http://www.pbs.org/newshour/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/
Snowden leaked that the NSA gave companies court orders to fork over their security keys so that they could access confidential financial and personal info. The made the companies sign gag orders so they couldn't complain, and we are talking about the major players like MSFT and GOOG (in fact Google is now suing the gov't for the right to tell the public about how they were forced to give access to user info). Also, the NSA just blatantly cracked other firms' encryption. Ironically the US Gov't has recently complained about China doing that to our companies. The NSA hasn't denied anything, and said that the disclosure has hurt national security. As we discussed before in the original Snowden story, maybe this invasive action is tolerable when there is a court-issued warrant (from a real court with real oversight, not some shadowy FISA BS), but they can't just arbitrarily cast a dragnet on everyone.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/
I have mixed feelings about a military strike, unless we want to do it purely as formality to show that there are *some* consequences to using WMD (just lob some missiles at easy targets and that's it, no escalation plans, no what-ifs). But like Iraq, right now we don't really have an exit strategy, or any strategy, or even agreed-upon objectives (regime change, reduce Assad's ability to use WMD again, protect civilians? Not necessarily mutually exclusive). That's why it's so frustrating to see big Dems like Pelosi rubber-stamping this. Another problem is Iran has called for terror groups to strike at US targets and affiliates if we do anything to Syria, so we have to weigh the risk-benefits (and sorry Syrian victims, unfortunately your lives are less valuable to us).
Russia has moved some warships into the Eastern Med. I also don't understand that... why does Russia care so much what happens to Assad? I know he is a big trading partner and buys a lot of weapons from them (and is serving as a distraction for the US to prevent our "hegemony" in the Mideast), but is it worth losing face if Assad ends up going madman and doing something worse? According to Putin, it's not just him and China though, as India, Brazil, Argentina, and Italy have also opposed military action.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/29/
But
as usual, Syria is really a proxy battleground and the underlying
issues are much bigger. Syria's people are unfortunately a test case to
evaluate what are the int'l norms for violating sovereignty for
humanitarian, political, or security reasons. Supposedly we're going to
have to face similar issues with Iran as it gets closer to a functional
bomb, and as the people demand more freedom from the theocracy and may
revolt. What the interested parties do vis-a-vis Syria is signaling to
the other parties on what will happen should Iran go down a similar
path. Unfortunately the US is not sending out great signals at the
moment: dithering on justification and appropriate response to WMD usage
and other atrocities. Plus all this pre-warning and debate is giving
Assad plenty of time to prepare and hide or shield his military assets,
as well as giving Iran's proxies preparation for potential retaliations.
The trick was to diffuse Syria way before we ever got to this point,
but that ship has sailed long ago. You think Kennedy and Khruschev could
have resolved the CMC if troops had already killed each other?
FUBAR....--------
I was listening to someone on NPR about the Russian perspective and it was really interesting. Aside from the fact that Russia has a fair amount of Russian interests at stake in Syria, they view the crisis much more on the side of Assad than they do the rebels because of their past with Chechnya. A sub-unit of their country, Islamic terrorism, etc. So for the ruskies this looks a lot more like a conflict they are familiar with and don't want to see the "terrorists" win.
I'm not sure why Obama is giving this to the congress. I
think, as a rule, it should. But in his own speech at the G20 he said
that these types of conflicts don't poll well. If Rwanda were today it
wouldn't poll well. So given that he knows it is generally unpopular,
why put it to a vote? Just so posterity can be SURE that his action was
against the will of the people?
Also an onion article, I paraphrase: "Obama
debating to either proceed with missile strikes, or to strike with
missiles". It doesn't seem like there are any alternatives being
considered, perhaps rightly so, but it doesn't help the idea that the
congress is controlling this mess. If they vote 'no' then what happens?
The fact that Snowden is not considered a whistle
blower is ridiculous. I don't see how anyone can, with a straight face,
say that we the people don't have a right to this kind of information.
The fact that there are secret courts, massive spying networks, privacy
tools currently available have been backdoor'ed or defeated entirely,
is insane. And the response is "why doesn't he let a court decide if he
is really a whistle blower?" As if history is full of examples of
prosecuted whistle blowers who had nothing bad happen to them. Get
real.
--------
Thx, M.
I 100% agree with you on Snowden. The "official" definition of
whistleblower is BS, modified by the people who stand to lose from
whistleblowers. And as you said, the whole "give yourself up and you
will get your chance to be heard" has probably never worked out. This
NSA garbage is blatant abuse of power, and the only difference with
Nixon is that the NSA hasn't been caught obstructing justice yet
(because they have courts that exist to protect them, unlike Nixon).
Another side effect of the terror-industrial complex. But I think the
bigger tragedy is that democratically minded, progressive, and smart
leaders like Obama and Feinstein are not only failing to hold the NSA
accountable, but actively defending them. There was a scene from this
season of Sorkin's "The Newsroom", ironically about investigating a wild
claim that the US used WMD on Pakistani "terrorists". The producer was
frustrated that his peers couldn't fathom this president's capacity for
criminality because they liked and admired him so damn much. To me, THAT
is Obama's greatest sin (not the fact that he is a Kenyan born Muslim).
Ya I can understand that Russian perspective, and China may have it too regarding their internal dissidents. But unless they really consider unarmed women and kids as "terrorists" who deserve to be gassed (assuming the evidence is solid and not the BS that Colin Powell presented to the UN), I think they are kind of full of it. Remember when Russia invaded Georgia, because Georgia was trying to put down a rebellion in South Ossetia that was trying to unify with Russia? So in that crude analogy, Georgia = Syria, Ossetian rebels = Al-Qaeda linked Syrian rebels, and Russia = the US ("peacekeepers"). So it was OK for Russia to invade then, but they oppose the US+France doing it now? There are plenty of reasons to protest Obama's plan, but Russia doesn't really have the cred to say anything.
And what about cyber warfare? We crashed Iran's centrifuges and we spy on our own innocent civilians. Why can't we shut down Assad's military IT and wipe our his finances? Heck we could make his warplanes fire on each other instead of strafing towns.
Syria and Byzantine Strategy
September 4, 2013 | 0900 GMTIn March 1984, I was reporting from the Hawizeh Marshes in southern Iraq near the Iranian border. The Iran-Iraq War was in its fourth year, and the Iranians had just launched a massive infantry attack, which the Iraqis repelled with poison gas. I beheld hundreds of young, dead Iranian soldiers, piled up and floating in the marshes, like dolls without a scar on any of them. An Iraqi officer poked one of the bodies with his walking stick and told me, "This is what happens to the enemies of Saddam [Hussein]." Of course, the Iranians were hostile troops invading Iraqi territory; not civilians. But Saddam got around to killing women and children, too, with chemical weapons. In March 1988, he gassed roughly 5,000 Kurds to death. As a British reporter with me in the Hawizeh Marshes had quipped, "You could fit the human rights of Iraq on the head of a pin, and still have room for the human rights of Iran."
Stratfor
The reaction of the Reagan administration to the gassing to death of thousands of Kurdish civilians by Saddam was to keep supporting him through the end of his war with Iran. The United States was then in the midst of a Cold War with the Soviet Union, and as late as mid-1989 it wouldn't be apparent that this twilight struggle would end so suddenly and so victoriously. Thus, with hundreds of thousands of American servicemen occupied in Europe and northeast Asia, using Saddam's Iraq as a proxy against Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran made perfect sense.
The United States has values, but as a great power it also has interests. Ronald Reagan may have spoken the rousing language of universal freedom, but his grand strategy was all of a piece. And that meant picking and choosing his burdens wisely. As a result, Saddam's genocide against the Kurds, featuring chemical weapons, was overlooked.
In fact, the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, coterminous with the life of the Reagan administration, was a boon to it. By tying down two large and radical states in the heart of the Middle East, the war severely reduced the trouble that each on its own would certainly have caused the region for almost a decade. This gave Reagan an added measure of leeway in order to keep his focus on Europe and the Soviets -- and on hurting the Soviets in Afghanistan. To wit, only two years after the Iran-Iraq War ended, Saddam invaded Kuwait. Peace between Iran and Iraq was arguably no blessing to the United States and the West.
Likewise, it might be argued that the Syrian civil war, now well into its second year, has carried strategic benefits to the West. The analyst Edward N. Luttwak, writing recently in The New York Times, has pointed out that continued fighting in Syria is preferable to either of the two sides winning outright. If President Bashar al Assad's forces were to win, then the Iranians and the Russians would enjoy a much stronger position in the Levant than before the war. If the rebels were to win, it is entirely possible that Sunni jihadists, with ties to transnational terrorism, will have a staging post by the Mediterranean similar to what they had in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan until 2001, and also similar to what they currently have in Libya. So rather than entertain either of those two possibilities, it is better that the war continue.
Of course, all of this is quite cold-blooded. The Iran-Iraq War took the lives of over a million people. The Syrian civil war has so far claimed reportedly 110,000 lives. Even the celebrated realist of the mid-20th century, Hans Morgenthau of the University of Chicago, proclaimed the existence of a universal moral conscience, which sees war as a "natural catastrophe." And it is this very conscience that ultimately limits war's occurrence. That is what makes foreign policy so hard. If it were simply a matter of pursuing a state's naked interests, then there would be few contradictions between desires and actions. If it were simply a matter of defending human rights, there would similarly be fewer hard choices. But foreign policy is both. And because voters will only sustain losses to a nation's treasure when serious interests are threatened, interests often take precedence over values. Thus, awful compromises are countenanced.
Making this worse is the element of uncertainty. The more numerous the classified briefings a leader receives about a complex and dangerous foreign place, the more he may realize how little the intelligence community actually knows. This is not a criticism of the intelligence community, but an acknowledgment of complexity, especially when it concerns a profusion of armed and secretive groups, and an array of hard-to-quantify cultural factors. What option do I pursue? And even if I make the correct choice, how sure can I be of the consequences? And even if I can be sure of the consequences -- which is doubtful -- is it worth diverting me from other necessary matters, both foreign and domestic, for perhaps weeks or even months?
Luttwak himself offers partial relief to such enigmas through a meticulous and erudite study of one of the greatest survival strategies in history. In The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (2009), he demonstrates the properties by which Byzantium, despite a threatened geographic position, survived for a thousand years after the fall of Rome. This Byzantine strategy, in its own prodigiously varied and often unconscious way, mirrored Morgenthau's realism, laced as it is with humanism.
The Byzantines, Luttwak writes, relied continuously on every method of deterrence. "They routinely paid off their enemies….using all possible tools of persuasion to recruit allies, fragment hostile alliances, subvert unfriendly rulers…" He goes on: "For the Romans…as for most great powers until modern days, military force was the primary tool of statecraft, with persuasion a secondary complement. For the Byzantine Empire it was mostly the other way around. Indeed, the shift of emphasis from force to diplomacy is one way of differentiating Rome from Byzantium…" In other words, "Avoid war by every possible means in all possible circumstances, but always act as if it might start at any time [his italics]." The Byzantines bribed, connived, dissembled and so forth, and as a consequence survived for centuries on end and fought less wars than they would have otherwise.
The lesson: be devious rather than bloody. President Barack Obama's mistake is not his hesitancy about entering the Syrian mess; but announcing to the Syrians that his military strike, if it occurs, will be "narrow" and "limited." Never tell your adversary what you're not going to do! Let your adversary stay awake all night, worrying about the extent of a military strike! Unless Obama is being deliberately deceptive about his war aims, then some of the public statements from the administration have been naïve in the extreme.
A Byzantine strategy, refitted to the postmodern age, would maintain the requisite military force in the eastern Mediterranean, combined with only vague presidential statements about the degree to which such force might or might not be used. It would feature robust, secret and ongoing diplomacy with the Russians and the Iranians, aware always of their interests both regionally and globally, and always open to deals and horse-trades with them. The goal would be to engineer a stalemate-of-sorts in Syria rather than necessarily remove al Assad. Reducing the intensity of fighting would thus constitute a morality in and of itself, even as it would keep either side from winning outright. For if the regime suddenly crumbled, violence might only escalate, and al Qaeda might even find a sanctuary close to Israel and Jordan.
Such a strategy might satisfy relatively few of the cognoscenti. Though, the American public -- which has a more profound, albeit badly articulated sense of national survival -- will surely tolerate it. The Congressional debate that preceded the Iraq War did not save President George W. Bush from obloquy when that war went badly. The lack of such a debate would not hurt Obama were he to successfully execute the methods described in Luttwak's book.
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