Hmmm... what DO I think?
This last week has been a big one for telling people what they think. I have certainly been told what I think, and it turns out I think all sorts of crazy things... sometimes things that have never even crossed my mind. (Now that's multi-tasking!)
Gee... what do I really think? Not just the dogma of whatever "side" one thinks I'm on...
I think the Syrian civil war is incredibly serious, and I do not consider it certain that Assad retaining power is the very worst option.
Thus I am not a big fan of toppling Assad unless one was in a position to dictate what follows Assad. And I do not see the US wanting to take on that job, even if we could. But it's so serious, and the potential downsides so grim, that I would listen to an argument for a ceasefire, disarmament, UN peacekeeping regime. Probably not possible, but this is a dangerous civil war for the whole region.
There was never much rational doubt that Syrian regime forces did, in fact, launch a huge artillery barrage with a LOT of nerve gas shells at Damascus suburbs, mostly to the east. As to whether their orders came from Assad... who knows? But if they did not that isn't much of an argument in favor of the regime. If Assad doesn't control his own forces that's a poor argument for keeping him around.
Chemical weapons are a big deal in terms of holding the line on savagery. But it is worth remembering that we have been seeing more dead kids than usual partially because these dead kids are not all blown apart, and thus can be shown on American TV. The method of killing kids doesn't seem paramount to me. Killing people is 99% of the moral dimension of killing people.
Should we have struck Syria as a response to massive chemical weapons use? Perhaps. If it were possible to do so as an effective life-saving intervention, maybe so. But that would make dropping atropine injectors and gas masks more useful than bombing airplanes on the ground or anti-aircraft installaions in order to somehow limit poison gas in truck-launched artillery.
The White House's handling of the matter was shockingly bad. I have never seen Obama less effective, and the Kerry show has been as FUBAR as anything I've ever seen. The case being made was a lie, pretending that our goal was not to tip the war to the rebels. Nobody fell for it.
I applauded the "going to congress" move big-time. I was moved that Obama had decided to back-pedal and restart things to have a rational national and international dialog about the nature of responsibility to back up these treaties we sign. I was near tears.
Then the next day the WH came out of the gate like Bush 3.0 with a bunch of "Hitler" bullshit, and embrace of regime-change they'd denied up and down 48 hours earlier and generally pushing a war with emotion and bluster while mocking those who called it war. That was the kind of thing that it is hard to get past.
I predicted the resolution would pass Congress. I was probably wrong about that, but I did so without knowing that Kerry was going to get even worse, and the whole argument become so disorganized and contradictory that any sane politician would start backing toward the door.
As for the "who's a hawk?" game??? They all are. Maybe Obama is 74% hawk and Hillary 77% and Kerry 76% and Susan Rice 78%... there are differences, but not huge ones. This is the mainstream institutional Democratic foreign policy stance. (There is a reason that former DNC chairs Dean and Kaine were so quick to sign up.)
I am not a hawk or a dove. I am a perpetually conflicted "liberal realist" on foreign affairs. I do not think bombing Syria would be the crime of the century. (Iraq was only a few years ago, after all.) But bombing people just to send a message seems sort of sociopathic. So I couldn't see the whole "incredibly tiny" war argument of bombing just to bomb.
But that doesn't mean WMD use means nothing.
As to the whole Kerry/Russia "turn in the WMD" thing... I am for it. I expect Russia to put strings on it that make it a hard thing to swallow, and if the WH had done a halfway decent job forming a cogent argument we would be in a better position. As things stand, we pretty much have to grasp any straw we can. (Bad preparation leads to bad outcomes. This whole thing has been half-assed.)
If congress votes down the resolution it will usher in a Republican feeding frenzy. I don't want that. I do not want the President humiliated and lame-ducked... but you don't bomb people just to retain political relevancy. That was Bush in a nutshell and most presidents have done a little of it, but it can't be okay.
I never had all that much against Kerry before a few weeks ago. A rather oportunistic blow-hard, but kind of harmless. His behavior the last two weeks has been shameful (and incompetent, which counts) and his reputation, to me, is unrecoverable. I do not see him as peculiarly awful for being hawkish, lot's of folks in the government are hawkish, but for being an ineffective, self-impressed bozo fucking up the program and digging we Democrats into an awful political morass. Hillary was no less hawkish and probably more, and is the architect of the red-line, arm the rebels, regime-change Syria policy that we currently have. But she was better organized and more politically aware, which kind of matters. But to say she would have been better at selling bombing Syria is a mixed endorsement.
I hope we do not bomb Syria. I also hope we do not precipitate more chaos then they already have. But I do not consider bombing some Syrian targets, in context, to be a "war crime" in the way that term gets thrown around. But it would sure as hell create a state of war between the USA and Syria, and to the bombee, all bombs are pretty much the same, however good their intentions.
In closing, Obama is not Bush. Obama has been too much like Bush for comfort the last couple of weeks, but he is not a dumb-ass, a sociopath or a mere puppet. And I do not think he wants to bomb Syria not matter what. That's a big difference. Bush wanted war. I think Obama wants to end this mess as best he can with the least bloodshed while retaining a little political relevance and American credibility.
If there is a way to work out something like the "Turn over the WMD to the UN to destroy" I trust Obama to seek it, and go the extra mile for it. But there may be poison pills we cannot swallow.
We will see. I admire the president. He is an able and intelligent and well-intentioned man. (But a much better politician when Plouffe is around.) The fact that I think he has been dead wrong about some important things, and stubbornly so, does not mean I think the guy is a bum.
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