"Could bombing Syria kill more civilians than it saves?" --Ezra Klein

[KoKo]

The answer is clearly yes, and for two reasons.The answer is clearly yes, and for two reasons.

The first is that our bombs will kill people. The United States will do everything it can to minimize civilian casualties, of course. But Syrian President Bashar al-Assad won’t. As James Fearon writes, “you can bet that the Assad regime will do what it can to make it so attacks do kill, or appear to kill, a lot of civilians.”The chemical attack we’re punishing is thought to have killed about 1,400 people: It won’t take all that many ill-targeted explosives to match that death toll.


The second — and probably larger — worry is that our bombs will lead the Syrian government to kill more people. That’s the implication of this 2012 paper by Reed Wood, Jason Kathman, and Stephen Gent (which I found via Erica Chenoweth).

The authors looked at a range of conflicts from 1989 to 2005 and found that when outside governments intervene on behalf of rebel forces, the government’s killing of civilians increased by 40 percent. The reason, basically, is that as the government fears it’s losing control of the conflict, it becomes more desperate and more ferocious and more lethal. The authors conclude (italics mine):

Supporting a faction’s quest to vanquish its adversary may have the unintended consequence of inciting the adversary to more intense violence against the population. Thus, third parties with interests in stability should bear in mind the potential for the costly consequences of countering murderous groups. Potential interveners should heed these conclusions when designing intervention strategies and tailor their interventions to include components specifically designed to protect civilians from reprisals. Such strategies could include stationing forces within vulnerable population centers, temporarily relocating susceptible populations to safe havens that are more distant from the conflict zone, and supplying sufficient ground forces to be consistent with such policies. These actions could fulfill broader interests in societal stability in addition to interests in countering an organization on geopolitical grounds. Successful policies will thus not only counter murderous factions but will explicitly seek to protect civilian populations.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/31/could-bombing-syria-kill-more-civilians-than-it-saves/

[durablend]

1. Gee, YA THINK?!?!?

But I'm sure the keyboard commandos don't really care as they're just collateral damage in the path to our spreading democracy.

[riderinthestorm]

2. Ezra Klein is always an interesting read

His point that Assad may simply get more lethal in response to our strike resonates with me as a real potentiality.

Furthermore, the point that Assad may simply lash out, killing a slew of people along with our strike, amplifying the dead and injured civilians so "we", the US, look bad as though we targeted civilians - that point also strikes me as utterly possible.

[Harmony Blue]

3. What I find shocking

is the 40% increase in the deaths of civilians. That is simply staggering and I did not expect it to be that high at all.

[riderinthestorm]

8. But those who support action will probably say its necessary

in order to "send a message" to other dictators about CW use... or something.

I'm sure those killed in the aftermath of a US strike are going to be happy they got to be used as exemplars for North Korea or Iran or (insert bad guy here).

[sabrina 1]

9. They will say what they always say, that if you didn't want your child to die you should not have

placed him/her under our humanitarian bombs in your own country.

Not to mention, Ezra Klein is wrong. But then he often is. He is attempting to shift the blame for more deaths once we start the 90 bombing campaign to someone else. Assad has every reason NOT to kill Syrians who now support him by over 70% of the population.

WE KILLED hundreds of thousands of Iraqis with our bombs, starting on the first 'glorious day'. Soldiers told us later that they just killed anything that was moving after a while because they could not tell who was who.

The first victim whose photo went around the world, was the little boy named Ali who lost his arms and legs, his pregnant mother, his father and his siblings who were in their OWN apartment.

Klein does this, sits on the fence to protect himself from criticism from all sides, but generally ends up being criticized by all sides for his muddled reasoning.

[riderinthestorm]

11. I didn't read his piece as shifting the blame.

I think Klein's clear that the escalation of killing following our intervention would be on Obama's head. I didn't know that factoid about the increase in casualties that follow third party interventions. News to me.

Assad is going to do whatever he has to do to "win" this because he knows its genocide for the Alawite Shia (and Christians etc) in Syria if he doesn't. And yes, he also does have a lot of popular support by most Syrians.

[sabrina 1]

13. It makes no logical sense for Assad to kill his own supporters, and that is not what generally

happens.

The reality is that the extremists who have been funded and supported by the Western powers and their ally, the Saudis, and who HAVE been slaughtering Civilians over there in order to destabilize the country and make it 'ready' for yet another Western Colonial Imperial states intervention, will do what the extremists and the 'death squades' did in Iraq and in Lybia.

They will not be controllable and bodies will be found, tortured, murdered, raped as they were in Libya and Iraq but people like Klein will 'wonder' who is doing it, no matter that Human Rights groups in Iraq andLibya were begging for NATO to protect the people they CLAIMED to be there to protect. To no avail.

Libya and Iraq and Afghanistan are disasters now, unstable, with violence escalating every day and as millions of Iraqis and now Libyans and Syrians leave by the millions, overburdening the surrounding countries, the whole ME is, thanks to our bombs and wars and torture and all the other war crimes that have gone unpunished.

But that was the goal. The Amnesia that has set in even among Democrats apparently, regarding the plans of the PNAC for the ME, to topple the regimes of seven countries, starting with Iraq, is simply stunning as we watch them tick off country after country on their list.

Michael Ledeen never even tried to hide it, and his dream has more true than even he could have wished for as all of the ME becomes more and more unstable, with millions of refugees spreading out all over the area, traumatized, homeless and now dependent on countries that cannot possibly handle this enormous Humanitarian Crisis for WHICH WE ARE, to a great extent once we invaded Iraq, RESPONSIBLE.

Michael Ledeen, fan of Machiavelli, Bush 'advisor': One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. ....

Yeah never mind the human beings in the center of his cauldron.

[polly7]

14. Perfectly stated, Sabrina. nt.

[riderinthestorm]

15. I agree with you 100% Sabrina. On all fronts

EXCEPT I do wonder if Assad is brutal enough to "strike back" at the US by painting/manipulating/amplifying it with a few more civilian casualties.

That's all.

Klein's statistic about the post intervention violence just caught my eye and I wondered aloud....

Regardless its a clusterfuck on the order of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan with Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen teetering on the brink of joining the disaster parade. Jordan's not going to be able to endure much more with the huge influx of Syrians. Lebanon is teetering (if its not already fallen into civil war - hard to tell from afar).

[whatchamacallit]

4. Only tools and fools believe this is a humanitarian mission

[polly7]

6. +1. nt.

[hughee99]

5. It could possibly kill more than the gas attack did. n/t

[kenny blankenship]

7. There's a third reason as well.

Bombing Assad's forces won't be the end of it. The more you target the chemical weapons the looser the government's control over them will become. You will not destroy them all. You will not destroy half of them. You may make them less available for use by Syrian govt. loyalist forces, and you may make them less attractive to be around for the units who're supposed to be guarding and maintaining them. But that's a short term victory. And even that may be overshadowed by civilian deaths caused by bombardment and the release of chemical agents into the atmosphere. In the long term, though, an even worse possible outcome looms: you will have made the weapons harder to account for and less controllable. The loyalist side will lose control over some of them, and then more of them, as sites are bombed and territory changes hands. Rebels will scavenge bombed sites for intact warheads whenever possible, if only to prevent them from being used on themselves later on. If the bombing campaign is ultimately successful in ousting Assad (and, please, let's have no more childish lies about the real policy goal of the US policy and of its former colonial power allies), the stocks of chemical and maybe biological weapons will be scattered to the four winds. The prominence of Islamic fundamentalist terror groups in the Syrian opposition, including some our government regards as Al Qaeda affiliates, is too well established to need rehashing. Those groups will be racing each other to pick over bombed WMD sites in the localized chaos that follows.

The only way for the western imperialist powers to secure those WMDs to prevent them falling into the hands of religious maniacs is to go in and get them, as they said they were going to do in Iraq. Not even here among the most wild-eyed moronic Obama worshipers will one find many takers for a proposed occupation of Syria. The idea is patently insane. Of course that doesn't mean it won't happen. For our leaders never suffer (as yet) the direct consequences of their stupid and mad ideas. Other people do; first among them will be innocent civilians in the Middle Eastern region. Maybe they will be Syrian Alawites, or Lebanese, or Israelis. And eventually some of them may be innocent civilians of our own country and civilians of countries who assisted us in our "make over" of Syria. It is not necessary for us to even invade Syria and attempt to occupy it to bring down the wrath of Syrian opposition terror groups, now armed with captured chemical weapons maybe, upon our vulnerable fellow citizens abroad. Inevitably after the overthrow of Assad, the US will attempt to aid some group gain control over Syria, if only to exclude other groups whom we like less - which will be the religious fanatic terror groups, who as it happens are more powerful than secular elements on the rebel side, and who are already predisposed to hate us. Right there you have more than enough impetus to turn a temporary ally of convenience into a bitter enemy, determined to strike us even in our "homeland".

[KoKo]

12. Going to the UN to get a Resolution to get Syria to allow Weapons Inspectors in

to locate the Chemicals and dispose of them might have gotten both Russia and China onboard. But, we didn't do that when the first reports came in last year of possible Chem Weapons being used. Now we have our "hair on fire" about the latest use ...which leads many to think that this isn't about the weapons use or who is responsible for their use (still in dispute) but that we want to strike them for the purpose of destabilizing country and then move on to bomb Iran.

The chemicals are there and probably in the insurgent areas as well as in areas Assad controls. How are we going to take these weapons out with "surgical precision" when they may be in civilian areas where hitting the weapons will release even more death and destruction.

[Solly Mack]

10. K&R

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

16. Sloppy Research....

I'm not weighing on the issue at hand, just commenting on the quality of the research cited in the Washington Post column.

The authors are ultimately claiming that military intervention causes regimes to resort to more aggressive (and more lethal) measures to put down an insurrection, meaning that the "Law of Unintended Consequences" might cause more civilians to be killed than saved. But their research ignores the rather obvious conclusion that it's not the intervention that triggers this behavior, but rather the regime's perception that it's losing control. The more lethal response is triggered by a sense that "holy shit, we losing," which would occur regardless of any intervention.

A wounded and cornered animal is dangerous, regardless of how it became wounded and cornered.

Furthermore, the research only studies cases of direct military intervention, which I have to assume includes both "boots on the ground" and airstrikes (the authors could have been more clear on this subject). It excludes cases of intervention where the only external assistance is funding, supplies and intelligence.

To have included those cases would have been enlightening. It would have given an indication as to whether there is a difference in reaction by the regime when the intervention is direct or indirect. If there's no difference, and we're already providing indirect support to the rebels in Syria, then it would indicate that there would be no additional adverse consequences by ratcheting up our involvement.

As it is, we're left with an enormous gap in what we know.

[KoKo]

17. It's "Common Sense." The Research only gives credibility to the Common Sense

as to what an Intervention by Bombs to Punish Assad would do. We have direct experience in our lifetimes of what our Other Interventions have done when they turned into full scale wars.

Iraq and Libya being our most recent in our "RESULTS."

So...while you find fault with the Research...I say Experience shows that effects of bombing and invading other countries doesn't seem to produce what is hoped and just causes more death and carnage when it should be up to the people involved in those countries to decide their OWN FATES and work out their problems without us being involved. But...we know why we involve ourselves....it's our lust for control of Resources and that's always been what American Power is about.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

18. In research, there's no such thing as "common sense"

In God We Trust....all others bring data.