There is a lot of important signalling going on right now. Russia and China are burnishing their international image at our expense by sending warships to the area. This actually increases the chances of conflict, because now we run the risk of looking extremely weak if we buckle now. We should never have been in this position to begin with. But now here we are, if greed, diffidence, and glory/reputation are the three main things that drive men to war, then at least two of those are in play at this point. That's BAD.
Personally, I don't want to fight Russia and China at the same time. I don't want to fight Russia OR China. Not over freakin' Syria. If we were going to fight Russia over a country that wasn't directly tied to our vital national interests, we should have gone all-in when they invaded Georgia. At Georgia was stable and pro-Western. Syria is neither, and is unlikely to be anytime soon.
So I've been looking through the things that Secretary Kerry has been saying about Syria, and I'm even more concerned now than I was before. In
this article, Sec. Kerry states that "up to" 20% of the "oppositionists" are bad guys. OK fine, that sounds like a lot to me, but let's look at the math. 100,000 rebels, 20% of 100,000 is... 20,000. Twenty thousand bad guys, which means radical Islamist jihadists, the same people we're fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and any number of other countries around the world. Given that the "bad guys" seem to be the best organized, best equipped, and most importantly, the most heavily externally-supported element out there, does it not intuitively follow that when/if the Assad regime falls that the entire country will be taken over by a radical fringe? Is that good, or bad for America's long term interests?
And
in this article, Sen. Kerry is trying to convince the world that us shooting missiles at and dropping bombs on Syria doesn't make it a war. I think I said it before but it bears repeating: we might not thing we're at war with Syria after we attack them, but they will certainly be at war with us. Moreover, when he got backed into a corner with his ridiculous comments, he tried to put to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who wasn't having it. Well played, GEN Dempsey.
"Later, a frustrated Kerry revealed the real logic behind his position: public opinion. He noted that no Americans wanted to go to war with Syria and insisted the White House was of the same mind. “We don’t want to go to war in Syria either!” he exclaimed. “It’s not what we’re here to ask. The President is not asking you to go to war…He’s simply saying we need to take an action that can degrade the capacity of a man who has been willing to kill his own people by breaking a nearly hundred year-old prohibition [against chemical weapons].”
Then, turning to Dempsey, Kerry asked, “General, do you want to speak to that?”
Dempsey responded, “No, not really, Secretary, thank you for offering.” Why? Because General Dempsey knew that was nonsense. When one state attacks another with military force toward a political objective, it is war. The President has ordered warships into the Eastern Mediterranean to employ military force to compel Assad into keeping his chemical arsenal under wraps."
