US Congress Weighs the Pros and Cons of Military Intervention in Syria

Syrians on both sides of the civil war have weighed in on the debate in Congress about whether to support President Obama’s call for a limited military strike. The rebels and Bashar al-Assad supporters are deluging members of Congress with various media pleading their case. Supporters continue to claim that Assad forces didn’t use the sarin gas and emphasise the danger of the US effectively supporting Al Qaeda.

Rebels insist the gas was used by Assad forces, and continue to plead for assistance against a tyrant who reigns undemocratically and massacres his own people with impunity. 

The problem for the West is that there isn’t enough balanced information about who makes up the rebel forces. There’s a lot of media coverage now on those rebels who torture and murder prisoners in the most horrific ways, which has created an idea that all the rebels are vicious thugs who don’t deserve any assistance at all from the West. Either that or they're completely dominated now by Al Qaeda.

Whatever the truth is, they've been fighting a losing battle from the start in their attempts to convince the West that they need help. A lot of Westerners believe the Middle East is an uncivilised region, lagging hundreds of years behind the West. They quote treatment of women, the enormous wealth in the hands of the few, and undemocratic governments.

Memories are so short when it’s convenient. Has everybody forgotten that Egypt had the world’s first ever peaceful revolution? And a closer look at the West reveals shocking gender inequalities, increasing seemingly senseless violence, phenomenal wealth in the hands of the few and, in the US, a US Congress that may have been elected but is, if not ruled, at least highly influenced by the military industrial complex. Racism, religious intolerance, religious fundamentalism and white collar crime are rampant as is child pornography. 

People are sinking below the poverty line and those who could help turn their heads away. In fact, in the West that event is so common that we even have a cliché for it. When times are difficult you find out who your friends are.  

It’s not such a civilized picture after all. And yet we cling to the idea that we’re ahead somehow of the Middle East. Well, the reality is we may be in some ways, but in others it’s the same play, just different props and costumes and a different stage. And truth is, when we compare the two, we take the best of the West and the worst of the Middle East. 

So in reality none of that has anything to do with whether Syrian rebels should get Western assistance or not.  

International relationships don't provide much help either. They're so complicated; and we don’t know the half of it; information is probably more often than not fed to the public on a need to know basis, filtered through a radically biased media, either deliberately distorted or simply misinterpreted. 

The permutations of what could happen as a result of different actions by different countries are countless. Imagine this: if President Obama got support from Congress to go ahead with a limited military strike against Assad for using chemic weapons on his own people, it would, oddly put the US in Al Qaeda’s good books, which maybe wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Particularly since Putin’s refusal to back the intervention would put Russia in Al Qaeda’s bad books.  Maybe then Al Qaeda would turn their attention away from the US and focus it on Russia. Which would put Putin out of power.

It's a stretch, I know. But trying to come up with a perfectly sensible and unassailable social or political rationale for intervention or not is pretty much impossible. So in the end it's down to humanity and not setting a very dangerous precedent by letting a maniac massacre his people with impunity and play with chemical weapons and get away with it. And those two arguments are pretty unassailable, I think, no matter which way you look at them.  

I wish there was another way, though. But is it possible to stop a violent man with peaceful means?

A Sober Barack Obama Wants Action Against Bashar-Al Assad's Use of Chemical Weapons

The war in Syria rages on, with media reporting contradictory stories that masquerade as the truth about what’s really happening. The war in the US rages on; a war of words, emotions and opinions that verge on ludicrous conspiracy theories. Did Bashar-Al Assad use nerve as in an attack on Damascus that left more than 1400 dead, over 400 of them children, or was it the rebels killing their own in a Machiavellian plot to make Assad look bad?

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said the attack was an offense and even a crime against humanity and that if the West did nothing Assad could take that as permission to repeat the offense. David Cameron wanted to do something but British MP’s voted him off the stage, although that was before the UN report was released.

Russia and China of course refuse to get involved, and Barack Obama has been fighting a losing battle with Congress and with many US citizens, to take some kind of action. He has repeatedly said that he would wait until he received the UN report and that he was not considering troops on the ground or any kind of action that would lead to long term involvement in Syria’s civil war, but the press continues to use the most dramatic headlines possible, and whatever it is that has underpinned opposition to Obama in the US since he first got elected is feeding off the drama.

It’s par for the course that conservatives in the US don’t listen to his actual words, and conveniently ignore the reality of his actions, just as it’s predictable that they will accuse him of having no backbone no matter what he does.

But the latest is that he’s being compared to GW Bush on the eve of the Iraq war, which is so far from the truth that if it wasn’t tragic it would be laughable. Bush’s intention was clear from the start. Justification for the Iraq war, where there was none, was fabricated on the flimsiest of excuses. Well, patent lies, actually. The US military industrial complex profited immensely as people on both sides got slaughtered. By the time the truth was obvious to Americans it was too late. Not for the military industrial complex of course.

Barack Obama has no intention of creating a war as GW Bush did. He has no intention of indiscriminately involving the US in Syria’s complex civil war. He has openly refused to do so up to this point, and gotten little recognition for it.

But he once said, when criticized for attempting to work with Congress, that he knows perfectly well how to draw a line in the sand, and that when he does he doesn’t back down. He spoke to the press on Friday, having seen the UN assessment which categorically states that Assad used sarin in the Damascus attack. The following is taken from the text of Obama's speech, transcribed by Federal News Service:  

“…This kind of attack threatens our national security interests by violating well-established international norms against the use of chemical weapons, by further threatening friends and allies of ours in the region like Israel and Turkey and Jordan, and it increases the risk that chemical weapons will be used in the future and fall into the hands of terrorists who might use them against us. So I have said before, and I meant what I said, that the world has an obligation to make sure that we maintain the norm against the use of chemical weapons.”

“…But again, I repeat, we’re not considering any open-ended commitment. We’re not considering any boots-on-the-ground approach. What we will do is consider options that meet the narrow concern around chemical weapons, understanding that there is not going to be a solely military solution to the underlying conflict and tragedy that’s taking place in Syria [my italics]. And I will continue to consult closely with Congress. In addition to the release of the unclassified documents, we are providing a classified briefing to congressional staffs today, and we’ll offer that same classified briefing to members of Congress as well as our international partners. And I will continue to provide updates to the American people as we get more information.”

For this he’s recently been accused of trying to save face. I guess when you don’t want to see the truth of a man you won’t see it no matter what. Obama hasn’t said yet what action the US should take. But he’s being blasted from all sides as if he had openly and aggressively declared war and said let’s kill the bastards. Frankly, the idea that nerve gas can be used indiscriminately by a lunatic like Assad and get away with it unnerves me. But what’s more unnerving is how many people in the West are quite happy to let him get away with it because it’s not on their doorstep. Yet. And maybe because it’s about Middle Easterns.

A lot of the comments left on recent New York Times articles about Obama’s desire to take some kind of action have been of the nature “let the Syrians kill each other, they’re all violent criminals anyway”.

So much for global humanity. The callousness of conservative Americans is nauseating. They’ve forgotten – as they forget anything that contradicts their current fantastical theory, whatever it is – that the original rebels didn’t initially commit the atrocities; they just fought for their freedom. It was when they got utterly desperate and particularly when foreign, fundamentalist elements came in to support them, that atrocities started being committed on both sides.

What conservatives in the West are too short-sighted to see is that if Assad has stockpiles of chemical weapons and he uses them and nobody in the West takes him to task, a precedent has been set. And if – or maybe I should say when - fundamentalists get hold of them, hallo international terror all over again but on a much bigger and more horrifying scale than ever before. If Obama doesn’t take action now – moderate action, as he’s proposing - what will they say then? If they’re alive to say anything at all.