RUTHFULLY YOURS

Syria is weird for reasons that transcend even the bizarre situation of bombing an abhorrent Bashar al-Assad who was bombing an abhorrent ISIS — as we de facto ally with Iran, the greater strategic threat, to defeat the more odious, but less long-term strategic threat, ISIS.

Trump apparently hit a Syrian airfield to express Western outrage over the likely Syrian use of chemical weapons. Just as likely, he also sought to remind China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea that he is unpredictable and not restrained by self-imposed cultural, political, and ethical bridles that seemed to ensure that Obama would never do much over Chinese and Russian cyber-warfare, or Iranian interception of a U.S. warship or the ISIS terror campaign in the West or North Korea’s increasingly creepy and dangerous behavior.

But the strike also raised as many questions as it may have answered.

Is Trump saying that he can send off a few missiles anywhere and anytime rogues go too far? If so, does that willingness to use force enhance deterrence? (probably); does it also risk further escalation to be effective? (perhaps); and does it solve the problem of an Assad or someone similar committing more atrocities? (no).

Was the reason we hit Assad, then, because he is an especially odious dictator and kills his own, or that the manner in which he did so was cruel and barbaric (after all, ISIS burns, drowns, and cuts apart its victims without much Western reprisals until recently)? Or is the reason instead that he used WMD, and since 1918 with a few exceptions (largely in the Middle East), “poison” gas has been a taboo weapon among the international community? (Had Assad publicly beheaded the same number who were gassed, would we have intervened?)

Do we continue to sort of allow ISIS to fight it out with Syria/Iran/Hezbollah in the manner of our shrug during the Iran-Iraq War and in the fashion until Pearl Harbor that we were okay with the Wehrmacht and the Red Army killing each other en masse for over five months in Russia? Or do we say to do so cynically dooms innocents in a fashion that they are not quite as doomed elsewhere, or at least not doomed without chance of help as is true in North Korea?

Trump campaigned on not getting involved in Syria, deriding the Iraq War, and questioning the Afghan effort. Does his sudden strike signal a Jacksonian effort to hit back enemies if the mood comes upon us — and therefore acceptable to his base as a sort of one-off, don’t-tread-on-me hiss and rattle?

Or does the strike that was so welcomed by the foreign-policy establishment worry his supporters that Trump is now putting his suddenly neocon nose in someone’s else’s business? And doing so without congressional authorizations or much exegesis?

President Trump’s swift bombing of a Syrian airfield responsible for a chemical attack has been praised by our allies and even by Democrats. The mere fact that Trump followed up his condemnation of a sarin gas attack with military action sends a signal that the U.S. is no longer the “weak, pitiful giant,” to use Richard Nixon’s phrase, that eight years of Barack Obama’s appeasement and retreat had left it. Such praise is deserved, but the bombing is just the start. The real question is, what happens next? What’s the strategic goal?

The effect of the attack on restoring American prestige is undoubtedly important. Obama’s foreign policy reflected the idealistic internationalism that dismisses such old-fashioned ideas as prestige. Modern progressive thinking holds that the use of force represents a foreign policy failure, and usually makes things worse by entangling the U.S. in escalation and quagmires. Non-lethal negotiated settlements are a better way to defuse conflict, and a national humility based on recognition of past neo-imperialist sins (see Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech) can make our rivals and enemies more amenable to “win-win” agreements.

Obama’s now infamous “red line” warning about Assad’s use of chemical weapons in 2013, a warning the Syrian butcher promptly violated, reflected this thinking. Rather than back up his bold words with force when Assad went ahead and used chemical weapons in the Ghouta region, Obama quickly accepted Russia’s offer to help him negotiate a deal: The U.S. wouldn’t bomb Syria if Assad surrendered his chemical weapons stockpiles to Russia. Despite domestic and international criticism of such an obviously feckless capitulation, Obama told a reporter last year that he is still “very proud of this moment.”

Of course the deal was negotiated in bad faith by Syria and Russia, and did nothing to stop the slaughter or the use of chemical weapons. Like the current deal with Iran, no one knew if the terms of the deal were being adhered to by Assad. Now we know that they weren’t, and that he retained significant stockpiles. Such duplicitous behavior is consistent with the long history of failed negotiated agreements that usually serve as a tactic for furthering an aggressor’s ends. And the failure of such “covenants without the sword,” as Hobbes called them, damages a state’s credibility and prestige, emboldening other aggressors. That in a nutshell is the history of Obama’s foreign policy, which has been a huge success for Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and the myriad jihadist outfits swarming out of the Libya that our thoughtless intervention turned into a jihadist jungle.

So bombing the airfield is a necessary first step to restoring our credibility and concentrating the minds of our enemies and rivals. But it is only one step, and such a one-off by itself can often be an act of international public relations rather than a game-changer. Cruise-missile and drone attacks are dramatic and photogenic. They get media attention and make noise, but without a larger strategic plan, they serve mainly to create the illusion of action in the absence of a lack of will to use decisive force. Destroying some planes on one airfield, or killing an endless series of al Qaeda “number two” leaders has little strategic value. New war planes can be bought, and al Qaeda has an endless supply of potential “number twos.”

Writing in the Washington Post, neo-conservatives Reuel Gerecht and Ray Takeyh wrongheadedly propose to send U.S. ground troops to fight Iran and its proxies in Iran and Syria:

It is way past time for Washington to stoke the volcano under Tehran and to challenge the regime on the limes of its Shiite empire. This will be costly and will entail the use of more American troops in both Syria and Iraq. But if we don’t do this, we will not see an end to the sectarian warfare that nurtures jihadists. We will be counting down the clock on the nuclear accord, waiting for advanced centrifuges to come on line. As with the Soviet Union vs. Ronald Reagan, to confront American resolution, the mullahs will have to pour money into their foreign ventures or suffer humiliating retreat.

They’re nuts. The last thing the US should do is commit ground forces.

It isn’t Iran that we would be fighting: It’s an international mercenary army that already includes thousands of fighters recruited from the three million Hazara Afghans now seeking refuge in Iran, from the persecuted Pakistani Shi’ites who comprise a fifth of that country’s huge population, and elsewhere. As I reported recently in Asia Times:

The IRGC’s foreign legions include volunteers from Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Shi’ites are an oppressed minority often subject to violent repression by the Sunni majority. IRGC-controlled forces include the Fatemiyoun Militia recruited mainly from Shi’ite Hazara refugees from Afghanistan, with reported manpower of perhaps 12,000 to 14,000 fighters, of whom 3,000 to 4,000 are now in Syria. Iranians also command the Zeinabiyoun militia composed of Pakistani Shi’ites, with perhaps 1,500 fighters in Syria.

The manpower pool from which these fighters are drawn is virtually bottomless. The war has already displaced half of Syria’s 22 million people, and Iran plans to replace Sunnis with Shi’ite immigrants in order to change the demographic balance. The Sunni side of the conflict has become globalized with fighters from the Russian Caucasus, China’s Xinjiang Province, as well as Southeast Asia.

The U.S. State Department last year estimated that 40,000 foreign fighters from 100 countries were in Syria; Russia cited a figure of 30,000. Whatever the number is today, it would not be difficult to add a zero to it.

Russia and China, as I explained in the cited Asia Times essay, blame the U.S. for opening the Pandora’s Box of Sunni radicalism by destroying the Iraqi State and supporting majority (that is, Shi’ite) rule in Iraq. Sadly, they are broadly correct to believe so. Thanks to the advice of Gerecht and his co-thinkers at the Weekly Standard and Commentary, the Bush administration pushed Iraq’s and Syria’s Sunnis into the hands of non-state actors like al-Qaeda and ISIS.

A seventh of Russia’s population is Muslim, and 90% of them are Sunnis. China has a restive Muslim population among the Uyghurs in its far West, and all of them are Sunnis. Moscow and Beijing therefore support Shi’ite terrorists as a counterweight to Sunni jihadists. A Eurasian Muslim civil war is unfolding as a result. Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum thinks America should let Sunnis and Shi’ites exhaust each other. If it were just Syria, that would make sense, but the Syrian conflict is the nodal point for a much larger and more dangerous conflagration. If the 300 million Muslims of Southeast Asia were to become involved, the consequences would be horrific.

Gerecht and Tayekh want the U.S. to back the anti-regime forces whom Obama left twisting in the wind during the 2009 demonstrations against Iran’s rigged elections. That is the right thing to do. The Trump administration should create a special task force for regime change in Iran and recruit PJ Media’s Michael Ledeen to run it. Iran is vulnerable to subversion. With 40% youth unemployment and extreme levels of social pathology (the rate of venereal disease infection is twenty times that of the U.S.), Iranians are miserable under the theocratic regime.

But I don’t know if that will work: Iran gets all its money from oil, and the mullahs have the oil, the money, and all the guns. If we can’t overthrow the Iranian regime, we will have two choices.

The first is to bomb Iran — destroy nuclear facilities and Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps bases. That risks war with Russia and China. It is an option, but a dangerous one, and not anyone’s first choice. We could have done this before Iran became a Russian-Chinese ally.

The second is to cut a deal with Russia and China: We muzzle the Sunni jihadists whom we (or our allies like Saudi Arabia) supported, and Russia and China cut Iran off at the knees. I sketched out such a deal in August 2016. It won’t happen easily, or any time soon, because Russia and China are not sufficiently afraid of us to want to come to the table. Russia would demand other concessions (e.g., recognition of its acquisition of territory by force in Ukraine). As the use of poison gas despite past Russian assurances makes clear, one can’t trust the Russians unless, of course, they really are scared of us. CONTINUE AT SITE

UNITED NATIONS—Three months into her job as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley has emerged as a leader in articulating President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

That role has drawn a particular spotlight in the past week. As the international community looked to Washington for a Syria strategy in the aftermath of a new chemical attack that killed scores of civilians, it was Ms. Haley who stepped in to offer insight.

On Wednesday she told the Security Council that the U.S. would be willing to act against Syria unilaterally. On Friday she warned the Council that the U.S. could take further action if necessary. On Sunday she said in a CNN interview that conversations had begun on possible actions against Iran and Russia, such as sanctions, if they don’t abandon their support of President Bashar al-Assad.

“I don’t think anything is off the table right now. You will continue to see the U.S. act when we need to act,” said Ms. Haley in the CNN interview.

Ms. Haley, the 45-year-old former governor of South Carolina who came to her job with no previous foreign policy experience, has surprised diplomats and U.N. officials since she arrived here in late January. On her first day, she pledged to take down names and overhaul the U.N. and has called herself the “new sheriff in town.”

But so far she has assumed the unlikely position of becoming a leading foreign policy face of the new administration, rather than just its attack dog at the U.N.

Diplomats and U.N. officials said that in the confusion and chaos coming from the White House over its foreign policy, they look to Ms. Haley for clarity on a wide range of policies from Syria to Iran, Israel and Russia.

Last week she announced at a press conference that the U.S. had told Israel to freeze all settlement activities to allow for negotiations, the clearest signal of Trump administration’s willingness include pressure on Israel in its foreign policy tool kit.

On Iran, Ms. Haley hasn’t given any indication that the U.S. might pull out of the nuclear deal with the country, as Mr. Trump pledged during his campaign. But she has fiercely criticized Iran’s support for U.S.-designated terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas and meddling in Syria. CONTINUE AT SITE

The goal of American foreign policy should be to make our friends more secure and our adversaries less secure. The balance of countries then have to decide how they want to position themselves. A successful policy will have tactical goals that fit into a larger strategic picture. The American attack on Syria’s al Shayrat military air base fits squarely into the rubric.

The UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Japan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Poland approved publicly. So did Democrats Dick Durbin, Ben Cardin, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, and Nancy Pelosi. Opposed were Russia, Syria, Iran, and Bolivia (keep reading). China and Sweden made statements that hedged. Among the more odd responses, Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr called on Assad to resign, and MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell called it a “false flag” operation, planned by President Trump and Vladimir Putin to help Trump prove he isn’t pro-Russian.

The first Russian response — after a furious announcement that they were tearing up the deconfliction agreement with the U.S. in Syria (they quickly thought better of it) — was to report that planes had flown from the base, so the U.S. attack had been a failure. Not so. Photos from the UK Daily Mail clearly show that hangars, fuel storage, airplanes, and service buildings were destroyed, confirming the Pentagon’s assessment. An Israeli report indicated that 58 of 59 Tomahawks hit. Flying some planes to al Shayrat and rolling them down abandoned runways is typical Russian obfuscation — the planes didn’t come from there, can’t stay there, can’t be maintained there, and can’t be refueled there. As punishment, the strike was a success.

If the tactical goal was met, what about the strategic ones? The Trump administration had announced that America’s priority in Syria would be the ouster of ISIS rather than the removal of Bashar Assad. Does the attack change that? Does it mean “regime change” is back on the table? Is the U.S. about to enter the Syrian civil war?

Not necessarily. Ambassador Haley’s comment that no political solution is possible with Assad does not mean that the U.S. is looking for a military solution. We faced a violation of international law that constituted an international emergency.

Not because of the numbers — more than 400,000 Syrians have already been killed, 11 million are displaced internally and externally, and life expectancy has declined by more than a decade. (U.S. comparables would be 5.6 million dead and 154 million total refugees – factors of 14.) Chemical weapons have been outlawed precisely because the world has generally agreed that they are uniquely hideous and terrifying. The appearance of CW threatens one of the world’s few consensus points.

Which is to say, the consensus on CW was actually shattered in 2013-14 with President Obama’s “red lines” and “game changers.” But then a different consensus coalesced around the fiction that Syrian chemical capability had been eliminated by a U.S.-Russian joint operation. Voices of disbelief were few and far between –- no one wanted to take on Putin or Obama. One result was to embolden Assad and his patrons. The past three years have seen Syrian and Russian strikes on relief convoys and civilians, including the use of chlorine –- though not nerve gas –- to pursue their campaign against Syrian Sunni Muslims.

The U.S. Navy has canceled planned port calls in Australia for the USS Carl Vinson and is instead sending the aircraft carrier toward the Korean Peninsula amid concerns about possible new weapons tests by North Korea, military officials said.

Speaking on Fox News on Sunday, U.S. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said the president has ordered him to prepare “a full range of options” to the nuclear and missile threats North Korea poses to the U.S. and its allies, adding that it was a prudent move to send the Vinson strike group to warn Pyongyang against additional provocation.

But North Korea’s Foreign Ministry indicated on Sunday that it wasn’t cowed by the U.S. moves, calling Thursday’s U.S. strike against its ally, Syria, “an undisguised act of aggression against a sovereign state” and vowing to beef up its nuclear force .

Shortly after the strike, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the attack showed “[President Donald Trump] is willing to act when governments and actors cross the line,” in remarks widely regarded as being directed in part at Pyongyang.

The Vinson strike group, including the carrier and two guided-missile destroyers, is being dispatched to operate in the western Pacific Ocean in response to Pyongyang’s recent missile tests.

There is widespread speculation, based on satellite imagery and analysis, that North Korea might try to carry out another weapons test in the coming days as it prepares for its most important national holiday—the anniversary of the birth of the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung, on April 15.

North Korea carried out three missile tests in the past month, including a midrange-missile launch on April 5 that triggered a terse response from the Trump administration.

“The United States has spoken enough about North Korea,” Mr. Tillerson said after that test. “We have no further comment.”

Now, one official said, the Navy is sending the strike group as a show of force.

The Trump administration has issued a series of warnings to North Korea about its missile tests.

Last month, during a visit to South Korea, Mr. Tillerson said the U.S. “policy of strategic patience has ended” and that “all options are on the table.” CONTINUE AT SITE

When it came to foreign policy, I was worried that the 2016 election would be a case of Clinton delivering the third Obama term. Instead, we have Trump giving us the third Clinton term.

President Donald Trump has now done what candidate Donald Trump committed not to do: He has launched a military strike against a foreign regime — a repulsive one, to be sure — in the absence of any threat, much less any attack, against the United States, in furtherance of no vital American interests.

Trump’s act of war is in violation of the Constitution, which requires congressional authorization for such an offensive use of military force, provoked by no aggression against our nation. Or, as someone once said:
Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

What will we get for bombing Syria besides more debt and a possible long term conflict? Obama needs Congressional approval.
2:14 PM – 29 Aug 2013

Mind you, that’s just one in a series of “Syria is NOT our problem” tweets in which Trump ripped Obama for not recognizing that “the so called ‘rebels’ may be just as bad (or worse)!”

The U.S. attack is an impulsive intervention in a civil war in which both sides — the Damascus/Tehran/Moscow alliance and its Sunni-jihadist/sharia-supremacist opposition — are hostile to the United States. It is a war in which Bashar al-Assad’s continuation in power, dismal as that prospect may be, is in no way the worst conceivable outcome for American national security.

Further, the missile strike offends sound policy: If the United States has not been attacked or threatened, congressional approval should be sought, not merely for legal purposes but also to ensure that complexities have been thought through and public support for a risky intervention has been won. Here, quite apart from the want of American legal footing, Trump lacks even the fig leaf of international legitimacy — there are none of those cryptic U.N. mandates that progressives prefer to our quaint Constitution.

Supporters of Trump’s aggression indignantly focus on Assad’s latest war crime, the barbaric use of chemical weapons — an apparent sarin-gas attack said to have killed 80 civilians. (It is necessary to qualify media reports of “civilian casualties” in the Syrian conflict, since Assad’s jihadist opposition is frequently referred to as “civilian.”)

I guess Obama’s gone, so we’re all in on “R2P” now. But, to repeat, Trump acted without congressional authorization; and as explained by Harvard’s Jack Goldsmith (a former Bush Defense and Justice Department official), in the absence of a cause rooted in self-defense or a Security Council resolution, there is no international-law justification for military attacks against another country — even one whose regime uses poisonous gases against its own people.