War Games

“The president is not asking you to go to war. He’s not asking you to declare war. He’s not asking you to send one American troop to war.

He’s simply saying we need to take an action that can degrade the capacity of a man who’s been willing to kill his own people by breaking a nearly 100 year old prohibition.” –  John Kerry, U.S. Secretary of State at the Senate hearings on the proposed attack on Syria.

For sheer stupidity, arrogance and vanity those two sentences are unparalleled.

 

It’s is unbelievably stupid to claim that raining cruise missiles down on another country is not “war”. Sure it’s not going to be as dazzling a display of American pyrotechnics as “Shock and Awe” which kick started the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. But what word would Kerry or Obama themselves use to describe an attack that deluged American territory with explosive ordinance killing hundreds of servicemen and civilians?

It’s also mind bogglingly dumb to anticipate, as Obama and Kerry clearly do, that there will be no comeback. True, Syria doesn’t have the conventional military capability to hit America. But should Assad survive the assault (which also seems to be part of the plan) he will hit back through the terrorist groups that he has used as proxies for years.

And it’s arrogant to think that Obama’s “shot across the bow” will have any beneficial effect on the behavior of a man who in using sarin gas and so crossing Obama’s red line has already amply demonstrated his irrationality.

And it’s unutterably vain to kill hundreds or even thousands simply to feel better about yourself. If there’s one leitmotif that runs through all the speeches of Hague, Cameron, Obama and now Kerry it is that bombing Syria is not about Assad, but about who we are. Apparently, if we don’t kill hundreds of hapless conscripts left on guard duty at the targets we won’t be able to look ourselves in the face as we shave in the morning. 

So much for the general strategy behind the coming attack.

But what of the tactical brilliance of the Obama team. On this score those of us who were looking forward to something new from “the smartest guy in the room” have not been disappointed.

Rejecting the accumulated wisdom of a host of dead white guy military theorists the American president has come up with something entirely new in the field of military tactics.

Though the great leader has not yet published Obama On War: The Audacity of Winging It, observation of his genius in action has revealed the following:

                                         

☻ Lead from behind, the commander in chief is far too important to expose to the slightest danger.

                                      

☻ Never tie yourself to any particular military objective. This makes failure literally impossible.

                                        

☻ Surprise attack is passé. What really upsets the enemy’s calculations is to provide them with a timetable of your planned attacks.

                                                   

☻ Then in the area of PSYOPS, assail the enemy with endless sanctimonious speeches to fatally undermine their self-esteem.

                                    

☻ After that reveal the precise nature of the attack together with a detailed target list. This ensures that no really important Syrian 1 percenters get killed inadvertently.

    

☻ Tell the enemy beforehand that the operation is “limited” or even “unbelievably small” so as not to cause undue anxiety in your opponent. 

I expect that the result of putting these exciting new concepts into action will range from utterly ineffective to totally disastrous.

The potential for the latter will only be known after some years, because while Obama has complete freedom of action in starting this war, it will be for Assad to decide when it’s over.

In short, to adapt the famous boast of the late Saddam Hussein, it will be the Mother of all Cluster Fucks.

So what should America and the west do about the vile slaughter of hundreds of innocent  civilians by Assad?

Nothing.

We’ve seen this film before. It always starts with weeping Muslims begging the west to intervene, and always ends with their reviling us for another attack on Islam.

All sides in this conflict hate us. In fact apart from Israel the west has no true allies at all in the whole region and never will. And because of the nature of Islam, Syria will always be ruled by a dictatorship of one kind or another. 

Western policy should be entirely confined to protecting our own vital interests. If a Muslim country threatens our oil supplies or launches attacks on western targets using terrorist proxies they must be gently encouraged to find a new dictator for life by having the snot knocked out of them till they do.

Or perhaps the neighbouring countries could intervene. Having invested tens of billions in advanced western weaponry, several of the regional players are fully capable of saving their Syrian brothers from the depredations of Assad.

They won’t, of course, because there is very little to choose between their regimes and his.

If Assad had stood out from his Arab brethren in terms of vileness, would Hillary Clinton the former Secretary of State among many other distinguished western visitors have described him as “a reformer” just 2 years ago?

Buts let’s say for the sake of argument that we did want to do something to punish Assad for killing hundreds of civilians with gas. Let’s say that for some reason those 100s of deaths seem somehow far more tragic and significant to us than the 100,000 other deaths in the Syrian civil war from such relatively humane causes as shooting, torturing, beheading, blasting or burning.

Nothing so simple.

All dictators, irrational or otherwise, respond to one thing: personal danger.

If you really want to send a message out about the unacceptability of chemical weapons, kill the bastard and as many Syrian 1 percenters as you can find.

It was no chance coincidence that the late lamentable Libyan dictator, Gaddafi, decided to officially announce that he was getting out of the WMD game just a couple of days after watching Saddam emerge from his rathole bedraggled and generally careworn.

Neither is it a coincidence that Assad and his dad before him haven’t attacked their most hated enemy, Israel, in more than 30 years even though the Jewish state has launched several attacks on Syria just this year.

                                              

Nothing loosens the bowels of your average strongman more than the slightest hint of danger.

                                      

But rather than what he would consider to be the “totally unacceptable assassination” of the real enemy, Obama would prefer to immolate a few hundred non-entities left to die at the target sites leaked by the Obama administration.

If you really care about the murdered victims kill the murderer, kill Assad.

And for God’s sake stop talking about how you feel about it.