Mother Jones
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When President Barack Obama announced that he would seek congressional authorization for a limited military strike against the Syrian regime in retaliation for its presumed use of chemical weapons, he turned the ongoing op-ed tussle over Syria into an official debate. Since the August 21 chemical weapons attack outside Damascus, foreign policy experts, columnists, cable news commentators, bloggers, and others have been arguing over what to do about Syria, and it was hard to know how much any of this policy wonk combat mattered because the decision appeared to rest with one man, the commander in chief. But with Obama recognizing Congress’ role in war-related decision-making, the ensuing debate in the House and Senate—and the external, surrounding debate that could well affect congressional deliberations—will shape how the United States responds to events in Syria.
Below is our running guide to the Syria debate raging on and off Capitol Hill. As Congress moves toward a vote, we will track commentary within Congress and within the commentariat, and gather it in one handy place. (To jump to the latest updates, click here.)
Helping Syria could destroy it. The day before Obama gave his Rose Garden statement calling for a congressional vote—and declaring the United States needed to hit Bashar al-Assad’s regime to deter it and others from using chemical weapons—Steven Cook, a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, published a piece in the Washington Post on Friday contending that an assault on Syria would do far more damage than good. Cook, who previously had recognized a case for intervention, wrote:
The formidable U.S. armed forces could certainly damage Assad’s considerably less potent military. But in an astonishing irony that only the conflict in Syria could produce, American and allied cruise missiles would be degrading the capability of the regime’s military units to the benefit of the al-Qaeda-linked militants fighting Assad—the same militants whom U.S. drones are attacking regularly in places such as Yemen. Military strikes would also complicate Washington’s longer-term desire to bring stability to a country that borders Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Israel. Unlike Yugoslavia, which ripped itself apart in the 1990s, Syria has no obvious successor states, meaning there would be violence and instability in the heart of the Middle East for many years to come.
“It is on occasions like this that I am grateful that I am no longer a White House aide.” Gary Sick, who served on the National Security Council during the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations, wrote this on his Tumblr on Saturday. He presents the White House’s conundrum as such:
Imagine that you are a White House adviser and you have been asked to calibrate a military intervention that will send an unmistakeable message to Assad that his use of CW was a serious error and persuade him that any such action in the future would be unacceptably costly to Syria generally and to the Assad government in particular.
However, the attack should not change the fundamental balance of power in the civil war — specifically it should not empower the radical Sunni opposition forces that are potentially worse than Assad. The strike should not be so great that it inspires reckless behavior by other states or parties in the region — specifically it should not provoke retaliation, for example, by either Hezbollah or Syria against Israeli targets.
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