“Degrade.” The word is problematic. Consider how limited it is: the White House is not even attempting to promise that they’re trying to eliminate Assad’s chemical capabilities, just “degrade” them – what this means, really, is the destruction of delivery paths and the like. The White House isn’t even claiming it will significantly eliminate Assad’s ability to gas his people. So much for the moralizing humanitarian angle in the push for a strike.
There is little question that in the wake of John Kerry’s testimony Tuesday that this fails the Just War test. Punishment for using chemical weapons does not pass the test. Love it or hate it, toppling Assad at least has the virtue of being an idea. Lobbing some missiles and not trying to topple him is not. An open-ended congressional authorization simply does not serve America’s national security interests, particularly an authorization which could involve boots on the ground – and probably would demand it in order to achieve even the limited promises of the administration. As I noted Tuesday, the only viable reason to take military action is to wipe out the chemical weapons in Syria so they can’t be used by anyone against Americans or our allies. The White House is not attempting that. And Kerry is also likely wrong about the impact of delay, as it allows Assad time to move, redirect, or bury his weapons Saddam style.
In this context, here’s last night’s debate on Syria on Chris Hayes’ show, with Tommy Vietor and Eli Lake, Part I. And Part II. There’s another aspect of this that we didn’t have time to get to: In a presidential debate in 2012, Obama said “for us to get more entangled militarily in Syria is a serious step. And we have to do so making absolutely certain that we know who we are helping, that we’re not putting arms in the hands of folks who eventually could turn them against us or our allies in the region.” If the lesson of Iraq is not to make war based on intelligence regarding WMD, but on more than that, how is Syria different? Is it worth the risk to roll the dice on the rebels not using chemical weapons? Is it worth us launching another war primarily because the president went off-script? And this gets back to the harsher question: Is this military action to save America’s reputation, or military action to save President Obama’s reputation?
As for the split on the right (and the left) regarding this messy, vague intervention, let’s stop with the increasingly ridiculous “isolationist” blather. I’m looking at you Hugh Hewitt. And Jennifer Rubin. Jonah Goldberg responds: “I covered a lot of this in a column last month (and in the magazine years ago) before the Syria controversy exploded. But in the context of the Syria debate, the term is particularly absurd. There are a great many hawks, interventionists, internationalists – pick a term that means something other than isolationist – who don’t want to attack Syria at all or certainly not on the terms being offered by this White House. Are, say, John Bolton, Don Rumsfeld, or Charles Krauthammer now isolationists? Marc Thiessen makes a good argument today that a feckless strike on Syria that is just serious enough not to be mocked would be a disaster. Is Thiessen an isolationist? If so, we are now in Crazy Pants Land. Timothy Carney’s sarcastic definition comes to mind: “Isolationist: n. Someone who, on occasion, opposes bombing foreigners.” I’d phrase it slightly different. An isolationist is someone who doesn’t want to bomb foreigners when I do.”
A War of His Choosing
No comments:
Post a Comment