Syria and WMDs

Robear wrote:

One interesting thing to note is that if Syria had indeed been a storehouse for Saddam's supposedly massive stocks of chemical and radiological weapons, they would have been exposed by the rebels, or used by the government (remember, in this magical story chemical weapons never degrade), or cited by the Israelis as a massive worry and threat. And yet, all we have heard about are the chemical weapons the Syrian government produces.

Yet another Neocon myth shot to hell.

Maybe it was... umm... Libya? Oh wait, crap...

I've read what Sarin gas does to the victims of it and I'd rather get nuked than get sprayed with that stuff. A quick Atropine injection and being rushed to the hospital to get the antidote might help but I doubt many Syrian have access to Atropine or medical care.

What I've heard about the war in Syria so far is that Assad is making progress in crushing the rebellion. The Israeli military and government doesn't get involved in things that don't concern it. The loss of life in Syria is regrettable but there is nothing we can do about it.

The Syrians rebels and loyalists have been messing around in the northern border and UNDOF has thinned it's ranks after at least two countries chickened out . The IDF have responded a few times to mortar fire with precission strikes against the shooters. The rebels also once took over the border passage but it was quickly taken back by Assad's troops. There was a shipment of weapons or two to Hizzbollah that got bombed ( I bet none took responsibility) .

The general public doesn't care much about Syria but many people went ahead and got the gas masks in record numbers. People talk about Syria often on the news and the general sentiment here is "let them fight" .While they are fighting each other they are not fighting us. Both sides in Knows well that Israel can easily tip outcome of the conflict in favor of one side or the other and it's known to be somewhat "crazy" and "evil". Both side generally hate Isreal so we don't have any favorites

Another thing that the rebel know is where to come to when they get wounded. A few rebels have been treated in Israeli hospitals and later returned (probably forcibly) to their country. The conflict also spilled over to Lebanon recently. The Turks also get bombarded from time to time but I don't think they want to get involved either. There are currently large refugee camps in Turkey and Jordan which hold a lot of people who escaped the conflict. I've read/heard on the news that the life in the refugee camps isn't that great especially for young women.

I am super happy that we used all of our political will, military, financial, and morale resources to invade a country that didn't have WMDs so that no one (including myself) would really want to do something when all of those terrible crimes that we had been warned about are actually happening right in front of our faces.

Yonder wrote:

I am super happy that we used all of our political will, military, financial, and morale resources to invade a country that didn't have WMDs so that no one (including myself) would really want to do something when all of those terrible crimes that we had been warned about are actually happening right in front of our faces.

Sometimes the political solution is letting one faction kill the other.

Sure, the political solution is letting one action kill another. But I can't believe the correct solution in a morale sense is letting one group sarin gas another group.

Is it morale to put a group in power who you know are going to stone people and oppress women?

OG_slinger wrote:

Is it morale to put a group in power who you know are going to stone people and oppress women?

And will back folks who will gleefully truck bomb your troops the next time you deploy them to save more unfortunate civilians from another despot.

I'm okay if we send a few tomahawks to blow up weapon depots, but more than that...I just can't care what happens in Syria right now and don't want to risk troops to right wrongs. We always seem to be doing that and it almost always blows up in our faces or makes the situation worse. I think OG summed things up pretty well.

I'm really just of the opinion that we need to let go of trying to police the entire world. It rarely works us or the world. Don't we have multinational groups that should be doing exactly that already?

Nevin73 wrote:

I'm okay if we send a few tomahawks to blow up weapon depots, but more than that...I just can't care what happens in Syria right now and don't want to risk troops to right wrongs. We always seem to be doing that and it almost always blows up in our faces or makes the situation worse. I think OG summed things up pretty well.

I am not even sure I want to go that far. This is one of those cases where putting a finger on the scale either way is probably not a good idea.

OG_slinger wrote:

Is it morale to put a group in power who you know are going to stone people and oppress women?

It works in Saudi Arabia and Iran. I think we should adopt the "prime directive" in this matter.

We might know that freedom is good is life is precious but there are some cultures where this is not exactly true. When there is some kind of revolution going on and the US or another country get rid of the current dictator people naturally start killing each other it's regrettable but it happens too often.

Maybe the fighting is preventing the deaths of more people.The fighting forces mostly concentrate on fighting other combatants. It may gives civilians time to escape or get ways to defend themselves for the aftermath. If anyone interferes the wining side might start massacre the losing side. As time passes there might be a way to split up the country and keep it relatively peaceful.

There is still an issue that the Russians support Assad which disrupt the balance. Assad might be able to crush the rebels soon but in the aftermath he'll have to do thing to prevent civil unrest either by appeasing the citizen or using terror tactics ( been done a lot in this conflict) .

I'm not sure the world can do anything about WMM. Israel is ready for anything and it allegedly concentrates on bombing delivery mechanisms . Jordan, Turkey,Lebanon and Iraq are not exactly ready to face a chemical weapon attack. Things can easily escalate to a regional war and that's why most countries don't over react to attacks. Currently if someone from Syria attacks a neighboring country with WMD you'll see their tanks rolling in . As long as Assad uses the WDM on his people inside Syria (or Lebanon - none cares what happens there) none will interfere.

Applying the prime directive would involve not getting involved.

What I meant by blowing up weapons depots is WMDs. I don't care if they shoot each other, but I think it should be a policy for us to find and destroy WMDs wherever we find them.

Why not focus on the secular rebels instead of the already well funded fundamentalist rebels? Not all of the rebel groups are religious fundamentalists. Unless the secular rebel group also did bad stuff.

edit: Turns out they are secular nationalists and we are arming them, not the religious fundamentals.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2...

Nevin73 wrote:

What I meant by blowing up weapons depots is WMDs. I don't care if they shoot each other, but I think it should be a policy for us to find and destroy WMDs wherever we find them.

Syria didn't sign the chemical weapons treaty so they aren't violating any international law. Are you saying we should commit acts of war against any nation that we suspect of having WMDs?

If so our first target in the region should be Israel. They didn't sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and, in clear violation of it, have nukes. And they also didn't sign the chemical weapons treaty, so they likely have those as well.

OG_slinger wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

What I meant by blowing up weapons depots is WMDs. I don't care if they shoot each other, but I think it should be a policy for us to find and destroy WMDs wherever we find them.

Syria didn't sign the chemical weapons treaty so they aren't violating any international law. Are you saying we should commit acts of war against any nation that we suspect of having WMDs?

If so our first target in the region should be Israel. They didn't sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and, in clear violation of it, have nukes. And they also didn't sign the chemical weapons treaty, so they likely have those as well.

Yup. Nuking Russia and China would also, likely, be a policy with very limited self-preservation utility.

This is going to sound, I don't know...bully-like, but I think we should take actions to limit the continued spread of WMDs (without resorting to full scale invasion) in states that can't be trusted not use them. Honestly it wouldn't be an act of war because Syria couldn't fight a war with us. Yes, it is overbearing but would be the reaction if we did blow up chemical weapon stores? Would there be a protest from Syria? I doubt they are organised enough at the moment to mount such a protest. Would there be a protest from the internation community? Doubtful or a minor one at best since we just blew up chemical weapons.

It's actually still an act of war, just because a nation is unwilling or unable to declare war in response to the activity doesn't mean it wasn't an act of war.

I'm not saying that's stopped us in the past though. Secretly flying drones into another country's airspace to spy on them is also an act of war and we do that.

Hell, invading and occupying a country is obviously an act of war, and we did that to Iraq without ever declaring war on them. I believe that Iraq may have declared war on us though, but they may not have bothered.

Nevin73 wrote:

This is going to sound, I don't know...bully-like, but I think we should take actions to limit the continued spread of WMDs (without resorting to full scale invasion) in states that can't be trusted not use them. Honestly it wouldn't be an act of war because Syria couldn't fight a war with us. Yes, it is overbearing but would be the reaction if we did blow up chemical weapon stores? Would there be a protest from Syria? I doubt they are organised enough at the moment to mount such a protest. Would there be a protest from the internation community? Doubtful or a minor one at best since we just blew up chemical weapons.

If you're going to use that reasoning, then you should logically prioritize which WMDs we target. The rational way would be to eliminate the most destructive of all WMDs first: nukes.

That means Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea should immediately be attacked. But since we don't know exactly how many weapons they have, where they are located, or if they can even be destroyed by conventional weapons, we need to look back to the Cold War days and plan for a massive nuclear first strike against those countries. Any military base that might house their illegal WMDs should have a couple MIRVs targeted at them.

Since nuking their military bases might be considered an act of war, we should also make sure that we nuke their command and control networks so they can't readily retaliate. And since we don't want to have anyone around to lodge an protest with the UN, we should also target their civilian government as well. The international community might even pat us on the back because we got rid of nuclear weapons and made the world a safer--if a little more radioactive--place.

Heck, all the dust and debris our nukes kick up in the atmosphere might even cool the planet down some, helping us fix global warming. Fewer nukes and no more climate change? That's called a win-win.

Actually the most rational way to go about it would be to consider not only the danger of the weapons, but the feasibility of destroying then and likelihood of retaliation (fiscal, political, military, etc).

Under that criteria blowing up warehouses in a weak country embroiled in a civil war is obviously more satisfactory then launching simultaneous attacks on four separate countries, 2 of whom are allies, and 1 of which its very massive and has a good relationship with us.

Yonder wrote:

Actually the most rational way to go about it would be to consider not only the danger of the weapons, but the feasibility of destroying then and likelihood of retaliation (fiscal, political, military, etc).

So beat up on the weak and turn a blind eye to the illegal activities your friends and powerful enemies?

OG_slinger wrote:
Yonder wrote:

Actually the most rational way to go about it would be to consider not only the danger of the weapons, but the feasibility of destroying then and likelihood of retaliation (fiscal, political, military, etc).

So beat up on the weak and turn a blind eye to the illegal activities your friends and powerful enemies?

Welcome to the entirety of biological history.

Yonder wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:
Yonder wrote:

Actually the most rational way to go about it would be to consider not only the danger of the weapons, but the feasibility of destroying then and likelihood of retaliation (fiscal, political, military, etc).

So beat up on the weak and turn a blind eye to the illegal activities your friends and powerful enemies?

Welcome to the entirety of biological history.

Not entirely.

The emergence of the ripe of law as a widely accepted concept is predominantly responsible for the relative lack of bloodshed in modern times. But if you want the world to return to the lethality and conflict rates we had during tribal times.... well, as the Dude would say, "that's your opinion, man.".

Paleocon wrote:
Yonder wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:
Yonder wrote:

Actually the most rational way to go about it would be to consider not only the danger of the weapons, but the feasibility of destroying then and likelihood of retaliation (fiscal, political, military, etc).

So beat up on the weak and turn a blind eye to the illegal activities your friends and powerful enemies?

Welcome to the entirety of biological history.

Not entirely.

The emergence of the ripe of law as a widely accepted concept is predominantly responsible for the relative lack of bloodshed in modern times. But if you want the world to return to the lethality and conflict rates we had during tribal times.... well, as the Dude would say, "that's your opinion, man.".

Yeah, this is more like the entirety of superpowers and modern sovereign states. Hypocrisy writ extraordinarily large.

However, allowing the weak to continue to do terrible things also encourages other weak countries, and strong ones, to do more terrible things. It's like broken window theory for human rights violations. Sure, we can't realistically stop China from doing it, but that doesn't me we want a dozen more countries to think, "F*ck it, Syria got away with it, let's crank up the violence."

Mixolyde wrote:

However, allowing the weak to continue to do terrible things also encourages other weak countries, and strong ones, to do more terrible things. It's like broken window theory for human rights violations. Sure, we can't realistically stop China from doing it, but that doesn't me we want a dozen more countries to think, "F*ck it, Syria got away with it, let's crank up the violence."

And we're back to being the world's policeman...

And, in case no one noticed, it's an unpaid job. Or, rather, it's a job that we shell out a sh*tload of taxes on and get none of the benefits. If the rest of the world wants to pay us tribute or even the going private contractor rate I'd have no problems with our military going around and busting heads. Hell, it could even become a profit center for our nation.

But until that happens we should learn from the past 10 years and just stay the f*ck out of everyone else's business. Getting involved always costs more blood and treasure than we think and the realities on the ground are always much more complex and less understood than we thought.

Great.

Looks like the Iraqis that we spent $1.7Trillion to "liberate" are no flocking in droves to Syria to support the Assad regime because the very thought of yet another hostile, radical Sunni controlled neighbor is antithetical to their national security.

Unless the Sunnis attacking them inside of Iraq succeed in taking over again. I bet there's some nice abandoned luxury properties in Tikrit all ready to go...

Robear wrote:

Unless the Sunnis attacking them inside of Iraq succeed in taking over again. I bet there's some nice abandoned luxury properties in Tikrit all ready to go...

Considering Tikrit was the power base of Saddam and remains loyal to him to this day, I can't say the hostility of Shiites toward that area is completely alien to me.

An NPR report Thursday, maybe Friday, had an interesting viewpoint. The reporter noted that there's a Shi'ite prophecy about the return of the 12th Mahdi, which among other things will start with a fierce war in Syria, which will destroy it. This will be followed by mass death and destruction in Iraq.

So according to her, the Sunnis are regarding the events in Syria with a skeptical eye - they are fighting the Hashemites for control of Syria. They are also worried about the geopolitical opportunity for Iran in setting up a Shi'ite state in Syria. (Most Syrian rebels are Sunni.)

But the Shi'ites, all over the region, view this as a desperate struggle, not to extend Iran's hegemony so much as to push back what they think of as religious fanatics longing to see the Mahdi return. They view it as a religious struggle, one that is not limited to Syria but that they expect to kick off fighting in the entire region, Shia vs. Sunni. They feel they are fighting for their very survival, and to bring about the return of the "Shi'ite Messiah" whose arrival portends the End of Days.

The Iranians used this prophecy to recruit fighters for the Iran-Iraq War, and the worry is that they are essentially testing their capacity to intervene in the region without actually having to send divisions hither and yon across their borders. It's another way that they can project power and influence events in their favor.

New allegations of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government has the media demanding US intervention of some kind. It seems odd to me that Assad & crew would use those weapons on a neighborhood when using chemical weapons is the only thing that would draw US intervention.