doubt. He was acquitted.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that exactly the right decision was made. But I know that I would have wrestled much more with a decision to find him guilty rather than ‘innocent’. It comes, I think, from being a sceptic across the whole gamut of life. I look for proof. Sometimes I find it hard to believe anything with that deep and abiding certainty that I see in some others.

Funny, I believe in God, for which physical evidence is unobtainable, but have my suspicions about the completeness of evolutionary theory, for which there is an amount of physical evidence. The latest announced cancer cure, cures for aging, quantum computing, driverless cars, the triumph of artificial intelligence over humankind, all are lapped up by some people as being part of a brave new future world. Not by me. I am consistently cynical. I’ll believe it when I see it, which I won’t because I’ll be dead before it likely doesn’t happen.

I am sceptical about both the fact of and the seriousness of manmade global warming, though I do not entirely dismiss the possibility that the alarmists are right. A lot of the people I know seem absolutely sure one way or the other. I have come under fire from both sides.

This brings me to the Russians and to also to Bashar Al-Assad. First to Russians and Mr Putin. Apparently, the Russian government, Putin himself perhaps, employed a Soviet-made nerve agent Novichok to try to knock off ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in London in March of this year. Thankfully both have recovered. The British foreign secretary Boris Johnson was reported as saying that it was “overwhelmingly likely” that Russia did it. “There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible…Only Russia has the means, motive and record.”

This is what is called circumstantial evidence. Would the Russians have been silly enough to use a nerve agent which could be easily traced back to them? Perhaps they would as a signal to others who would turn against the motherland. I don’t know, but I do know that I have a problem with describing something of this kind as “overwhelming likely.”

It is overwhelming likely that he is guilty, M’lud. Is that the same as guilty beyond reasonable doubt, which though also imprecise has a long legal history to sustain it? Would we send someone to the gallows who is overwhelmingly likely to have committed the murder? What the heck does it mean? I would like those in positions of power to use more precise language before deciding to expel Russian diplomats and to enjoin other countries to do the same. Precision of language leads to precision of thought which, in turn, lays groundwork for better decision-making. As George Orwell puts it in his essay Politics and the English Language: “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

As the echoes from President Trump’s second Syrian missile strike died away, many observers criticized the administration for lacking a coherent strategy. There is more than a little truth to the charge. The drama and disarray of this often-dysfunctional White House does not suggest a Richelieu at work. The presidential Twitter feed has not always been consistent or levelheaded on the topic of the Syrian war, and it is hard to reconcile Mr. Trump’s denunciations of Bashar al-Assad and his warnings about Iranian aggression with his apparent determination to remove U.S. troops from Syria as quickly as possible.

The tangled politics of last week’s missile strikes illustrate the contradictions in Mr. Trump’s approach. The president is a realist who believes that international relations are both highly competitive and zero-sum. If Iran and Russia threaten the balance of power in the Middle East, it is necessary to work with any country in the region that will counter them, irrespective of its human-rights record. The question is not whether there are political prisoners in Egypt; the question is whether Egypt shares U.S. interests when it comes to opposing Iran.

Yet the rationale for the missile strikes was not realist but humanitarian and legalistic: Syria’s illegal use of chemical weapons against its own people demanded or at least justified the Western attacks. For any kind of activist Middle East policy, Mr. Trump needs allies—including neoconservatives and liberal internationalists at home and foreign allies like Britain and France abroad—and the realpolitik approach he wishes to pursue would alienate them.