[MP-Ryan]

That development should not surprise anyone.

[Nakura]

I'm actually pretty torn on Syria. NGTM-1R makes a valid point, if we allow a government to use chemical weapons against their own people and the United States/international community doesn't respond, then it sets a troubling precedent. At the same time, it's clear that Assad is the lesser of two evils in Syria and that any rebel victory will be infinitely worse for both the United States and the Syrian people, than the current government.

This leaves the United States and the international community stuck between a rock and a hardplace. If we intervene, we'll either be stuck nation-building in Syria for decades or we'll leave a power vacuum that would be filled by extremists. But if we don't intervene, we could be sending a message to other states that there will be little or no response to what is effectively the mass murder of civilians.

We're damned if we intervene, we're damned if we don't. That's just how I see it anyway.

[Scotty]

At the same time, it's clear that Assad is the lesser of two evils in Syria and that any rebel victory will be infinitely worse for both the United States and the Syrian people, than the current government.

I highly doubt this part in particular is true.  Then again, the reason I doubt it's true is because there are significantly more numerous and varied evils in Syria than two at the moment.

[Nakura]

At the same time, it's clear that Assad is the lesser of two evils in Syria and that any rebel victory will be infinitely worse for both the United States and the Syrian people, than the current government.

I highly doubt this part in particular is true.  Then again, the reason I doubt it's true is because there are significantly more numerous and varied evils in Syria than two at the moment.

Ah yes, I forgot to count the United Nations as an evil.

[Grizzly]

I'm actually pretty torn on Syria. NGTM-1R makes a valid point, if we allow a government to use chemical weapons against their own people and the United States/international community doesn't respond, then it sets a troubling precedent. At the same time, it's clear that Assad is the lesser of two evils in Syria and that any rebel victory will be infinitely worse for both the United States and the Syrian people, than the current government.

Aside from the fact that there is no single rebel alliance like in Libya, how will a "rebel victory" be worse for the general populace then the current government?

[Luis Dias]

Have you been paying attention to what happened to Egypt the last year?

[Luis Dias]

So China is saying the US is just trying to get an excuse to do what China is definitely against of doing.

So Iran is threatening the US of dire consequences if they press some kind of launch button.

The rebel coalition has cancelled a meeting in Genebra with the UN saying that Assad must first be punished, "then" we can have a meeting.


tic toc tic toc

[docfu]

We're damned if we intervene, we're damned if we don't. That's just how I see it anyway.

This really is right on the money and the only reason I can see a successful political intervention at this point is if it will give the U.S. and western countries brownie points with the rest of the world. There's plenty of terrible war times going on all around the world at any given time, along with campaigns to bring them to light(like Coney 2012) but the sad...sad truth is that it's better for western counties to evacuate the willing and give them asylum more than it is to go in guns blazing and try to fix the problem.

America's greatest strength has always come from people looking to escape their current lives in favor of what she has to offer. It should come as no surprise that this quiet solution is probably the most likely that is already in motion.

If we have learned anything from Iraq and Afganistan, it's that military intervention will bring only limited success. Capturing Assad and holding him accountable might be the worst thing we could do, next to an air strike. The best thing would be to let his enemies take him down. I doubt there would be any impact on economic gains either way.

Not that the economy is more important than our moral values, just that this approach would have the least negative impact on the U.S. and other countries.

[Luis Dias]

The idea behind holding Assad accountable is not about Assad. "It's about sending a message". It's about saying to all the potentially creep assholes in power "Don't you EVER think of doing this ****". That is the only important reason. Syria is ****ed either way.

[Luis Dias]

meanwhile Exxon is calling Obama sayin "ah OK buddy keep doin what u been doin k man?"

[Nemesis6]

I've been pondering this situation for a while, and I can't shake the feeling that we've been ignoring a perfect ally; the Kurdish people. They're by far the most secular and stable society over there, and they're effectively neutral in the fight, though they're fighting against the Islamists trying to take control of towns under Kurdish control. The Free Syrian Army, although numerically superior to Al Qaeda and the other Islamist militias, are not as powerful or brazen as the Islamists. Meanwhile, any attempt by us to equip the FSA with combat gear(excluding weapons) is a laughable game of catch-up with the Saudis and Qataris who are arming Al-Nusra Front and Guraba Al-Sham with state of the art weaponry.

[Black Wolf]

The kurds are too much of a political problem to be supported by the West. If you want their help, they will demand an independent nation. Which, in theory is great, but that would piss off the governments of every other nation in the area, as their Kurdish populations would almost certainly try to rebel and join wherever this new Kurdish land ended up. Seriously, any move towards supporting Kurdish independence in  Syria would provoke at one more war, probably more - in Iraq, Turkey and/or Iran. It's just not going to happen.

[Grizzly]

Have you been paying attention to what happened to Egypt the last year?

Yes, I did. However, the situation that is currently ongoing is quite different from what happened there the last 20 years or so (or... I don't actually know - I wasn't involved). We have to wait and see for another few years - when the dust has settled - to see what the effects really were.

Also, Egypt is not Syria. I just want to hear Nakura's reasoning behind how a rebel victory is worse then a governmental victory.

[MP-Ryan]

We're damned if we intervene, we're damned if we don't. That's just how I see it anyway.

This really is right on the money and the only reason I can see a successful political intervention at this point is if it will give the U.S. and western countries brownie points with the rest of the world. There's plenty of terrible war times going on all around the world at any given time, along with campaigns to bring them to light(like Coney 2012) but the sad...sad truth is that it's better for western counties to evacuate the willing and give them asylum more than it is to go in guns blazing and try to fix the problem.

America's greatest strength has always come from people looking to escape their current lives in favor of what she has to offer. It should come as no surprise that this quiet solution is probably the most likely that is already in motion.

If we have learned anything from Iraq and Afganistan, it's that military intervention will bring only limited success. Capturing Assad and holding him accountable might be the worst thing we could do, next to an air strike. The best thing would be to let his enemies take him down. I doubt there would be any impact on economic gains either way.

Not that the economy is more important than our moral values, just that this approach would have the least negative impact on the U.S. and other countries.

Quoting this because it expands on Nakura's point and you're both wrong.  Specifically Nakura's earlier statement that "we'll either be stuck nation-building in Syria for decades or we'll leave a power vacuum that would be filled by extremists."

No.  nonononononono.

Look, the recent examples of Afghanistan and Iraq are TERRIBLE examples to base your ideas of intervention on.  Both of those interventions were experiments - which didn't work - from which all NATO countries have re-learned some hard lessons from the 1950s and 1960s.

The only moral and strategic obligations Western countries have concerning Syria are the following:
1.  Denunciation and prevention of further chemical weapons use in the conflict.
2.  Protection of civilian refugees.

Both of these can be accomplished without Afghanistan/Iraq-style invasions.  Between combined airpower, the presence of Turkey on one border, and the myriad of tactical units in various countries that can operate within Syria without full-scale divisional deployment, there are ample options for intervention well short of invasion that can accomplish the above two goals.

Your are both demonstrating linear and somewhat historically-myopic thinking by using Afghanistan and Iraq as examples of what NATO intervention will or has to look like, and nothing is further from reality.  Wipe those two precedents from your minds when discussing this topic; they are not even within the scope of probability for NATO operations in the forseeable future.

[Grizzly]

Would Libya be a good example instead?

[Flipside]

From what I understand, what is being considered is a version of 'Cruise Missile Diplomacy', strategic long-range strikes on military targets within Syria in order to convince them that using Chemical Weapons will have unpleasant repercussions, I don't think any Government would be foolish enough to try putting yet more boots on the ground there.

Personally though, before we start throwing missiles around, I'd like a little more evidence than the say-so of people who have been chomping at the bit for months for a chance to do exactly this. If the Syrian government is involved, then yes, such behaviour needs to be discouraged in the strongest terms, we don't want to go back to that place in History, but we need to be really certain before launching strikes against another country that has not attacked us directly, because whether it is like Iraq or not, you can be certain that other countries will see exactly what they want to see.

[Luis Dias]

MP, I would suggest that saying that the biggest historical precedents that we have available in these situations should be wiped out from our brains is not exactly the most rational thing. You say that what NATO has in mind is nothing like these precedents, well excuse me if I'm a bit skeptic from such an outlandish claim.

Do keep in mind that the Iraq example did not start in 2003. In 1991 a limited intervention was attempted. Did not work but rather kept a lunatic in power for too long, and it ended up in war anyway. We have myriads of different "precedents" and we do have some knowledge of what works and what doesn't work. The Yuguslavia case is exemplary, but I dare say that the game was an entirely different one.

[StarSlayer]

MP, I would suggest that saying that the biggest historical precedents that we have available in these situations should be wiped out from our brains is not exactly the most rational thing. You say that what NATO has in mind is nothing like these precedents, well excuse me if I'm a bit skeptic from such an outlandish claim.

Do keep in mind that the Iraq example did not start in 2003. In 1991 a limited intervention was attempted. Did not work but rather kept a lunatic in power for too long, and it ended up in war anyway. We have myriads of different "precedents" and we do have some knowledge of what works and what doesn't work. The Yuguslavia case is exemplary, but I dare say that the game was an entirely different one.

Desert Storm was an intervention to halt Iraqi expansion and secure the sovereignty of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (and their oil).  Those objectives were successfully executed, occupation of Iraq was not one of them.  Iraqi military power was effectively smashed in 91 and the Coalition could have rode straight into Baghdad if they so chose.  George Bush Senior and his staff were smart enough to recognize what a **** storm occupying Iraq would turn out to be, unlike his lack luster progeny.

[MP-Ryan]

MP, I would suggest that saying that the biggest historical precedents that we have available in these situations should be wiped out from our brains is not exactly the most rational thing. You say that what NATO has in mind is nothing like these precedents, well excuse me if I'm a bit skeptic from such an outlandish claim.

Do keep in mind that the Iraq example did not start in 2003. In 1991 a limited intervention was attempted. Did not work but rather kept a lunatic in power for too long, and it ended up in war anyway. We have myriads of different "precedents" and we do have some knowledge of what works and what doesn't work. The Yuguslavia case is exemplary, but I dare say that the game was an entirely different one.

Desert Storm was an intervention to halt Iraqi expansion and secure the sovereignty of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (and their oil).  Those objectives were successfully executed, occupation of Iraq was not one of them.  Iraqi military power was effectively smashed in 91 and the Coalition could have rode straight into Baghdad if they so chose.  George Bush Senior and his staff were smart enough to recognize what a **** storm occupying Iraq would turn out to be, unlike his lack luster progeny.

To elaborate on this further, Luis is [it seems] missing a great deal of the background on Desert Storm.  Hussein was seriously emboldened to act against Iran by the provision of American intelligence prior to and during the Iran-Iraq War.  He [mistakenly] thought he was the US' go-to guy when it came to Arab states in the Middle East, and he desperately wanted Kuwaiti oil and access to the Gulf.  The UN resolution and coalition action quickly dispensed him of that notion.  StarSlayer is correct that the coalition could have walked directly into Baghdad, but did not as their goals were accomplished and they were bound by the terms of the UN resolution.  There was no need to oust Hussein, and occupation was recognized as an extremely bad idea.

The most recent engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq were experiments.  NATO forces went into Afghanistan with the intention of crushing Al-Qaeda's ability to stage attacks from Afghanistan, which meant the destruction of the organized Taliban government, and that goal was accomplished quite rapidly.  The problem is that mission creep rapidly took place, where the military presence took the form of boots-on-the-ground beyond rapid deployment forces and air power, and NATO nations quickly got sucked into a nation-building enterprise without the resources required to do it.  The deployment to Afghanistan was a mere fraction of the forces deployed into Germany in 1945 as an occupying force, yet were being told to pacify a much larger area and a populace that actively opposed much of their intervention.  As for the subsequent invasion of Iraq, there are many contemporary theories on Iraq but the simple version is that evidence of limited CBRNE-type production was blown vastly out of proportion and used to justify invasion and occupation that devolved to civil war.  In both cases, these were US-led attempts to re-shape vulnerable countries in a strategically-important part of the Middle East that failed utterly.  NATO and other US allies were completely unprepared and unwilling to mount an occupation of the size, scope and duration that would be required to re-shape those nations into something more friendly to Western interests.  That lesson has been learned several times over throughout NATO, and no one is prepared to try anything like that again.

Furthermore, the last time that was tried was roughly 50 years prior - the various proxy hot-wars in southeast Asia were a combination of an attempt to retain colonial power and simultaneously prevent Communist forces from reshaping those countries.  Those wars failed for much the same reason:  no one was prepared to pay the price for a chunk of land most of their citizens couldn't point out on a map.  It took 50 years and a series of military (if not political) success stories for anyone to be willing to try again.  And it didn't work.

So the parallels of the Iraq/Afghanistan messes are really not applicable to Syria.  The situation in Syria is far more comparable to the Balkans or the myriad of mercenary-fought hot wars in Africa over the last 35 years than to the folly of the strategic attempts made in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Military history has shown time and again that the intervention of foreign powers does not remake governance structures without the enthusiastic endorsement of a majority of the population.  That is not, nor should it be, the objective of intervention in Syria.  Not only are NATO and the Arab League uninterested in occupying Syria, both organizations have sufficient resources to ensure that is not necessary.

Regardless of who fired off chemical weapons, the conflicting forces in Syria need to be made to understand two things:
1.  It is never acceptable to use CBRNE weapons in conflict, particularly in areas where civilians will be impacted.
2.  The UN, NATO, Arab league, etc will not let you murder your civilian population in the course of internal conflict, but we aren't going to rebuild your damn country after we intervene to protect those civilians either.

TL;DR:  Nothing NATO does for the foreseeable future is going to look anything like Afghanistan or Iraq, because no NATO country can afford a repeat:  militarily, economically, or politically.

[Luis Dias]

My words were not good. What I meant to say was not that the Desert Storm op didn't accomplish all its objectives. It did and it did so in record time. What I meant by saying "it didn't work" was that it didn't solve the problem of Iraq and the iraqis, nor did it fundamentally solved the problem of Hussein and his egomaniac attempts to create WMDs, make all sorts of instabilities in the region, etc.

Yes, if we are to judge DS to what was prevented from happening in Kuwait, etc., it was a blast. But I don't think we are talking about Syria in quite the same tone, now are we? The problem does not seem to be whether if Syria is about to invade anyone. It's about whether if the government will massacre and oppress its own people even further, or if this civil war will keep going as it has been for quite some time.

The most recent engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq were experiments.

What in the bloody hell are you talking about? If you were to argue that the management of the situation was absolute garbage, naive and incompetent, etc. I'm with you. But "experiments"? What does that even mean? Now we may go on and list all the mistakes that were made, the absolute lack of predictive power of those in power, the ideological blindness of the people in charge, etc., etc., but the ability of making these lists do not assure me *whatsoever* that any lessons have been learned by the US machine of war. Most probably, many of those same mistakes would happen again and again, despite the fact that we should "know better" (but does the system?). This is why that forgetting past mistakes is the worst possible suggestion. If anything, it tells us that they have probably learnt that they don't know how to deal with these situations.

...and no one is prepared to try anything like that again.

You'd be amazed at the stupidity of humanity.

So the parallels of the Iraq/Afghanistan messes are really not applicable to Syria.  The situation in Syria is far more comparable to the Balkans or the myriad of mercenary-fought hot wars in Africa over the last 35 years than to the folly of the strategic attempts made in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not really. Not at all. The balkans are in the middle of F europe. And despite them having Russia support at the time too, it was not the Russia in its best form. There were *no* backers for Milojevic and he went down fast. They had no muslims backing them up either (the crimes were commited against the muslims at the time), no Al Quaeda was involved, etc.,etc. The situation couldn't be more different than from the balkans!

1.  It is never acceptable to use CBRNE weapons in conflict, particularly in areas where civilians will be impacted.
2.  The UN, NATO, Arab league, etc will not let you murder your civilian population in the course of internal conflict, but we aren't going to rebuild your damn country after we intervene to protect those civilians either.

Nice negatives. I'm still waiting for an actual measure. For I do agree with all the above. But you know, geopolitics is never this easy.

TL;DR:  Nothing NATO does for the foreseeable future is going to look anything like Afghanistan or Iraq, because no NATO country can afford a repeat:  militarily, economically, or politically.

That's .... bad politicalese. Come on, don't lower yourself to these kinds of naive feel-good twitter-lenght sentences that we can hear on and on and on in every single US election. The situation is a deadlock. I do agree with Nakura, and while you may be right in saying that there are "best moves" that the US should take (and I kinda agree with punishing those who launch CWs and so on), this will not solve the Syrian problem. It will remain a problem.

I said it before. Either Assad is murdered and a kind of a miracle happens (with all the factions actually coming together), or any other scenario is a civil war for more 10 years, if not 20. In Angola, only when the "fremen" leader Savimbi died (the rebel leader) did the nation come forward, with a nasty scumbag tirant family at its helm.