This line is not realistic. The proposed AUMF is for 90 days- we’ll fire far more than a few dozen tomahawks.
Well ok then. “We’ll have far greater worries than replacing 100+ Tomahawks.” The point is the debt ceiling has to be resolved: this military adventure doesn’t really enter into it.
I’m not sure about its realism though. AUMF provides a window. The actual attack might be a 1 or 3 day affair. I don’t know.
(FWIW, Wikipedia says the navy has ~3500 Tomahawks.)
To the degree this is a serious proposal, it’s a bad idea. We shouldn’t bundle a tax bill in with a war bill. It would be wrong if conservatives tried to include a tax cut in a declaration of war and it would be equally wrong if liberal tried to include a tax increase in one. War is a serious issue and it shouldn’t be used to advance partisan programs.
I am gong to make prediction right now: “Shock and Fuuuck!”
Hope I’m wrong for the first time.
Tax here so that you can pay over there. Plus, both Syrians and Americans gets a bit more free for just $85.
Finally, someone made a business plan to monetize freedom.
I wonder if ‘cost’ is the wrong approach here. Surely the context is Iraq and then Afghanistan - with one ended and the other winding down, how the hell do you justify a military machine comprising nearly 60% of the entire planets capability: I know! You manufacture a manageable conflict (minimal losses, stir up a hornets nest, validation complete).
Of course it’s not the only reason for the Red Line, but it is surely in the minds of those kind, humanitarian interventionalists in Congress. Or perhaps even to the financial contributors to the election campaigns of those kind, humanitarian etc.
Not a signatory to what? They did agree to prohibit use of chemical weapons:
Of course, Obama is careful not to call use of chemical weapons “illegal” but rather “a violation of international norms.”
Use “in war”. Since Kerry is sure that bombing a country by another country is not “war” (I guess someone should have told that to the US on December 7, 1941), then maybe the Syrian army operations inside Syria do not qualify as “war” either?
Not a signatory of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
This is what I get for not double-checking claims made in a thread. As noted earlier in the thread, the Syrian Arab Republic acceded to the 1925 Convention on Dec 17, 1968, reserving the right to not recognize the legitimacy of the State of Israel. The International Red Cross’s page on the treaty, and its parties, is lucid, and frankly better than the U.N.'s.
From the text of the treaty, we find the language, “The High Contracting Parties will exert every effort to induce other States to accede to the present Protocol.” Which is it for any enforcement mechanism or clause dealing with breaches of the Protocol. IANAL, nor an expert in International Law, but “will exert every effort to induce” seems awfully strong. I don’t know if current practice means that “every effort” includes bombing violators until they do what you want, or a harshly written note read in the General Assembly.
What the Syrians haven’t signed, while nearly everyone else in the world has, is the 1992 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction. That treaty has, at Article XII, enforcement mechanisms including bringing breaches to the attention of the Security Council. Which to my mind means contemplating the use of military force to persuade the violator to stop violating. But Syria hasn’t signed this one. I do read the first clause in the Article to provide for violations of the purposes of the Convention by non-signatories:
“Any situation which contravenes” is not limited to covering only those that signed the Convention, as I read it. But again, not an international lawyer.
What does all this mean? Whoever released the nerve agent in the Damascus suburb performed conduct that is unquestionably in violation of the 1925 Protocol and the 1992 Convention. That’s bad. But what enforcement mechanism exists to punish the violator? While the 1925 Protocol says states will exert every effort, you can argue that the U.N. Charter supersedes that, in that these efforts to induce—if they involve military force—complying behavior from the violator must take place under the aegis of a UN Resolution. Which we’re not going to get.
In practice, the U.S. will do what it damned well likes, but I just wanted to correct my previous statement implying that Syria hadn’t signed any chemical weapons treaties.
And I see that John Mace has ninja’d me much more concisely.
u hu, that the legal position righ there.
Again, McCain is promoting the idea of taking out Syria’s air defenses so that we can set up a no-fly zone and bomb at will. Clearly the 90 day window allows for an action like that, which will by no means be an off-hand attack.
But look. I admit that the extent of our military involvement is contingent on what happens next once we start bombing. If it turns out to be 100 tomahawks then I won’t have much to say wrt to cost. But, what is the contingency plan for paying for this if it blows up into a full-scale war? Because I think it will, I don’t think we’ll be able to leave WMDs on the ground, and I think removing them will run us in the neighborhood of $1 trillion.
Its deadly serious all right. I don’t think we should just leave the cost issue hanging out there like we did with Iraq. By no means is this a partisan proposal- if we don’t specify how we pay for the war, almost by default it will come out of cuts to public programs. Our leaders are selling this war without bothering to mention that, as if nothing could possibly go wrong.
We need to plan for the real contingencies of what we’re really about to do. Little Nemo, how are we going to pay for this? Do you accept throwing Medicare under the bus? What else would you suggest?
Maybe. Is it insured?
Considering the war will be a few bombings even if we go the no fly zone route, it’ll be about as relevant to the budget as the Kosovo and the Bosnian interventions were. Not to mention any Medicare cuts that will from this (if it does) will be trivial.
We bombed Bosnia for 2 1/2 months. I doubt the costs were ‘trivial’, though I concur not much compared to your standard Middle Eastern quagmire. And then the UN sent in the peacekeepers so that we didn’t have to.
And I disagree, I think once we are at war with a WMD-armed country, our leaders won’t be willing to stop until they are disarmed. Qin Shi Huangdi, how are we going to pay for that?
The financial cost of this action is a red herring. We can afford it.
The question is whether it’s the right thing for us to do. It is not.
I consider that last question to be a good one, regardless of how it actually plays out. Because not accounting for well trod contingencies in warfare is as common as it is foolish.
The US has lots of spare capacity. Over the next couple of years we can borrow. But if this turns out to be an 8 year wonder, it will probably coincide with recovery and higher interest rates. At that point, I would shift away from my “Just borrow the cash” strategy. To be clear, short term rates usually are well above 0.25%. You have to go back to the 1930s and 1940s to find rates as low as they are now IIRC. Macroeconomically, we live in a special time.
Taxes are a partisan issue? Well ok they are. But they are also a substantive one. During normal times (which we are not in now, but set my preceding discussion aside) war spending has to be financed out of taxes (reduced consumption), lower domestic spending (ditto) or lower investment (via crowding out: higher borrowing displaces private borrowing). Under such circumstances, I find it immoral to essentially finance a war entirely by placing the burden on future generations. A tax increase should be a standard part of any war plan. If you don’t think the war is worth that kind of sacrifice, then don’t go to war.
Personally, I think that protecting the norm against chemical weapons is worth fighting for and worth paying for. In the abstract. Whether this action will be counterproductive after all elements are considered is a separate matter and one that should potentially be a deal-killer.
Thank you. An immediate 1% income tax increase, across the board, ought to be included in the bill. Next quarter, reevaluate the tax increase according to the best data. Rinse and repeat.
Well, I’d do it a little differently (YMMV). I’d say that if spending crosses the $100 billion threshold, then put in an immediate x% tax in place for Y years. Or something like that. I’d make it a $200 billion threshold for Iraq 2003, since our leaders were claiming that was well beyond what was conceivable. The point is that the threshold and subsequent tax increase would be put in place before the first drone is launched. If all goes according to plan and the cost is moderate, then no tax increase would occur. This creates better incentives.
I don’t have a problem with making it a progressive tax increase (higher on the wealthy) because that encourages the elites to take a more serious attitude towards wars that their offspring will never ever fight in.
Since we’re in a lesser depression, the tax could be triggered to start in 2015, say (and still expire after Y years).
That said, the US is the necessary hegemon in the world and smaller actions might not fall under this rubric.