Anne-Marie Slaughter, doyen of the neoliberal “bomb for humanitarian reasons” set, has a plan for intervention in Syria that doesn’t require U.S. involvement. It’s not just a bad plan – it’s positively idiotic.
The Friends of Syria, some 70 countries scheduled to meet in Tunis today, should establish ”œno-kill zones” now to protect all Syrians regardless of creed, ethnicity or political allegiance. The Free Syrian Army, a growing force of defectors from the government’s army, would set up these no-kill zones near the Turkish, Lebanese and Jordanian borders. Each zone should be established as close to the border as possible to allow the creation of short humanitarian corridors for the Red Cross and other groups to bring food, water and medicine in and take wounded patients out. The zones would be managed by already active civilian committees.
Establishing these zones would require nations like Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan to arm the opposition soldiers with anti-tank, countersniper and portable antiaircraft weapons. Special forces from countries like Qatar, Turkey and possibly Britain and France could offer tactical and strategic advice to the Free Syrian Army forces. Sending them in is logistically and politically feasible; some may be there already.
Yeah, let’s send portable anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles by the bushel load to a fracture-ridden bunch of militant fighters we know next to nothing about, except that Al Qaeda’s already infiltrated their ranks and called on fighters from other nations to go join them. What could possibly go wrong with that plan? And of course we can totally trust AQ to police any truces with the Syrian Army…
Crucially, these special forces would control the flow of intelligence regarding the government’s troop movements and lines of communication to allow opposition troops to cordon off population centers and rid them of snipers. Once Syrian government forces were killed, captured or allowed to defect without reprisal, attention would turn to defending and expanding the no-kill zones.
All while these SpecOps soldiers are wearing their underpants outside their tights! I thought Afghanistan would have gotten rid of any belief that SpecOps were superhuman, but apparently not.
This next step would require intelligence focused on tank and aircraft movements, the placement of artillery batteries and communications lines among Syrian government forces. The goal would be to weaken and isolate government units charged with attacking particular towns; this would allow opposition forces to negotiate directly with army officers on truces within each zone, which could then expand into a regional, and ultimately national, truce.
Ummm, all right. Has General Slaughter looked at the the Syrian order of Battle?
4,950 Main battle tanks (including 1,150 in storage)
1,125 Amphibious Armoured Scout Cars
2,950 Infantry fighting vehicles
1,860 Armoured personnel carriers
4,815+ Towed Artillery Pieces: 1,010+ Mortars
2,130+ Gun/Howitzers (400 in storage)
1,675+ Anti-aircraft guns (300+ in storage)1,136 Self Propelled Artillery Pieces: 485 Self-propelled howitzers
650 Self-propelled anti-aircraft guns (240 in storage)6,890+ Anti Tank Guided Weapon Launchers (4,290 in storage)
500+ Multiple Launch Rocket Systems
102+ Surface to Surface/Ship Missile Launchers: 86+ Tactical ballistic missile launchers
16+ Anti-ship missile launchers4,235+ Surface to Air Missile Launchers: 4,000+ MANPADS
235 Self-propelled air-defence systems
Plus around 340 MiG and Sukhoi combat aircraft, around 85 Russian and French built attack copters, 2 missile figates, 10 fast missile boats, a whole bunch of Naval attack helicopters, air defense missiles galore and batteries of coastal defense missiles. Phew!
This lot is apparently going to be defeated by defectors with light anti-tank missiles and MANPADS, along with these magically awesome special forces and a few Turkish armed drones? I don’t see anywhere in Slaughter’s plan a mention of massive foreign airpower, tactically applied, so I guess so.
Umm, and a unicorn!
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d70_1329951479
It does seem to be an Al Qaeda production.
Is this the Iraq version of al-Qaeda that “was hunted nearly to extinction” by our Shi’ite allies in Iraq, according to the article? Is it the original al-Qaeda from Afghanistan/Pakistan, that we now understand was destroyed by Osama bin Laden’s death? Or is this the Egyptian al-Qaeda that has taken on the global leadership of the group?
The good news is that the CIA has not rushed eagerly to work with our new allies in al-Qaeda, now that they are willing to be the enemies or our enemies. Maybe it is too soon to let auld misacquaintances (9/11) be forgotten.
It might also be good news that no leader has arisen within the Syrian opposition. The US isn’t very good at assessing foreign leaders of insurrectionist movements. Look at how deft we were at promoting Ahmad Chalabi as Iraq’s future president.
The only thing for sure the outside world knows about Syria is that the Syrian people are not backing down this time in the face of a national campaign of murder by the Assad regime unafraid to slaughter its own people merely for showing up in the street at a funeral. We have perhaps a second fact: the government’s hold over its own military is shaky. The army consists of troops raised through conscription, and at the lower levels these men are not keen to fire upon their own families and friends. Hence the need for the government to resort to Iranian forces and help from Lebanese allies. All this has done has fomented hatred among the Syrian population for Iranians, Hezbollah, and Russia as the proxy supporter and protector of these agents.
The temptation to “do something” in the face of such national genocide is obviously very strong, and not just among neoliberals. A good many Arab states would like to see the Assad family go. The template most people seem to have in mind is the campaign against Milosevic and his Serbian regime, involving air power to destroy the regime’s tactical advantage in armaments. This campaign did eventually work, but you had all of Europe behind the effort (not militarily, but in terms of policing the Balkans afterward). More importantly, Russia was unable to stand in the way.
At the moment you have Merkozy focused almost entirely on saving the euro, and spending trillions of euros trying to avoid bank failures. Europe is distracted and much poorer than 15 years ago, so can we really expect much help here? Russia on the other hand is no longer weak and is quite willing to make trouble for the US or anybody who wants to intervene in Syria.
That leaves the Syrians to fight the regime on their own, and there is a way to do this – a protracted guerilla war of attrition that may last years and that uses Iraqi tactics of IEDs to destroy the regime’s military advantage piece by piece. There is an interesting dimension to this that doesn’t get talked about much, and that is that the opposition is a Sunni effort, representing the great bulk of the Syrian population’s religious orientation. It is opposed to the Alawites, who are aligned with the Shi’ites in Iran and Lebanon. There are also about 1,000,000 Iraqi refugees in Syria, all of them Sunnis driven out by the Shi’ite regime in Iraq, and some of them must have experience at running a campaign of insurrection. Syria has become a population that is majority Sunni by far, supressed by a Shi’ite oriented government – the reverse of Iraq. If the opposition succeeds, Syria could become a Sunni enclave in the area that stands opposed to the Shi’ite crescent which extends from Lebanon into Iraq and down into Iran. Moreover, the Alawites, who are less than 10% of the population, know now that they are fighting for their survival, because if Assad loses power the Alawites could well be wiped out in a bloodbath. The majority Sunnis know this too; if they lose, they will be subject to decades more of torture and repression by the Alawite government. This has become a fight to the death.
Nor do all Shi’ites recognize the Alawites as completely equal Muslims. The Alawite sect is a strange version of Shi’ite Islam (celebrating Christmas, for example) and it is also secretive. There may come a point where the Shi’ite government in Iran gets tired of supporting them if this civil war drags on. The Alawites, after all, run a secular regime (which is what Ba’athism was all about in the first place), and the Iranians are theocrats. At least on religious grounds, they may not want to invest national treasure in supporting a regime that was allied to Saddam Hussein.
One other element of fluidity in this situation is the role of Turkey. Turkey has at least contemplated “doing something” about the Assad regime and its atrocities, but it would prefer no doubt for this to be a NATO effort. Here we come right back to Russia, which certainly does not want to see another NATO campaign so close to home.
Don’t forget the possibility of the West doing something behind the scenes, if that is not happening already. There are three areas the West could use to infiltrate Syria: from the Turkish border to the north, from the Kurdistan border to the east, and from the southern Iraqi border to the south, which is extensive and poorly patroled by the Iraqi government. All the lack of inaction on the public front might be masking some developing efforts to provide armaments, training, and logistical help to the Syrian opposition. While this runs the risk of creating another monster like al-Qaeda, that risk is probably small. Syrians are not Afghanis. Most Syrians in the cities live a modern life not dissimilar from many Turks or eastern Europeans. Most have satellite dish access to European television. Most see Syria as preferably aligned to Europe. Whatever Sunni government arises will probably be light on religion and more interested in economic development on the European model.
…of al-Qa`eda in Iraq with some leavening of transnationals from other areas looking to evaluate the potential of using the area for basing, should they be able to tip it over into chaos. These folks are not our “allies” nor are they really allies of the Syrian resistance, though they will be trying to demonstrate their usefulness to various of the factions that are most receptive to their ideology. This will be a somewhat tough sell, given that memories are fresh as to the reasons for the awakening movement. They’re surfers off chaos and their presence seems likely to me to lead to a fish or cut bait moment. This plan may actually reflect that as the aim appears to be to withdraw to safe havens and negotiate for conflict termination – the deal for Assad from western (not Arab) powers may well be “make the nasty imagery go away and you get to keep your state”.
“In combat one should be very suspicious of painless moral choices. When you are confronted with a seemingly painless moral choice, the odds are that you haven’t looked deeply enough.” ~ Karl Marlantes
First, having Turkey invade any part of the Arabian Peninsular is explosive, the Ottoman Empire is remembered, and not fondly.
Second, that’s the Syrian desert you are discussing, and contains some very valuable features, the T and K pipelines…(at least that’s how I refer to them, I lived in T2 for a while). One pipeline (T) runs from the Kirkuk oil fields to Tripoli (The Tripoli in Northern Lebanon) on the Eastern Mediterranean — and the Kurds not want to damage these pipelines.
The Syrian desert is an inhospitable desert (as if there were an hospitable desert, SoCal aside). Damaging those pipelines would be bad news…for Europe as well as the Kurds.
I certainly wasn’t suggesting that Turkey invade Syria. I was going to mention the traditional Syrian distrust of the Turks from the Ottoman days, but things were getting too long. Your points are all valid; I was only talking about getting materiel and possible special forces through, and even then I am not exactly recommending this. I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t already happening, however.
I mentioned earlier this is a fight to the death between the Sunni majority and the regime, which is an Alawite minority and which has dragged the Alawites along to share his destiny.
…has the horsepower required, if the regime takes the gloves completely off and western powers stay out. They’re deep into the pressure to “do something” right now – if they come down on the non-intervention side of the fence as a conscious decision, I don’t think the Arab powers have the resources or the stones for what it would take.
Me, personally, on balance of probabilities I think the western powers don’t have the ruthlessness and clarity to completely walk away – they’ll probably stumble about splitting the difference, which will allow other powers to free ride and make things more expensive than they need to be, but some day I have to be too cynical and I keep hoping that this is the day.
“In combat one should be very suspicious of painless moral choices. When you are confronted with a seemingly painless moral choice, the odds are that you haven’t looked deeply enough.” ~ Karl Marlantes
[...] units into Syria. I dealt with these dumb ideas when Anne-Marie “General” Slaughter first came up with them – as did Spencer Ackerman and Robert Caruso. They’re magical unicorn rainbow pony [...]