To launch or not to launch...that is the question

So...here's the dilemma. Syria has employed chemical weapons in their civil war. The use of chemical weapons was outlawed after WWI. It's a war crime. We went to war in Iraq over the idea that Saddam Hussein had WMD and had gassed his own people. ( with materials and helicopters that we supplied him...but that's another story)

I have very conflicted views on this. On one hand, if we strike Syria with Cruise Missiles, there will very likely be some form of retaliation. Syria is backed by Russia and Iran and we could likely see Hezbollah armed and the civil war could spill over into Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and of course attacks on Israel, and we find ourselves drawn into a conflict that we don't want to be involved in. An attack on Syria won't go unanswered. We should expect that it will.

On the other hand, if we and the international community does nothing, then the ban on chemical weapons is meaningless. There is no such thing as a war crime. And if there is no response then there is no reason at all for Syria or any other country to use these weapons with impunity knowing that nobody is going to do anything to stop it. That would be a green light for chemical weapons to be employed against any other country including Israel, and even the US and it's allies. And if chemical weapons are ok to use, than why not Nukes? If there is no line drawn, not just by the US, but by the world, then anything goes, and we should not be surprised or alarmed at the use of Sarin or any other form of gas to gain an advantage in a dispute. And when it's done...and it will surely be done again if there is no action, what then? In the case of Iran, why would they hesitate in pursuing nuclear weapons that they would certainly aim at Israel. It seems that we went to war in Iraq on the suspicion of WMD. In this case we know that they were used, and will be used again if it isn't stopped. Did the War in Iraq poison the well to the extent that when a real situation presents itself, we back off because we're all sick of war? Is that a good reason to allow poison gas to be used on the battlefield?

There doesn't seem to be any good solution to this. I'd like to see where people stand on this, and hopefully without the irrational nonsense that would claim that Obama or Bush or Clinton engineered the whole thing. That kind of crap is just intended to derail the thread into the absurd. So try to keep it real, so we don't devolve into the irrational world of conspiracy theories. Deal with what we know, not what we want to attempt to prove for some partisan position.

There is a solid rational response from conservatives and liberals both to be made here. Democrats and Republicans are split on bi-partisan grounds on this issue. That's something that we never see these days. Dems and Pubs coming together on any issue is significant.

Try not to be hostile toward another persons view, because there is no right or wrong that I can see and a conservatives view will be just as solid as a liberals and vice versa. There is only bad and worse. As a Liberal, I find myself leaning toward a strike. I don't know what the response would be. But I do know what a non-response will mean, and I don't think that's acceptable.

So...make your case. To launch or not to launch.

 

I'll support whatever the elected representatives of my people decide to do based upon the wishes of the people, as always.

If the polls say to bomb is popular and the reps vote accordingly, then all is well. So far, bombing is only 28% favorable, but gaining rapidly. When it hits 51%, Assad better buy a Wiley Coyote umbrella.

 

A limited strike upon Syria would cause more problems than it would solve.

We have to make sure to capture all Syrian Chemical Weapons as if we don't they could soon find themselves in the hands of terrorists.

If we do this we have to use Overwhelming Military Force and also airdrop a few divisions in to seize Chemical Weapons sites.

AboveAlpha

 

I had a real horrible thought today. What if both side have used chemical weapons

 

Assad very cleverly had his operatives sell small amounts of non-weaponized Chemical Weapons to the Sunni Extremists and then after Assad used Chemical Weapons on Rebel Controlled areas he sent his Police and Military to various Sunni Extremist Hideouts which he already knew were there with the Cameras rolling.

AboveAlpha

 

So some claim. I see the propaganda machine and echo chamber are fast turning rumour into reality, as per usual.

 

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You have made an assumption here. There has been NO evidence that this was an
action of the Syrian Government put forth yet. Only assertions (or accusations) and
"hearsay" evidence.


If logic is injected into this calculus, then the whole idea of the SAA making a
chemical attack is ludicrous in the extreme. Just like the Russians said.

Do you want to play chess ?

 

Rammy....think about this.

If Putin and Russia did not want the United States to perform a possible Military Strike against the Assad Regime...RUSSIA WOULD NEVER HAVE REMOVED ALL IT'S PERSONAL ON THAT SHIP THAT DELIVERED THE RUSSIAN MADE AA MISSILES!!!

Putin made a DEAL.

The United States would NEVER have performed a Military Strike if Russia had Russian Military Personal deployed through out Syria....which Russia did right up to the moment Russia dropped off those AA Missiles and then was paid and 5 minutes later every remaining Russian Personal jumped on that same ship and left Syria.

AboveAlpha

 

There is Murphy's Law which of itself is enough reason not to do any kind of strike. Where exactly are these other WMD and where (and how) are they stored. What happens when the missile is targeted against what is thought to be a conventional military hardware target (tank, helicopter etc), and instead, hits a secret depot filled with nerve agent warheads? NOW, you have created an even LARGER explosion of gas which will kill MANY MORE innocent civilians.

STUPID, STUPID, STUPID, and just to make sure it gets through the dense skull of the President:

ITS STUPID YOU BIG DUMMY

I

 

Kerry said there wouldnt be boots on the ground in respect to the civil war. The language and words these guys use are important. A limited strike with no troops at risk is far more palatable to be approved, but how long is it intended to stay that way? Id suggest not long, as Buchanan says this is the back door into Iran. Since they know it'll escalate it wouldnt look good if Obama just rushed in there hence going to congress. Watch it unfold just as the Zionist masters have wanted.

 

I agree.

That is one of the main reasons I wanted the CIA to handle this.

AboveAlpha

 

This really doesn't have a lot to do with Israel but Israel is a consideration.

A limited Strike is STUPIDITY!!!!

Personally as I have posted on a new topic I created advocating making a statement....I think it is time to use the Non-Nuclear EMP's we have in our Inventory.

We have to generate so much fear of the U.S. Military as to ingrain this into peoples Psyche's which will influence whether or not anyone would attempt to strike back.

Now if we perform some Half Assed Limited Strike....Assad and Iran will just shrug it off.

So or real options are either....perform a MASSIVE Missile and Aircraft Strike and as well drop in the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions and seize Assad's Chemical Weapons.....OR....

Employ EMP's Strikes and put a serious Psychological Fear of the Unknown into them as such a strike would scare the Hell out of anyone.

Whether you were a Syrian Soldier or an Iranian Qud's Force Member working in Syria or even a Sunni Islamic Extremist fighting with the Rebels.....and one minute you are driving in a truck with weapons and taking on the radio and the next minute...EVERYTHING STOPS AND SHUTS DOWN.....that is an effect that would end this conflict right then and there.

AboveAlpha

 

Sure. I love chess. White pieces or black?

Have I? You don't think that's been established?

I think there's plenty of evidence. The Syrian Government has stockpiles of chemical weapons. They aren't the only country that has them, but they certainly do have them and that's what's relevant here. Gas was used. We know that. We've seen the evidence. Are you suggesting that the opposition which does not have access to the storage of these weapons somehow got hold of them and are using them? Lets use logic.

What do we know factually? The Syrian government has chemical weapons. The opposition doesn't. They don't have the facilities to manufacture them or the materials to do it. In order for them to get them, they'd have to have stolen them somehow from the storage facilities without the governments knowledge and then used them in order to make it appear that it was the government. We've been able to track the trajectory of the weapons and we can verify where they came from and where they landed. The difficulty of pulling this off and making it appear to be a government attack is pretty high. I don't think they could pull that off. It's a bit too Mission Impossible for me to accept.

On the other hand we have the Syrian government which has had no reservations on bombing the crap out of its own citizens and killing them at will. Since they are doing this, why would they hesitate in using the chemical weapons that they have, when it's become pretty obvious that the world community doesn't give a crap? They can do it without facing repercussions. Are they worried about the US? We can't even decide on what a limited strike would accomplish. We launch and it's done and Assad is still alive and kicking and doing it again.

And finally lets apply Occams Razor which says never apply unnecessary contingencies when the simplest answer is usually the right one. The scientific and philosophic rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities, and what we know is that Syria has chemical weapons.

Therefore, the simplest answer is probably the right one. The guys that have the chemical weapons are probably the guys that used them.

Is it possible that the rebels acquired them somehow surreptitiously and used them to make the other guy look bad? Yeah it's possible, but not likely. Gas was used and the simplest answer would be that the guys that have it...used it. Now unless you can offer a compelling case in which the guys that don't have them, somehow got them and then fired them from Government positions to make it look like the government did it, when in fact it was the rebels doing it to make the government look bad, which the government probably wouldn't give a damn about since Russia doesn't care, and the rest of the world doesn't care and they get away with it, why would I be inclined to believe that it wasn't the government, and moreover why would you be compelled to believe it was undertaken by the rebels who don't have access to them?

Let me say this; over the past hour I've had other thoughts on this that I can't find a good answer for. The thought that keeps hitting me is this; What is the difference to the person that dies, how it was done? Is it worse being blown up by a bomb, or shot to pieces than being gassed by Sarin? Is it worse for the victim? If you're the parent of a child that is dead, does it matter to you if your child was killed by a bomb or a drone strike, rather than a gas attack? Maybe it is, but if so..why? And if it doesn't matter, then why was it such an issue after WWI? Has the battlefield changed that much that the sophistication of the weaponry has made that policy irrelevant today? But that kind of begs the question how far is too far. If gas is ok, then why would Nukes be worse. If all that is equal then why would things like torture be off limits? What is a War Crime? What is considered humane in a war?

 

I don't think there's any evidence that the rebels have these kind of weapons.

 

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Assad regime is not the only group that has sarin gas --

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/30/us-syria-crisis-turkey-idUSBRE94T0YO20130530

Yes, the black pieces are fine with me.

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Try making your case without the ad hominem attacks posting them in huge type doesn't make the case anymore significant.

It doesn't work like that. The explosion doesn't disperse the gas. It destroys it. Gas isn't used in a conventional bomb because the explosion would destroy the gas. A gas attack isn't meant to destroy buildings, it's meant to kill people. A bomb is essentially dynamite and in a large enough bomb, it destroys the chemical agent.

 

Are you suggesting Pat Buchanan is making this claim? I don't take anything he says with more than a grain of salt. This is from Pat Buchanan:

"On Jews:

Buchanan referred to Capitol Hill as “Israeli-occupied territory.” (St. Louis Post Dispatch,
10/20/90)

In a 1977 column, Buchanan said that despite Hitler’s anti-Semitic and genocidal tendencies, he
was “an individual of great courage…. Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts
alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness
masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.”

Hitler as a man of 'great courage"? Buchanan being an apologist for Hitler? Hitler???? I'm sorry, but I'm pretty aware of Buchanan's view of Jews.

I think that anybody that thinks that Obama wants to invade Iran or start a war with them, fails to remember that he opposed the war with Iraq. He's not some NeoCon looking to build the Empire.

 

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Everything that you quoted Buchanan as saying is absolutely true.

If you had read any history, you would know this. And I'm not talking
about watching the History Channel.

.

 

I don't think that dropping in the 82nd Airborne is going to go over well with the American public. Iraq really poisoned the well with regards to our putting troops on the ground in another Arab country. But I agree with you on the effects of a limited strike. But...there is this: Bill Clinton bombed Iraq for four days in December of 1998. The reason of course was Saddam's reluctance to allow inspectors access to supposed WMD sites. Clinton didn't invade Iraq. He launched a limited strike with the idea of eliminating the WMD sites that we suspected were there. Later Bush invaded and when looking, we didn't' find anything. It's pretty likely that we hit what we were aiming at. But nobody is inclined to get into another war. Bush kind of soured us on that idea, even if the war was justified.

 

Let's use fact and wait until the results of the investigation come back later this or next week.

Once again, this information is not there - yet. Shortly it will be.

Hardly. The entire US Senate just approved action so it seems if and when the time comes there will be possible repercussions.

Good one!

That works for me but seriously, you're dealing with so many variables such as hot headed Jihadists, Iranian non conventional forces and influence, terrorist organizations, a dictator who is clinging to power yet fears foreign intervention, various olitical rebel groups who have visions of cemocracy and a whole lot of evil individuals who want some payback for real or perceived slights and know that the chaos occuring is a golden opportunity to turn one side against the other by any means possible.

Hardly a simple problem or solution even if the variables were known.

Unless of course, some of the defectors were the guys who were in charge of one of the storage facilities and, had access to the equipment and stores necessary. Assad wouldn't broadcast that this occured as that would have invited immediate foregn intervention to secure ALL sites.

Correct and logical. As far as I am concerned this means nothing until the results come back.

WMDs are an area weapon meant to kill, nothing more. Not to lay waste to an area to dissuade movement and then use yourself afterwards but to kill whomever it touches. It has no secondary purpose and, innocents are almost never protected by it's effects hence, unlike a bullet or a device that can be aimed, WMDs cannot hence, they are more terrible than a bullet or grenade.

As for your comments about one way of dying being worse than another I agree, it is, as far as I'm concerned not the moment of death that occurs that defines how terrible a weapon is as to lose a limb from a bullet or a good part of your organs from mustard gas can I'm sure be comparable in some way so I would define it as the indiscriminate area they effect.

 

Adagio...the problems with Chemical or Biological Weapons is they kill indiscriminately.

They are difficult to control and targeting and then delivering such a weapon and after it is disbursed something as simple as a wind on that day can completely change who will die and how many.

AboveAlpha

 

You are confusing the incineration process in a controlled contained metal furnace, with a high explosive conventional warhead detonation in an OPEN environment. There a very good probability that many containers would be breeched by HE fragentation, and the nerve agent within would then be released into an OPEN environment. NOT a contained environment.

There is a potential for containers that might be constructed to withstand HE conventional explosion that could be hurled in all directions in a radius extending farther out from the depot in which the warhead hit. Now there would be multiple containers many of which might be breached and the gas escapes spread over a much wider area. Worse, those containers which did NOT get damaged would now be available to be picked up by whomever might find them in the rubble.

ITS a REALLY STUPID IDEA, to think that just making a big enough conventional HE explosion will vaporize all the containers of chemical agent in a single flash bang moment, with no possibility of some of them surviving and now readily able to be picked up. Whereas before, they were in a depot, probably guarded, and location not exactly known.

 

You are correct.

Just dropping a large bomb on a Chemical Weapons site will not either destroy all containers or tanks or shells nor will it completely vaporize any Chemical Weapons cloud.

AboveAlpha

 

You are right, full-scale punishment doesn't pass USA.Privesti multiton containers with the chemical weapon to the country very simply. Dilema that the government well understands risks, people in the different cities can elementarily spit out the guts. But nobody wants to recognize small efficiency of conventional arms in future wars, it will be shock on war industry, it is much more pleasant to dream of "star" wars and to allow to make good money to military corporations, to advance further science and technique.

 

So you acknowledge that Buchanan is an apologist for Hitler. And he's your source? If you find Buchanan authoritative and Buchanan finds Hitler worthy of some kind of respect...where does this place you?

Two points. First you assume that I haven't read any history. You'd be wrong about that. And second I don't get my history from Fox Noise or any of their sources. I never consult an alleged news source that went to court to make the case that they have the legal right to lie or misinform their viewers.