Robert Reich / Robert Reich.org & Simon Jenkins / The Guardian – 2013-09-02 02:33:04
http://robertreich.org/post/59902516092
The True Test of American Resolve:
Not Attacking Syria but Living Up to Our Ideals at Home
(August 31, 2013) — We are on the brink of a tragic decision to strike Syria, because, in the dubious logic of the President, “a lot of people think something should be done,” and American “credibility” is at stake. He and his secretary of state assure us that the strike will be “limited” and “surgical.”
The use of chemical weapons against Syrian citizens is abominable, and if Assad’s regime is responsible he should be treated as an international criminal and pariah.
But have we learned nothing from our mistakes in the past? Time and again over the last half century American presidents have justified so-called “surgical strikes” because the nation’s “credibility” is at stake, and because we have to take some action to show our “strength and resolve” — only to learn years later that our credibility suffered more from our brazen bellicosity, that the surgical strikes only intensified hostilities and made us captive to forces beyond our control, and that our resolve eventually disappears in the face of mounting casualties of Americans and innocent civilians — and in the absence of clearly-defined goals or even clear exit strategies.
We, and others, have paid an incalculable price.
On Labor Day weekend we should instead be testing the nation’s resolve to provide good jobs at good wages to all Americans who need them, and measuring our credibility by the yardstick of equal opportunity. And we should strike (and join striking workers) against big employers who won’t provide their employees with minimally decent wages.
We need to commit ourselves to a living wage, and to providing more economic security to the millions of Americans now working harder but getting nowhere.
Mr. President, a lot of Americans do think something should be done — about these mounting problems at our doorstep here in America.
We can have more influence on the rest of the world by showing the rest of the world our resolve to live by our ideals here in America, than by using brute force to prove our resolve elsewhere.
Robert B. Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers Aftershock and The Work of Nations. His latest, Beyond Outrage, is now out in paperback. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause. His new film, “Inequality for All,” will be out September 27.
SEE THE TRAILER: Inequality for All
Syria: It Takes More Courage To Say
There Is Nothing Outsiders Can Do
Simon Jenkins / The Guardian
The human misery in Syria is agonising to watch. But intervention-lite is a bad idea for all but the politicians’ egos
(August 29, 2013) — The urge of much of Britain’s political establishment to attack Syria is in retreat. The prime minister’s eagerness to join an American bombing run on Damascus hit a humiliating reverse in the Commons on Thursday evening. The prime minister now appears to accept there will be no British intervention in Syria.
Prior to the vote, Downing Street had been swerving and skidding to avoid the Iraq trap. It wisely published the intelligence report indicating the Assad regime used chemical weapons in a raid on a Damascus suburb, possibly in random retaliation for an attempt on his life. Such weapons are illegal under international law.
While it was wrong to rush to judgment with inquiries still in train, there is justice in a desire to enforce the law. But enforcement must be meticulous in its legality. Otherwise what is dispensed is anarchy, not law.
The government claimed it could attack Syria under the UN’s “responsibility to protect” doctrine, where people in a foreign state are abused by their own government. We know from the Iraq invasion that British politicians are adept at finding lawyers to say what they want. But facts are facts.
The UN’s resolution 1674 on responsibility to protect plainly states that such action must be “through the security council in accordance with the charter.” That process was absent.
The use of chemical weapons is awful. But to treat their apparently random use to justify an urgent, extra-legal attack on a foreign state is wilful. It had been precipitated by President Obama’s unwise warning in the summer that such use would cross a “red line”.
This is odd from a leader whose own arsenal embraces phosphorous and depleted uranium shells and delayed-action cluster bombs, not to mention nuclear weapons. Why such dreadful weapons are not taboo, and chemical ones are, is a mystery.
Obama’s intention is currently for a “limited, tailored … clear, decisive shot across the bows” of the Syrian government. The tactical basis for this is obscure. It can hardly claim to deter a chemical attack, since the red line speech tried and failed in that respect.
While Assad seems unlikely to repeat the outrage, the idea that he will roll over if bombed and stop killing his people is naive. As for “degrading” his arsenals, if this releases chemical clouds how stupid is that?
The likelihood is now of a single burst of destruction by US forces if only and bloodletting, to assuage the do-something lobby. This can hardly alter the balance in the civil war, though it seems certain to increase the refugee flow, alienate Russia and its regional allies, and infuriate a newly moderate Iran. All this is to “punish a dictator” in what seems depressingly like a gesture to allow western politicians to strut tall and feel good.
Something-must-be-done wars have a long and wretched history, notably in the Middle East. It was after Ronald Reagan saw television footage of the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982 that he ordered his marines into Beirut. He later withdrew them, leaving 265 American dead and Lebanon with a further decade of ghastly civil conflict.
In 1986, the US tried to kill Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi over a terrorist attack in Berlin, merely ensuring a further burst of Gaddafi-sponsored terrorism. In Kosovo in 1999, the Nato bombing of Belgrade did nothing to impede ethnic cleansing, indeed it probably expedited it. What tipped the Russians into forcing Serbia to back down was the threat of a western land invasion.
In 1993, President Clinton bombed Baghdad in retaliation for a claimed plot to kill former president George H Bush. This was followed five years later by the further bombing of Iraq in Operation Desert Fox, this time to deflect attention from the Monica Lewinsky affair.
Its declared purpose of eliminating weapons of mass destruction was so botched as to require more bombing and the eventual invasion in 2003. Then as now, the zest for aggression seemed driven as much by the military-industrial complex as by legality or evidence.
Overstating the military and political potency of air power — mostly as a “sending of messages” — is as old as air war itself. Tactical bombing is occasionally effective where, as in Libya and initially in Afghanistan, it is in close support of ground forces. When, as now, it is intended as a soft option to ground action, it merely destroys.
The one sound strategic reason for intervening in Syria would be to topple President Assad. Cameron was unable to tell the Commons how raining bombs on Damascus contributed to this perhaps as advice was that this might be illegal. The idea that a region afflicted by decades of sectarian conflict will be driven to peace and democracy by a few Tomahawk missiles is absurd. And who was it that Cameron wanted to see take over? Hezbollah or a new (and probably no less brutal) Sunni supremacy?
The desire to re-order foreign states — still embedded in parts of the British establishment — has long been subsumed in the constitution of the UN and international courts of justice. These may seem imperfect, but they are how the world has agreed to legitimise actions that infringe the integrity of independent independent countries. When Britain went to war in Kuwait, the Falklands and Libya, it did so with proper UN legal cover.
The Syrian civil war is awful to witness but not exceptional. The Lebanese civil war next door claimed 120,000 lives and created millions of refugees. The Iraq war, a similar sectarian conflict, claimed even more lives and continues to do so.
Sometimes it takes courage to conclude of foreign conflicts that we can only do more harm than good by meddling in them. But the idea that not meddling constitutes “allowing them” to continue is a short route to madness. The logic of most civil wars is that they end either when the combatants fight each other to exhaustion, or when some neighbouring power invades and quashes them.
Dropping a few bombs would have been the nearest the British government got to Cameron’s own charge of “standing idly by.” It would have been careless of outcome, halfhearted intervention, intervention-lite.
In Syria the human misery is intense and agonising to watch. It merits extremes of diplomatic engagement and humanitarian relief, to which outside attention and expense should surely be directed. Bombs are irrelevant. They make a bang and hit a headline. They puff up the political chest and dust their advocates in glory. They are the dumbest manifestation of modern politics.
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