Politics The Syrian uprising: Will the Assad regime resort to chemical warfare?

A couple of thoughts on the subject:

NATO is not deploying Patriot missiles so much for protection against chemical weapons as much as they're putting other member states in there as a warning against crossing the border. It's a lot easier to shrug off Turks being killed in Turkey in cross-border conflicts than it is NATO member states' militaries coming under fire. Counter-battery fire from Turkish armed forces is one thing, provoking NATO to get involved is another. It also gives the US a legitimate reason to deploy missile defense in Eastern Europe in such a way that they can brush off Russian complaints.

NATO and the UN definitely need to come up with plans, but this isn't clear-cut like Libya was. The Syrian opposition is a collection of a lot of groups and like many countries in the region, there are religious and ethnic divides. Syria's Baath party is a ruling minority and has historically allied itself with Alawites. The Free Syrian Army has stated that there will be no reprisals and that their goal is solely the removal of Assad from power, but there's a very real possibility that other groups of exiles and dissidents will follow his removal with ethnic cleansing of Shia and Alawite groups. It's not just a matter of "Assad bad, opposition good."

 

Even the Russians and Chinese will be hard-pressed to ignore the deployment of chemical weapons, which could move the UN beyond sanctions if it were to happen; possibly leading to a no-fly zone over the whole country (or at least Assad-controlled areas), or even direct support of a rebel coalition (unlikely). Chemical weapons would probably have more impact at the UN, both at the Security Council (where the loss of Russian and Chinese support would be lethal), and in the General Assembly (generally muslim-controlled on Arab issues), than it would with NATO. NATO is already pretty much against Assad.

With only Iran remaining as a major supporter, Assad would be hard pressed to hang on a lot longer. Chemical WMDs would almost certainly be a suicide call on his part, but we're not really dealing with a rational person there.

 

What incentive does Assad have NOT to use chemical weapons if he thinks they could be a game-changer? Suppose he doesn't use them. If he lives and is deposed, he'll be tried for war crimes. Or he'll be deposed and assasinated. Or he'll be killed in the fighting. The only scenario I can see right now in which he lives and keeps power is by winning the current fighting, and I don't see that as a likely outcome -- unless he has a game changer. It's not like he has moral scruples.

And btw, I regard it as quite possible that he'll fire some bio or chem shells into Israel, just to make the point that he's still a resistance fighter and should be kept around for that reason. Or just to try to change the subject. And I'm not sure there is anyone for Israel to retaliate against in that instance, certainly not if they don't want to get involved in someone else's civil war, which I'm sure they don't.

This is a very unforgiving and tough part of the world. They play by different rules. And the Assad family is more ruthless than most.

 

what's clear in a situation that hasn't offered a whole lot of it is:

russia was the primary obstacle to any international intervention. apparently, things have reached such a pass by going quite otherwise than the russians had anticipated.

there are persistent reports that the cia sees asad lasting 8-10 more weeks. the rebels, whatever that means, are apparently closing in on the damascus airport and there is an expectation of a very unpleasant battle in the city to come. word is also that asad's main military contingent in damascus is around 20,000 strong. so this could get very ugly.

if this is accurate, then it would seem to me that the time during which chemical weapons would serve any tactical function is likely passed. launching them in the same city you are in---not an awesome idea.

turkey has every reason to be concerned, though. israel to some extent as well, though i think that turkey is far more implicated in the fighting in the north and in ways that would make of some desperation action in that direction a more logical move, to the extent that anything involving desperation actions are logical. but what would asad gain by using them? i can't imagine a single advantage. so what i'm wondering is if turkey ran up this flag out of recognition that things are moving toward an endgame in co-ordination with other allies in order to create grounds for international action---or it's appearance---as a way to hedge round that endgame with some sense of agency. the us has already been actively making moves in the attempt to shape which of the various rebel factions might next come to power. those interests are being expressed under the now usual idiocy of the category "terrorist" and the bogeyman "al quaeda" and surfaced in a move to declare one of the rebel groups a "terrorist organization."

which is all quite odd if you consider that everyone has to now been more than willing to allow syria to bleed itself white. insofar as the united states is concerned, this would fit with its lunatic policy toward israel---being unwilling to act on grounds that in other places seem urgent blah blah blah, the us has been entirely content to make the vague clucking sounds of disapproval while standing by as syria expends its military capabilities on itself....

 

Then you're saying chem/bio weapons won't be a game changer so he has no reason to use them. Maybe. "Reason" is the operative word, though. Desperate people move to rationales that you and I don't. Remember Saddam Hussein releasing huge quantities of oil into the Persian Gulf?

I have not been able to figure out Turkey in quite a while. I do admire Erdogan's strategic abilities and long-term planning. I may not like much of it substantively but I do admire it.

It appears there will be continual disputation and instability in a huge portion of the Arabic-speaking world for at least another decade. I see no neat short-term resolution in Egypt, or Tunisia, or Syria, or Yemen. Jordan may be in play as well. Certainly there won't be any resolution in West Bank/Gaza. And now the fever has spread into Mali.

 

what i'm saying---and i'm far from certain about this---is that, given the fighting is now at the edge of damascus, the geographical situation would tend to preclude them. hussein wasn't using chemical weapons in baghdad---it was in kurdish country. my sense is that the situation for assad has taken a rapid turn for the worst over the past few weeks...it's obvious that weapons in considerable amounts have been getting channeled into the rebels.

i think syria is in a direct line from the "arab spring" in the sense of people acting to rid themselves of despotic regimes.

egypt is pretty complex and is, at the moment, quite uncertain. morsi fucked up. he may well pay for it. last i saw an hour or so ago, there were rumors spreading that the mb was about to attack protestors around the presidential palace.

as for israel...don't get me started. netanyahu is SUCH an idiot that he's even placed the dysfunctional relationship between the israeli right and the united states into jeopardy. heaven help us all if that asshole gets re-elected in january.

mali is not connected to this directly. there it appears that a regional conflict has taken the unfortunate turn of being exploited by a fundamentalist militia. no-one is happy about that.

 

Each country is of course unique, but the pot appears to be boiling in many of them at the same time. Whether it boils over the side will vary by specific circumstances in each country. But Egypt has a problem: it has no way to feed itself or pay for imports of food for the long term. How will it fix that problem? I don't see a way to do it other than through breaking up the cronyist control of the economy, which just isn't going to happen any time soon because the cronies happen to also control the guns, tanks, planes and artillery. Tough nut to crack.

Mali is getting spillover fallout from the collapse of the old Kaddafi regime in Libya. If I was Niger or Mauritania or even Morocco I'd be plenty nervous. And I really would hate to see some of those religious fanatics start destroying things in places like Timbuktu (or however it's spelled).

But my thesis still remains -- there wont' be any resolution of these situations for a very long time. Lebanon has been roiling now for almost 40 years on and off. Do you think Syria or Iraq is immune from that sort of long-term dysfunction? yes, I know Lebanon had outside interference, but so do Syria (Russia, Turkey, etc) and Iraq (Iran, Russia, etc).

Personally, I wish there was a way the US could take the same stance toward that part of teh world that, say, Japan does -- low profile, buy and sell what you need, don't stick your neck out and call attention to yourself. But it's hard to do that when you're the 800 lb gorilla in the room.

As for Israel, I suspect Netanyahu will in fact be re-elected, and with a larger plurality than he has now. He's a very good domestic politician, and there isn't anyone else that the Israeli electorate takes seriously as a potential leader. Even a pygmy is taller than most dwarves.

 

egypt just signed a large loan agreement with the imf. the next day, the gaza cease fire happened. the day after that, morsi basically declared himself above the law, which triggered what is starting to look like a revolt against not only morsi, but the mb---and behind that, the power of scaf, behind which stands the united states and its lunatic policy toward israel.

libya has a long history of fucking around with chad. there's been less mucking about with mali. it's not obvious that there's a linkage between the coup in mali and libya, actually. it's also not obvious there's a disconnect. the northern sahara border areas are murky. mauritania has had some political trouble this year, but i don't remember much about it at the moment---only that it happened. a coup, i think. not sure.

what's unraveling is the entire balance of force in north africa that was cobbled together and maintained across the post-independence period--one in which repression of the population and extension of us (and european) interests were more often than not symmetrical. the us in particular is finding itself increasingly caught in a shit-storm of its own making, a consequence of the way it has chosen to operate in the region over the longer term. same goes for this "islamism" business. it's not an accident. the patterns where by it came about are really similar place to place---direct functions of the type of repression that us-backed regimes practiced. so it's too late for that low-keyed approach. you can see the first line of us response with egypt---backing scaf in order to protect camp david. that could well be blowing up in its face. we'll see.

netanyahu...better maybe to talk about the many delights he is responsible for in the gaza thread? dunno.

back to doing stuff

 

oversimplified. The dysfunction and stagnation in that part of the world has been going on for at least 300 years, maybe more. It was redirected and arguably intensified by exposure to European currents of thought starting no later than after the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire (and arguably as early as Napoleon's invasion of Egypt), but this is not something the US created by any means. In fact, if you read what the Barbary Pirates told (I think) John Adams about why it was perfectly fine for them to maraud along the North African coast and take Europeans as slaves, it sounds almost exactly like the sort of thing al-Zawahiri would be saying today, except that Zawahiri is smart enough not to talk explicitly about slaves anymore. But you really do need to take a long view -- the malignancies in that part of the world are very, very old. We may not have improved things much recently, though even there, I'd ask what the likely alternatives were. It's doubtful we made things much worse than they would have been otherwise. To wit -- where we're not interfering these days, things seem to be going to hell quite well without our assistance.

 

if you are inclined to make a kind of mystery out of the us role in the region since 1960 or so...and in particular since the 80s---by pushing it into a long durée, be my guest. but it doesn't help to understand what's going on now from a geo-political viewpoint.

i'll maybe get back to this later on---am trying to duck out of work.

 

not a mystery. But I'm trying to avoid some common fallacies. One is the focus on recency. Another is the ethnocentric focus: that all things exist as they relate to one's own self, family, group or country. (Come to think of it, recency is merely the time-based aspect of this same fallacy). It's like trying to explain a vegetable soup as a function of the parsnip -- yes, the parsnip counts, but it's not the main explanation for the soup.

 

I'm kind of surprised that the chemical bomb sites haven't been bombed yet.

 

ASU, no one wants plumes of chemicals being spewed into the air. That the chemical weapons sites haven't been bombed yet is the one thing I'm NOT surprised about.

 

They haven't mixed the chemicals together to make the bad stuff yet.

 

Binary or not, something tells me leveling chemical weapon facilities isn't in the best interest of anybody on either side.

 

Syria loads chemical weapons into bombs; military awaits Assad's order - World News

 

meanwhile, the shit could be hitting the fan in egypt:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/06/egypt-violence-worsens-five-die

 

this will not end well.

 

after yesterday's violence, several relatively high-profile members of morsi's government resigned today.

morsi himself blew town in a convoy yesterday. he provided a pre-recorded speech. the upshot: he will not rescind the i-am-above-the-law declaration, he will not act against the mb farce of a constitution. but he is willing to chat with the opposition.

from the opposition viewpoint, the extent to which morsi is not a whole lot different from mubarak is now clear. so there's alot of people out in tahrir now. very tense.

morsi fucked up. the sequence of events of thanksgiving week speaks for itself. morsi fucked up and has no way to back down without losing what little legitimacy he has left. meanwhile, the mb has mobilized in the streets against the opposition. personally, i see this as in the immediate run quite problematic, but maybe a necessary and positive step toward actually getting out from under the legacy of mubarak.

what if---what if this actually is about people wanting to be free? you know, not in the united states national-security state top-down corporate media consumer pseudo-democratic kinda way, but actually?

i imagine scaf--and behind them the united states---are not happy.

fuck them.