There aren’t 100,000 US troops in Syria.
And thank goodness for that.
James Clapper’s statement:
Affirmed his appreciation until the next tweet where he disparages them again. Whatever.
James Clapper can go drown himself in a bowl of dicks as far as I’m concerned.
The irony is that sociopaths adopt this strategy instinctively. What is gas lighting but an attempt to break you of your reason so as to make your beholden to theirs? If Trump wasn’t a complete dummy he might be a match for Putin but he is a dummy so he is no match.
Where the hell do you come up with 100k troops.
Bombing the HQ of the unit responsible for the chemical attack, we knew who they were and had fairly good idea of where the HQ was located could have been done risk free with Tomhawk missiles. Even bombing all of Syria military runways and destroying as many planes as we could get on the ground is a week or two operation (including the initial phase of taking out the Syrian air defense system.)
We maintained a no fly zone over Northern Iraq for a dozen years at cost of slightly over a billion a year. We could have easily done the same thing in Syria and even used the same Turkish bases we used for operation Northern Watch.
Remember Russia didn’t have a significant military presence in Syria until last year. At the time the redline was crossed Russia and handful of advisor in Syria and most of Russian were at the naval base in Tartus.
Trump appears to be an instinctive talent at baffling people with bullshit, whereas Putin is a trained professional.
I imagined it, as requested, and found it really easy to imagine a Syria situation that was far worse. If we had gone into Syria with an intent to overthrow the government, it’s really, really easy to see 100k troops as part of the AUMF.
That there is no authorization covering it, and no Congressional approval was forthcoming. It’s pretty absurd to argue that Obama should have started a war Congress didn’t want simply because he’s allowed to do so for 60 days or whatever. Sure, he could have aimed a targeted reprisal directly at Assad, but a) maybe he did something that was never publicly acknowledged, b) we did do a lot to help rebels taken down Assad’s regime, and c) no other countries had our back on this either, so it’s not like you can point to international law as the thing Obama failed.
Look, it’s fine to think the US should have attacked Assad after the chemical weapons, or that destroying him then would have lead to a better situation there today, but it’s just not correct to lay the blame for that entirely at Obama’s feet, and I especially don’t buy the idea that all the other countries in the world read that situation as carte blanche to use chemical weapons or to push Obama without US reprisal. As evidence, I submit the utter lack of anyone besides Russia pushing Obama.
Ok so why would 100,000 troops in Syria be worse? Worse than more than 500,000 dead, worse than 10 million Syrian refugees causing crisis in all of Middle east. Worse than the spread of ISIL throughout the region and many millions of Iraqi and Syria living under their unimaginably brutal regime?
Don’t forget the refugee crisis is a direct cause of the rise of Nationalist parties rising in all of Europe. It was also a big factor in the rise of the Trump’s nationalist party.
Syria is exhibit A in Obama’s failed foreign policy and even though Hillary urged a different course she got blamed for it also. We can never know for sure, but I say that it is as big a reason that Trump is president. Yes, another Middle East war would have been bad, but not anywhere as bad as what we have today.
I am not persuaded. I am pretty sure Russia would have tampered with the US election no matter what had happened in Syria. Military deterrent has never really deterred espionage activities of this kind.
Right, but congress doesn’t get a free pass for saying “No, don’t do this.”
The plan was for the UK and the US governments to announce some kind of retaliation, but both legislatures said no, and neither government was willing to put more blood and treasure into that tarpit without the support of the legislature. Ultiamtely that was a political judgement, not a legal one, but part of democracy is constraining the actions of the executive by forcing them to take the political consequences of their actions into account.
Which Trump won’t do.
Well shit.
You are misinformed in terms of how military power works. The President does not need any authorization to do such things.
It’s pretty absurd to argue that Obama should have started a war Congress didn’t want simply because he’s allowed to do so for 60 days or whatever.
It’s actually totally legitimate to argue exactly that. The reason why the president has such authority, is so that he’s able to execute such things.
If he was not willing to exercise such authority, that’s fine. But then he shouldn’t have drawn a line. Because the effect of what he actually did was to errode faith in US military power. That was all it accomplished.
I don’t really want to get into a tit for tat, but that’s a repetition of what I said, not a rebuttal.
In re Syria, there are (at least) two parts to the US response or non-response. One is should we have done X, the other is should we have said we were going to do X but then not do it. The second part is pretty easy; no, drawing lines you can’t enforce is not good policy. I’d argue that one should never, ever make threats, only promises, and then very seldom. Walk softly, big stick, etc.
The first part is intractable, and there are not clear answers.
But it’s also clear IMO that the incoming chief executive has no clue how to either walk softly or wield an effective big stick. I think in Trump’s world military action is a Michael Bay movie and a Tom Clancy thriller rolled into one…with him as Jack Ryan.
How can you guys argue for about a 100 posts over Hitler. It’s embarrassing. That must have taken hours.
It’s like an Aspergers Battle Royal.
If you disagree, you’re a fascist, and probably have a Hitler 'stache.
You may also like to be urinated on, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I fully endorse X, and will fight to the last to protect our right to X.
[The source] delivered a set to former colleagues in the FBI, whose counter-intelligence division would be the appropriate body to investigate. It is believed he also passed a copy to his own country’s intelligence service [i.e. the Brits], but it felt constrained in what action it could take and left it up to the Americans to do their own investigation and draw their own conclusions.
As summer turned to autumn, the investigator was asked for more information by the FBI but heard nothing back about any investigation. The bureau seemed obsessed instead with classified material that flowed through a private email server set up by Clinton’s aides. The FBI’s director, James Comey, threw the election into a spin 11 days before the vote by announcing his investigators were examining newly discovered material…
In mid-November, the documents took another route into Washington that ultimately led to them being mentioned in the joint intelligence report on Russian interference that was delivered to President Obama and President-elect Trump. On 18 November, the annual Halifax International Security Forum opened in the Canadian city, bringing together serving and former security and foreign policy officials from around the world.
Senator John McCain, a hawkish Republican, was there and was introduced to a former senior western diplomat who had seen the documents, knew their source and thought him highly reliable. McCain decided the implications were sufficiently alarming to dispatch a trusted emissary, a former US official, to meet the source and find out more…
On 9 December, McCain arranged a one-on-one meeting with Comey, with no aides present, and handed them over.
“Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the Director of the FBI. That has been the extent of my contact with the FBI or any other government agency regarding this issue,” the senator said in a statement on Wednesday morning.
It is not clear what underpinned the FBI’s decision to include a summary of the documents in its highly classified briefing to the president and president-elect and their top staff, before the bureau had completed its investigation. It may have been as a defensive measure, to prove for posterity that it was not involved in a cover-up, or because its investigators believed them to be credible.
I’m sure you’ll be happy about that when Trump uses this justification to nuke someone he doesn’t like.
Let’s be clear about the “line” - he was badgered over and over by reporters and by some members of Congress about why we weren’t intervening in Syria, and he continued to be cagey about interfering the internal struggle of a foreign country. Then he was basically asked a hypothetical about “what would it take for you to agree that the US should get involved?” His response was essentially that violating international law would be a good reason to get involved. That response was then blown up into “Obama says that he personally slay Assad if he uses chemical weapons!” What should he have said there? “No, there is nothing Assad could do that would be worth us intervening”? How about, “Well, there are things, terrible things they could do. I’m not going to talk about those things, but they could do things, believe me, and we would - listen, I don’t know Assad, people tell me he’s a bad guy, I don’t know him.” Chemical weapons seemed like a pretty safe bet as something that would warrant intervention. The international community should have enforced international law in response to the chemical attacks, but instead they allowed themselves to be persuaded by politics and Russia propaganda that the attack either didn’t happen or didn’t matter.
The embarrassment here is that Congress was not willing to enforce the Geneva convention, nor were they willing to support the President in his actions. They essentially demanded that he take unilateral action so that they could then blame him for all the consequences, and you are now blaming him for all the consequences and thus reinforcing their strategy as valid. Sending troops into Syria was not a popular thing, the US in general would not have supported it, and the fact that things continued to get worse and that other problems arose because of it doesn’t mean that a full-scale invasion was the right call at the time. If he had done it we would be talking about how horrible he was for getting us into another Middle East quagmire after campaigning on getting us out of the ones Bush got us in.
You still haven’t cited anything other than how it “eroded faith” or whatever. What actual consequences resulted from this supposed massive fuckup? The only one I’ve heard so far is the current situation in Syria, which has nothing to do with our lack of response to the chemical attack, and everything to do with our general confusion about how to establish order in a country with a brutal dictator fighting the most extreme of radical Islamic forces. It’s easy to say, “topple Assad, install democracy”, but that’s what we did in Iraq, which cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, and the Syria situation is an outgrowth of that too. Why should we be the only ones doing these things (and being hated by others for doing them)?