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The surprising saga of Barack Obama and Chemical Bashar continues with new twists and turns. First the President threatened, practically promised, a punitive (although strategically insignificant) missile strike in a matter of days, and then his people leaked precisely what it would be like in shocking, unprecedented detail — permitting Assad to vacate likely targets.

Israel placed its armed forces on alert, after threats from Iran, Syria and Hizballah, although — thanks to Israel’s credible promise of disproportionate response to any provocations — retaliation against it was considered unlikely. Israelis queued for gas masks and possibly even cleared the junk out of some bomb shelters.

Then the British Parliament embarrassed its PM by refusing to authorize the use of force against Syria. And the next day, Obama announced that he had decided to ask for the approval of Congress before taking action — and Congress is away on vacation until September 9.

How unfair! I can imagine the Syrians worrying about whether they ought to move their missiles back to their usual places, while Israelis stuff all the old baby strollers and lawn furniture back into their bomb shelters.

I have been watching the extended display of Western weakness and indecision, along with the unusual spectacle of Obama supporters calling for military action (at least, as long as he was) with interest.

It should be clear that — like most of the unrest in the Middle East today — the Syrian conflict has nothing to do with Israel, unless someone gets really stupid. Israel has done its best to remain neutral except insofar as it has acted to prevent the transfer of game-changing weapons to Hizballah.

But it seems to be just too tempting for some to resist trying to make Israel part of it in one way or another. For example, here is a piece of NPR’s morning newscast today, during which Hamlet Obama’s latest non-action is analyzed (my transcription):

Mara Liasson: What happened was the President changed his mind. He saw what happened in Great Britain, he knew he wasn’t getting the support of the United Nations Security Council, and, uh, although the White House insists they don’t need congressional approval to act, they are not legally required to get it, he felt that going to Congress would put any military action on a much stronger footing. It would also be consistent with the position that he’s taken all along, in favor of presidents going to Congress first. And especially with a public that’s deeply ambivalent about military action, he decided that a full debate with the people’s representatives was the best way to go. …

Wade Goodwyn: Will he get any support from Congress?

ML: Well, that’s the big question. If the vote was held right now I think the answer would be ‘no’, he’d lose. That’s what makes this such a hugely risky move on the President’s part, because a failure would weaken him immensely, the way it has for Prime Minister Cameron. But lots of members of Congress reacted favorably, as you said, to the decision to come to them, you know 200 of them had signed a letter demanding that he do so. But there are still many Republicans, especially in the House, who won’t approve of anything the President wants to do, and there are many Democrats who are against military action. And even in the Senate, where support for the President’s position is considered stronger, there are lawmakers like Lindsay Graham and John McCain who say they will vote ‘no’ because the tailored, limited, shot-across-the-bow type of military action that the President is describing won’t be effective.

So the public, as I said, is deeply ambivalent — for many members it is a lot tougher to vote ‘yes’ on this than ‘no’ — and the President is going to have to spend the next week or two working this very hard, and enlisting allies like Israel to help him sway members. [my emphasis]

Oh, please. Don’t drag Israel (and certainly not the ‘Israel Lobby’) into this! Except insofar as she has to be prepared to deter opportunistic attacks, Israel could not care less whether Obama  bombs some empty buildings to ‘teach Assad a lesson’. Whatever Obama does or does not do will be — or should be — based on his perception of US interests.

It is not Israel’s job to “help sway members” of Congress. Israel is not responsible for the barbaric behavior of Assad or his opponents, it is not responsible for anything that Obama does, and will not be responsible for anything that Assad and his allies may do to the US in return.

Maybe I’m paranoid, but I smell an attempt to position Israel to take the blame if something goes wrong with this already highly problematic exercise.

Update [1105 PDT]: The President and Secretary of State Kerry are both explicitly trying to relate this to Israel.

Technorati Tags: Syria, Obama, Israel

Antenna of the US AN/TPY-2 X-band radar system set up in the Negev. It is ostensibly there to monitor Iranian missile launches, but it can also see a small aircraft taking off from anywhere in Israel. Only American personnel are allowed anywhere near it.

By Vic Rosenthal

The Washington Post has a document that it says it obtained from Edward Snowden which it calls the ‘black budget’ of the various US intelligence services. It has published only a small part of the material “after consultation with U.S. officials who expressed concerns about the risk to intelligence sources and methods.”

The Post notes the growth of the CIA budget to almost $15 billion in 2013, which I have to admit is a remarkable number, comparable to the GDP of Jamaica or Mozambique, and 50% more than that of the NSA — which, after all,  has to read our email and listen to our phone calls. The total for all the intelligence agencies is $52.6 billion, close to the GDP of Croatia.

But naturally, the first thing I did was search for ‘Israel’ and here is what I found on pages 4-5:

Investments

Although the budget is declining, the mission is not. Prioritizing our requirements was a key element to produce a budget that meets customer needs, supports critical capabilities, addresses gaps, and helps to maintain a strategic advantage. In the FY 2013 NIP [National Intelligence Program] budget, the IC [Intelligence Community] makes targeted investments in:

…

o Counterintelligence (CI). To further safeguard our classified networks, we continue to strengthen insider threat detection capabilities across the Community. In addition, we are investing in target surveillance and offensive CI against key targets, such as China, Russia, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, and Cuba. [my emphasis]

Wait, what?

We are making “targeted investments” (read: spending more money) in spying on these ‘targets’ and attempting to prevent them from spying on us — and Israel is a “key target” in the company of  China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and Cuba!

This is just plain astonishing, considering that the other “key targets” encompass most of the main threats against US security today.

Keep in mind that unlike Russia, China and Iran, Israel’s main goal is survival, not expansion of its influence. Unlike Iran and Pakistan, it does not harbor terrorists or operate world-wide terrorist networks. Unlike Cuba, it is not a semi-hostile nation a few miles from US borders. Unlike China, it is not engaged in massive theft of intellectual property. The Israeli people are probably among the most pro-American in the world, and the government is remarkably ‘flexible’ — in my opinion, too much so — when called upon to subordinate its own interests to the demands of the US.

The Post suggests that the emphasis on Israel is because “[it] is a U.S. ally but has a history of espionage attempts against the United States.” So do many allies, and as has recently become clear from new documents released in the Pollard case, Israel’s interests — unlike, say, Iran’s — are not in subverting or damaging the US, but in collecting information about threats against itself coming from Arab nations, Russia, Iran, etc.

The obsessive interest in Israel surely can’t be about the ‘peace process’. I mean, really, how important or potentially dangerous is this when compared to the aggressive spread of radical regimes in the Muslim world, the possible implosion of Egypt, or a Syrian civil war that has so far taken about 100,000 lives including children killed by Sarin gas?

And as far as threats go, are they watching the infiltration of Hizballah into South and Central America? Now there’s a threat to the US!

For once, I can’t blame Obama. This has been going on for years (viz., the Pollard case).

No, there is really only one explanation for this fixation on Israel by the US intelligence community. If I may be permitted a technical term, they are batshit crazy.

Technorati Tags: US Intelligence Community, CIA, Israel

Bashar al-Assad. The tail of the snake.

As the expected ‘limited’ Western strike against Syria draws closer, I admit to a degree of unease.

After all, Western use of military force since 1945 has been fraught with incompetence and failure. There is a basic misunderstanding of what it is for and how to employ it.

War is about crushing regimes and occupying territory. It is not about applying pressure in precisely calibrated ways. There are too many unintended consequences. Generals can (usually) tell you how to achieve military objectives, but political ones are another story. Even very bright people are often surprised by the outcome after what was intended as a surgical intervention turns into chaos.

I am not saying that military force is never appropriate. Just that it should be reserved for big objectives.  And ‘punishing’ Assad for using chemical weapons — but being careful not to remove him from power — is not a big objective. It is more about appearance than reality.

It is also kind of absurd, seeing that Assad already killed some 100,000 Syrians with impunity with ‘conventional’ weapons. Suddenly he needs to be punished?

Another interesting thing about the Western plan is that it has been described publicly in great detail before being executed. This is certainly an innovation in military strategy, unless everything that has been leaked is deliberately false (but I don’t think so)!

It is as if the object is to appear to be taking action without actually doing serious damage (except to our military budget, since each Tomahawk costs about $1.5 million). Assad will have plenty of time to move expensive vehicles, aircraft, etc.

The purported function of this attack is to send a message about red lines. But nobody will be fooled, and the message to Assad will be, at best, “be more careful next time”.

If we must attack Syria, then we should destroy as much of her military capabilities and stock of weapons of all kinds as possible, force Assad out, and allow the various factions to split the country into ethnic enclaves. The trick would be to do this without allowing too many dangerous weapons to fall into the hands of terrorist factions. This would probably require Western ground troops and be expensive and difficult. The US and Europe don’t have the cash or the will to do this.

Some have expressed anxiety that any provocation, even a minimal one, will cause Assad to respond by attacking Israel. Here we need to consider the possibility that Obama will tie Israel’s hands as Bush I did during the 1991 Gulf War. You will recall that several Iraqi scuds hit the Tel Aviv area, and although the US promised that it would take out the launchers, it proved unable to do so. Mass casualties were only miraculously avoided.

PM Netanyahu has warned Assad that Israel would respond strongly to any attack. Although Netanyahu folded under Obama’s demand to release more than 100 convicted terrorists in order to please the PLO, there are limits (somewhere). I cannot imagine that an Israeli government that allowed Syrian missiles to kill its citizens without a response would survive.

We should keep in mind that an ineffective or partial Israeli response would play into Assad’s hands — he has been claiming all along that Israel is behind the insurgents. So any response short of one strong enough to end his regime (or his life) would simply help him make his point.

We know that the US doesn’t want to go that far. So as usual, Israel is placed in a tough spot. It will need to be prepared to defy the US, and to credibly convince Assad that it will do so if necessary.

Actually, there is an entirely different approach that the  West could (but won’t) take. Here’s what Melanie Phillips thinks:

The most important argument used to support attacking Assad’s regime is that, by bringing it down, the west would deal a grievous blow to Iran, Syria’s puppet-master, which itself poses such a terrible threat to the region and the world.

But this is yet anther incoherent and essentially weaselly proposition. The intention, don’t forget, is not to get rid of Assad but merely to deter him. Weakening him, however, will not hit Iran. It may well merely drive Assad further into Iran’s embrace, and in the process strengthen the influence of Russia over the region – already increasing exponentially as the Middle East and Muslim world gaze at the wreckage of American influence and cosy up instead to the toughest guy on the block.

There is only one way to hit Iran – and that is to hit Iran. Attempting to weaken Iran by striking at Assad is to look at the problem the wrong way round. To neutralise the puppet Assad, the west has to strike the puppeteer, Iran.

Unfortunately, we are even less likely to “cut off the head of the snake” than to step firmly on its tail.

Technorati Tags: Syria, Iran

Hell’s Angels. Like Bashar al-Assad, their power of deterrence comes from their reputation for ruthlessness.

Predictions of an apocalyptic Middle East war following a US attack on Syria are premature. None of the players are interested in a serious confrontation.

President Obama feels boxed in by his ‘red line’ promise, and it appears that it will be impossible to pretend that the line was not crossed. So he will, with the cooperation of the UK and perhaps France, symbolically strike some assets of the Assad regime.

This will be coordinated in advance with the Russians, who will make a lot of noise in public, but in private will not be concerned as long as Assad’s hold on power is not threatened, which it will not be.

Assad’s threats to retaliate against Israel also fall in the category of noise. His overwhelming concern is to stay in power, and although he finds it advantageous to link Israel to the ‘terrorists’ he is fighting, he knows that Israel is in fact neutral in the conflict. Why upset this applecart and risk really painful reprisals?

Assad’s gamble to use chemical weapons has thus had the following effects:

• It terrorized the Sunni civilians who are supporting the rebels. Remember, this is as much an ethnic war as a political one. Like the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club, much of Assad’s deterrence depends on his reputation for being ruthless, even ‘crazy’ (although he is actually quite rational).

• It embarrassed Obama. The weak response that will follow will prove to Assad that Western opposition will not be a significant restraint on his freedom to do as he wishes.

The downside for the regime will be a few Tomahawk impacts, possibly on empty buildings, but certainly not enough to affect the outcome of the civil war.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.

Technorati Tags: Syria, chemical weapons, Bashar al-Assad

Warning: graphic video

Some say that Bashar al-Assad is viciously murdering civilians in rebel-held areas of Syria with poison gas. Others insist that maybe the rebels themselves are doing it, or perhaps aliens from another galaxy. Although it seems to me that the evidence against Assad is close to overwhelming, it is not apparently not overwhelming enough for the humanitarians of the world to do anything more than talk about it.

For example,

On Friday, Obama also cautioned against “jumping into” immediate action, saying the U.S. needs to think strategically about its long-term interest and needs to work co-operatively with its allies. He also said the belief that the U.S. can end the Syrian conflict on its own is “overstated.”

Intelligence services of US ally Israel have indicated that they think that Assad, and not an alien death star, is actually gassing women and children to death.

Obama is right that the US can’t end the Syrian conflict on its own. But the US can end the gassing. I present the following plan to President Obama at no charge. If he wants, he can do it today.

1. Bomb regime targets and inform Assad that this is punishment for his war crimes;
2. if there is more gassing, increase the number of targets and go to step 1.

Note that whether this results in regime change in favor of the rebels is entirely up to Assad. Of course nothing is more important to him than staying in power.

But wait! What if all the videos are fakes? What if the rebels or space aliens really are responsible? Simple — just add a step 0: give Assad an ultimatum that he has 12 hours to permit an inspection of the scene of the alleged crime. If he refuses, or if inspectors find that he is in fact guilty, then go to step 1. This requires even less commitment than a no-fly zone, and puts the onus entirely on Assad.

I’m quite serious. This can’t continue, both because it is atrocious and because of the precedent it sets. The West needs to act, for once, against barbarism.

Technorati Tags: Assad, chemical attack, Syria, war crimes