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Syria and the “Red Line”

Jeffrey Goldberg seems hopeful that the U.S. will finally plunge directly into the Syrian conflict: If you recall, President Barack Obama drew a “red line” for you: no use of chemical weapons in your brutal attempt to put down the uprising against your regime. Any use of such weapons (even any “moving around” of such […]

Jeffrey Goldberg seems hopeful that the U.S. will finally plunge directly into the Syrian conflict:

If you recall, President Barack Obama drew a “red line” for you: no use of chemical weapons in your brutal attempt to put down the uprising against your regime. Any use of such weapons (even any “moving around” of such weapons) would “change my calculus,” Obama said, “change my equation.” In other words, welcome to the day in which the calculus might just be changing.

Hagel, speaking to reporters in Abu Dhabi, said that U.S. intelligence has come to believe — like the Israelis, the French and the British before them — that President Bashar al- Assad’s regime seems to have used sarin “on a small scale.”

The use of chemical weapons on any scale is atrocious, but it doesn’t follow from this that U.S. military intervention is any wiser today than it was a month ago or last year. If the principal U.S. concern about Syrian chemical weapons is that the regime will lose control of them and terrorist groups will acquire them, hastening the collapse of the regime makes that undesirable outcome more likely. If the greater concern is to discourage the use of chemical weapons by the regime, there could be ways to make this small-scale use an isolated incident without committing the U.S. to a new war. Of course, interventionists have been champing at the bit to drag the U.S. into Syria for any reason they can find, and this just happens to be the latest excuse for getting the U.S. more involved than it already is. Proposed interventionist measures make no more sense now than they did before. As Gvosdev points out today, supporters of regime change in Syria desire far more than any of the available measures can deliver:

The United States wants Assad out of power, his dangerous weapons secure, Iran’s bridge to the Levant broken, pro-al-Qaida groups in the Syrian opposition marginalized, no massacres of minority groups and the basis for a future secular democratic state created — all without the need for direct U.S. involvement. Right now, no course of action on the table promises to achieve all seven of these objectives.

The Pentagon estimates that as many as 75,000 troops would be required to secure Syria’s chemical weapons, so if interventionists want to make small-scale use of sarin into their justification for war they won’t be able to pretend that anything less than an invasion of Syria with a large military force would be sufficient. Goldberg tries to pretend just that, because the main concern is to get the U.S. into the war first. I assume that the administration has no intention of committing so large a force to Syria. So interventionists will continue proposing unworkable or ineffective measures in the hopes of getting the U.S. partially committed to the war, and then hope that there will be future escalation to follow.

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