There's a very basic question that needs to be asked about the following:
The attacks, which are expected to involve scores of Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from American destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, would not be focused on chemical weapons storage sites, which would risk an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe and could open up the sites to raids by militants, officials said.
The strikes would instead be aimed at military units that have carried out chemical attacks, the headquarters overseeing the effort and the rockets and artillery that have launched the attacks, according to the options being reviewed within the administration.
I see the wisdom of not attacking the chemical weapon storage sites, but how do we know that chemical weapons have not already been distributed to the military units on the target list?
From what I've read, the US and Israel have a pretty good handle on where Syria's chemical weapons are stored and they keep a close watch on those facilities. Can they really keep such a close watch that they can tell which Syrian army units have been armed with chemical weapons from those facilities and which have not? Did they detect the arming of the units that apparently fired the weapons on August 21? If not, how do we know if we are risking uncontrolled chemical releases by attacking those units?
Perhaps we do have that level of detailed intelligence but we just can't admit it. I'm skeptical.
Foreign Policy is reporting that intercepted calls are part of the evidence against the Assad regime:
Last Wednesday, in the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people. Those conversations were overheard by U.S. intelligence services, The Cable has learned. And that is the major reason why American officials now say they're certain that the attacks were the work of the Bashar al-Assad regime -- and why the U.S. military is likely to attack that regime in a matter of days.
I'd like to see the details of those calls and whatever intercepts occurred earlier, because that description above makes it sound like it was something other than a regime-approved operation. If that's the case, do punitive measures against the regime make sense anymore or is there another approach to take? It might sound funny, given how the civil war so far has been basically one giant war crime, but if we know the units and commanders that carried out the attack, should we instead demand that they be turned over to the ICC to be tried for war crimes?
In any case, I don't think it would hurt to grant the UN's request to chill out for a couple of days. As good as the US military is, I'm worried that the environment is too explosive to actually pull this off:
No, what the Obama administration appears to want is a limited, finite series of strikes that will be carefully calibrated to send a message and cause the just-right amount of pain. It wants to set Assad back but it doesn’t want to cause death and mayhem. So the most likely option is probably to destroy a bunch of government or military infrastructure — much of which will probably be empty.
Essentially a repeat of Clinton's Operation Desert Fox against Iraq in 1998.
Well, it's not 1998, we're not dealing with an isolated Iraq, and I'm skeptical that anything can be "carefully calibrated" when it comes to Syria right now.
Perhaps I would be more at ease if I could see the intelligence and the planning that Obama can, but I can't. So I'm not at ease with what's happening, not at all.
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