Yeah, they never did find where Saddam hid them all, did they? Was Saddam tipped of by a certain ambitious young man from Illinois? Just askin’ questions, is all…
Wait, what? “Nobody got shot”? People were getting shot in Syria throughout. People are getting shot in Syria right now. Assad has been given assurances that he can continue to shoot a great many people in Syria, for the forseeable future.
We could stop him from shooting people. We can stop him from breathing, comes to it. Is that what you want?
My analogy for Obama’s performance would be that over four quarters he fumbled the football multiple times and things looked bleak. Then near the end his quarterback (Kerry) without really coordinating it with him, threw the ball up in the air out of frustration with no real intent anything come of it, and it ended up being a touch down.
I think the current outcome is good and is definitely better than we would have gotten if we had pursued the limited military strikes against Assad. However, I see no evidence it was part of any master plan by Kerry and Obama. Maybe it was, but I don’t see that. It’ll be interesting in the years that come (if this ends up being a success) when the insider books and such get written and we’ll get an idea as to whether Kerry and Obama had really planned this chemical weapons surrender as a viable strategy and then had Kerry float it, or if it was what it appeared to be: Kerry just saying something rhetorically during a press conference.
So my verdict is: good job President Obama and Secretary Kerry, but it looks like a lot of luck and incompetence got you to where you are today. Now, it does seem like Kerry has down a very competent job in negotiating the particulars with his counterpart in Russia, and for that he deserves unreserved praised as that is exactly the sort of thing a Secretary of State needs to do well.
Long term I see two paths this could take:
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Syria genuinely gives up all of its chemical weapons, because it basically “buys” it protection from Western interference and Assad believes he can beat the rebels in a conventional war (he mostly already is.)
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Syria gives up some, but not all, of its chemical weapons. Because Assad believes he can beat the rebels, but he still might desire those weapons in a dire situation. Further, he is distrustful of the West, and if the West becomes more interventionist he wants to have those chemical weapons as a card up his sleeve.
Where this second path can get ugly, is if a few years down the road we discover he’s still got chemical weapons, and maybe he uses them in a few small battles–where does that leave us? The Russians will argue that the chemical weapons could not be Assad’s, because they personally oversaw, with international verification, their destruction. Since there was no enforcement mechanism built into this deal, if we wanted UN Support we’d have to go back to the Security Council. Any attempt there would be derailed by Russia, who would repeatedly be pasting evidence of chemical weapons disposal all over the place to influence world opinion.
Here in the States, many will reference the Iraq War, when international inspectors oversaw WMD destruction but the Administration still claimed some were left. In Syria, if that were true it’d be very difficult for the Obama Administration to convince anyone Assad still had them, and he’d probably have even less political support for strikes against Assad than he does now.
If Assad is winning, why did he use CW in the first place? Why take such a risk when you’re winning?
Asking me? Yes, I’d like to see murderous dictators taken down. Wouldn’t you?
But the ideal time for that intervention was long past by the time the gas bombs came out, and I never really had much hope that the US would act strongly against Assad. I did hope for something.
Really I just had to challenge the ridiculous assertion above that the present agreement constitutes a “nobody got shot” outcome.
My argument on the run up to invading Iraq is that Bush is evil? Not the CIA and other members of the real intelligence agencies. That is because primarily Bush did not allow the CIA go into Iraq in December 2002 when Saddam Hussein made a public offer that they were invited in to find WMD for themselves. The CIA was not the decider on rejecting that perfect opportunity for obtaining the best intel available on Iraq’s WMD at any time since 1991.
If you want to make up my position on what I think about our intelligence service members please post this false commentary on the Bush library thread.
I will further correct your error there or the Arrrrggggg thread if you prefer to take it there.
There was Cheney’s intel setup at the Pentagon that fed Bush most of the faulty intel. They are evil too. They are not anywhere near our intel community now thank god.
They are gone.
I think this is a huge diplomatic victory for the US. Instead of lining up sides for a showdown with Iran and Russia, we align with Russia and the UN against Syria and force them to cough up their chemical weapons. There could hardly be a better outcome.
Not that the Syrian civil war is a good outcome, but does anybody believe that can be fixed other than by letting the factions exhaust themselves? I don’t. Best not to get involved besides in humanitarian ways.
The victory is conditional of course. If Assad takes this reprieve as a chance to move his weapons around and gas the shit out of everybody, obviously we blew it. If Assad resorts to shenanigans over this, well the US is actually in a stronger position than it was. Military action against Syria didn’t get any traction the first time, but another provocation by Assad will make military strikes the obvious next step, one that Russia may veto at the Security Council but not something that is likely to lead to World War III.
I look at it this way. Given the players involved either side with a clear win over the other is a bad outcome for the region. The only good outcome is a negotiated settlement with a transitional government that has protections built in for all involved. That is not currently something on the table and won’t be until Russia helps make it so. The worst outcomes include destroying the ability for the current secure storage of the weapons to remain secure while failing to destroy them. One minimal outcome to hope for is that the weapons are not able to be used and secure. One step above that is that some or all are destroyed.
Cruise attacks could degrade the ability to use them some but would not destroy them or completely prevent their use. It would also open up the risk of making them insecurely stored. That would be very bad. Cruise attacks would not cause regieme change or a negotiated settlement to occur. Better than doing nothing, in my book, but it would be nice to have a better path. Doing nothing was not an option.
Russia getting some credit and getting on board pressuring the regieme towards the negotiation process with a step down that preserves them having some influence is a path that destroys minimally some of CW stockpiles and keeps the remainder likely as secure as they currently are, and, moreover, unable to be used during the process. (Such would nullify the process. You cannot well use what you are actively hiding.)
Will the process work? Maybe, maybe not. But if not then having exhausted all possible diplomatic approaches makes it more likely that a military option will be supported by others, even if Russia (whose prestige is on the line here now too) still vetos in the UN. And they would not be happy with Assad if he embarrasses them.
I am impressed.
It’s been fairly well explained. There was a portion of the Damascus suburbs that were stubbornly resisting his attempts to reestablish control. After the chemical shelling, not so much.
You’re confusing a tactical situation with the overall progress of the war. It’s akin to saying the Union wasn’t winning against the Confederacy because it was taking a really long time to break through the defenses around Richmond.
False! Inspectors in Iraq were looking for something that was not there and the Iraqis stated truthfully that there were nine there and that Bush and Blair were liars. The Iraqis were required to provide unfettered access to any site the inspectors wanted to visit. The Iraqis provided that access the full duration of inspections. The biggest difficulty Iraq inspectors faced was being prematurely ended by the Bush regime. So in that sense it was Bush that prevented unfettered inspections when he told the inspectors they shouldn’t be in Iraq so he could bomb the place and make the hidden wespons bounce up out of the ground and into his big Texas cowboy hands.
So if you meant it was tough to inspect Iraq from Cyprus then I guess you’d have a point.
On the other hand in Syria the civil war should have little impact because rebels are not in control of the locations were CW are under Syrian government control. And there is no guessing whether the CW exists. That makes this round of inspections more a matter of documentation, transfer and destruction.
I’m talking about UNSCOM before 1998, whose reports complained over and over about Iraqi noncooperation, but who nevertheless did find chemical and biological munitions and related materials. Nobody serious denies that Saddam Hussein had such weapons programs. Perhaps you’re getting mixed up with the situation before the 2003 invasion, the Colin Powell theater and all that.
Anyway, if you think “the civil war should have little impact” on compliance verification under this agreement… well, I don’t know what to tell you. I think you’re dreaming.
:crazy: Russia is not in any sense aligned against Assad’s Syria. Putin undertook this initiative to protect his Syrian client from Western attack.
Russia agreed with the US to disarm Syria. They concede we have a point on the CW issue and are helping us achieve our goals in that respect. If they’re doing it out of their own self interest, that’s ok since we never wanted to tangle with Russia in the first place.
You said the Iraqi inspections were a farce. So are you making it clear that the pre-1998 inspections were a farce but the 2002-2003 were not? If the latter were not a farce I do not see how your general point works. It seems to me that we should look at the end result from the 2003 inspections and those three months ended up being correct and Bush was the one who was incorrect to start a war.
I don’t see how the Syrian inspections will be a farce since the civil war should have little effect on them.
And Obama has not made the military actions/strike about regime change or Russia losing its war water port.
This Republican is selling bull puckey to claim that Putin “won” something by keeping his warm water port. That port was not in any calculation of the US punitive strike Obama still has available to him.
And yet you’ve made Russian fear of miniscule, tiny, barely acupuncture-style strikes against Assad somehow leading to a loss of their port a major plank of your defense of this mess as a “huge win” for Obama.
So which is it?
I’m confused as to why the OP of this thread has basically derailed it with a bunch of rhetoric from 2002-2003.
I don’t think Russia thought the strikes would end there, based on our previous history. And, yes, I think that was the point. I do in fact think that Kerry was deliberately floating the idea in the only way possible that Russia would latch on–if they could claim they were doing it to embarrass the U.S. Putin still thinks we are in the Cold War.
Now, I understand some people disagreeing. What I don’t get is people trashing Obama praising Putin for this. His plan has very clearly been to make it seem like the rebels were the ones using weapons. Plus this whole problem exists because Russia and the U.S. generally can’t work together. There’s no way Putin came up with this himself.
The reason we have to worry about intervening in any big way is not the American public but the fact that Russia will retaliate. The President clearly can do military actions without approval of Congress, as that’s the way we’ve pretty much been doing things since WWII.
At least we’re better here than Facebook, with that stupid image macro praising Putin for doing Obama’s job for him. I try not to get political on Facebook, but if I see that or the “Obama wanted to help the people who caused 9/11” image one more time…
Of course they’re getting shot ! But they’re most emphatically not getting gassed, and that’s… uuuh… well, you see, civilized…I got nothin’.