The Syria Mess

I listened in today on Secretary of State John Kerry’s congressional testimony regarding US intervention in Syria.  Am I the only one who feels a sense of déjà vu hearing John Kerry talk about US military action involving a Middle Eastern dictator and WMDs?  Wasn’t it the same Democratic Presidential Candidate Kerry who denounced President Bush for ‘going it alone’ back in 2003?  Didn’t we hear (retrospectively, or course) about what a bad decision it was to get involved in a Middle Eastern crisis and how we had no business there? 

Irrespective of where you landed on the Iraq war, shouldn’t we all agree that we should be pretty darn sure about WMDs before launching US military action?   We do seem to have enough evidence to be sure that sarin gas was used, but we don’t know much else.  The idea that Syrian rebels used it themselves to draw the US into the conflict seemed like a fringe conspiracy theory at first glance. I mean, who would do something like that?  Let’s go to the archives:

In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait.  On October 10, 1990, a Kuwaiti nurse appeared before the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus.  This quotation was reported on 60 minutes:

“Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, my name is Nayirah, and I just came out of Kuwait. While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the children to die on the cold floor. [crying] It was horrifying. “

American’s were outraged.  President Bush himself mentioned babies “thrown on the floor like firewood”.  On January 10, 1991, the US Senate voted to authorize war against Iraq.  The vote passed by 5 votes, and 7 senators cited Nayirah’s testimony as an influence in their decision to support the use of US military force.  After the US invasion, further investigation revealed no evidence to support her claims.  Instead, news reporters learned that Nayirah was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US. The Washington Post also reported that the story, including presentations to the UN and Congress, was promoted by a Washington PR firm who was paid $11 Million by “Citizens for a Free Kuwait”.  Never underestimate the influence of skilled marketing.

In today’s Congressional testimony, Secretary Kerry painted a grim picture of 1426 dead in Syria, including 426 children.

"Instead of being tucked safely in their beds at home," he said, "we saw rows of children lying side by side, sprawled on a hospital floor, all of them dead from Assad's gas and surrounded by parents and grandparents who had suffered the same fate."

I heard Senator after Senator jump on the bandwagon with terms like “Syrian atrocities”, “shock the conscience of the world”, and “crimes against humanity”.  Nobody seemed to recall Nayirah, at least not when the cameras were rolling.

Syria has been ‘comms dark’, as dictatorships can be.  Syrian Dictator Assad has flatly denied using chemical weapons, which is to be expected.  We don’t have the benefit of a free press and streaming video to expose the facts and let us decide for ourselves.  But we should at least consider that we have precedent for Middle East organizations exaggerating facts to win sympathy of hearts and minds in the US.  Maybe some conspiracy theories aren’t as wild as they sound.

Besides that, we need to understand that not every conflict has ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’.  Some have ‘bad guys’ and ‘worse guys’.   But politicians have become adept at condensing every major issue into a 20-30 second synopsis, which is the attention span of the average voter.  In March of 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Bashar Assad a “reformer”.  Our current Secretary of State, John Kerry, called him a thug and compared him to Adolf Hitler.  Hey, people change.   But more importantly, we need to graduate from the simplistic notion that if one side in an atrocity is horribly evil, the other side must represent truth and light.  Bombing Assad into the Stone Age would leave a power gap that could quite possibly be filled with the kind of Muslim extremists who would love to get their hands on the weapons Assad has stockpiled over the years.  Of course a more limited attack would avoid that outcome, but… remind me the point of the attack if not to inflict significant damage?

I sort of understand the argument that a strong response is needed to send a message to others in the world who are watching.  But it’s a stretch to claim that US vital interests are at stake at any time, any place in the world, any time a chemical weapon is used, but not when thousands are slaughtered in tribal violence in Rwanda, Darfur, or even in Syria when citizens were killed in more conventional ways. 

Syria is a complex problem for which we have no easy answers. We should have seen this coming and done something to head if off years ago.  But that would have required more than 20-30 seconds to analyze and explain to voters.