What
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has voted to
authorize is
a military operation not to exceed 90 days in duration, and without U.S. troops
in a ground role. The purpose, per
the “stronger language” amendment demanded by John McCain (R-AZ), is to “change
the momentum on the ground”; i.e., shift it against Assad and in favor of
“moderate” opposition forces.
Who
knows what might actually be done based on this authorization – if anything.
What would Congressional votes
mean, in the end? Has the McCain
amendment made the beefed-up resolution harder to pass in the full Senate? Is there a realistic chance that the House will
pass a
resolution authorizing military action at all? Will Obama refrain from mounting a
strike if Congress doesn’t agree?
Does
anyone else notice the inanity of putting a 90-day limit on this thing – as if
89 days of doing something as yet undefined would be just right, but 91 too
many?
Has
anyone checked to make sure China will keep a steady course on holding our
Treasury securities if we go through with this? We’ll have to borrow money to do it,
after all. Maybe the Saudis will
step in, as much as they can, if China and Russia go fiscally nuclear on
us. That wouldn’t, of course, color
our purposes – i.e., whom we favor in Syria – or anything. (Extra points for budgetary
excitement: an operation running
past 30 September would cross fiscal years. With more sequester cuts due to kick in
next quarter, that would actually matter.)
Speaking of the cost of military action: all of this is still the case. Our forces have not magically improved
their readiness in the last week.
We have no force depth to take to war in Syria. Merely adding funds to the Pentagon’s
operational accounts will not suddenly make up for the thousands of hours of
flight training lost in 2013, or the maintenance not done or the parts and
weapons not purchased.
We
can’t actually expand on a limited cruise missile strike against Assad – unless
we assume away all potential pushback from Assad or his patrons, Russia and
Iran. If there’s pushback, we are
not in a position to deal with it; certainly not decisively. Adding allied aircraft to the inventory
for the campaign might help. But it
might not: only France, to date, is offering to actually join the U.S. in
playing an offensive role over Syria – if
the UN comes back with an indictment of Assad.
The
U.S. and France together don’t have an overwhelming advantage over Assad’s
Syria, backed by Russia and Iran.
The Russians have long had a useful method for assessing this operational
dynamic: the “correlation of forces.”
What matters to our decisions about campaign intent and combat options is
not the sum total of national GDPs and armed-force sizes on either side. What matters is the character of the
problem at hand – Syria, her armament and combat conditions; her geography and
allies – versus what the U.S. and NATO can bring to bear on an operationally
meaningful timeline. Syria doesn’t
have to be better than the United States.
She and her allies just have to be more than we can reasonably propose to
take on, in the conditions we’d have to in September or October
2013.
Realistically, that’s precisely what they are, if they
bestir themselves against us: more than we can handle with what we can
bring.
I
don’t believe Russia (or Iran, for that matter) wants to come to direct blows
with us right now. Russia,
meanwhile, has zero interest in dealing with an inflammation of sentiment in the
Islamic world, which reaches into her southern doorstep (Chechnya, Dagestan),
and is already in turmoil in Egypt, increasingly so in Lebanon and Iraq as
well. Russia would have justifiable concern,
moreover, about the U.S. and an increasingly Islamist Turkey colluding to back
factions in Syria whose “moderation” could not possibly be vouched for – especially not in
a 90-day
operation-of-some-kind-but-no-American-boots-on-the-ground.
But
it doesn’t have to be a direct confrontation between Russia and the United
States that sets a match to the powder keg in the Eastern Mediterranean or
Middle East. Indeed, it almost
certainly wouldn’t be. The region
is one of long-simmering conflicts, which have survived unresolved in recent
decades because of the order imposed by overwhelming American power and the Pax
Americana. In our absence, the
stronger in each given situation would have imposed some kind of resolution long
before now, most likely a brutal one: in Lebanon; in the Arab-Israeli conflict;
as regards Kurdish nationalism; as between the Serbs and Muslims in the Balkans;
as between Greece and Turkey and their maritime claims.
One
such conflict is that of Cyprus, where Turkey invaded in 1974 and has since
maintained, by dint of military occupation, the fiction of a separate nation in
the northeastern side of Cyprus.
The dispatch of NATO aircraft to support a Syria operation has promptly
collided with the ad hoc arrangements of the 40-year Cyprus stand-off – and has
thereby begun to choke the canary in the coal mine.
The
indispensable Aviationist reported on Tuesday that RAF fighter jets operating
out of Cyprus came close to a confrontation with Turkish
fighters from
Incirlik Air Base on Monday, 2 September.
The news reporting is unclear on which jets were first reacting to which
– but that confusion is actually inherent in the problem itself, since neither
the UK nor the Republic of Cyprus recognizes the Turkish claim to sovereign air
space for northern Cyprus. A
long-running Notice to Airmen warns aircraft that Turkey claims the air space
for northern Cyprus, but that doesn’t mean RAF pilots are bound by their
nation’s policies to treat it as the sovereign air space of a recognized
nation.
We
can assume the Brits are exercising prudence and have no intention to present a
provocative profile while their fighters are in Cyprus. But that doesn’t mean the Turks won’t
read provocation into what they do.
While we can hope everyone will keep his head, it’s worth noting that
Turkey has had her navy out harassing and warning off third-party research
vessels from international waters off Cyprus (in
Cyprus’s EEZ) during the summer.
Ankara has been loaded for bear on this issue since Cyprus delineated an EEZ
boundary with Israel in 2010, and began soliciting bids for maritime oil and gas
exploration in her own EEZ.
Russia has a major stake in this issue as she has in
Syria, with a lot of Russian money invested in gaining control of the Bank of
Cyprus, whose fortunes will stand or fall on the oil and gas offshore. In both Cyprus and Syria, Russia and
Turkey have wound up on opposite sides.
The stakes are high, and they mean limits or options, perhaps poverty or
prosperity, to everyone on both sides.
It’s
one thing for the United States to hover over the multivariate Eastern
Mediterranean, way better armed than anyone else and determined the keep the
peace. It’s another for us to
wander into it with limited capability, proposing to shoot off missiles and back
factions on the ground somewhere.
The latter posture is an invitation to the regional nations to challenge
us: to give us a black eye, gain leverage over us (e.g., take our airmen
prisoner), damage our credibility, exploit us, make us
leave.
We
never had to provoke the situation in those terms. But that’s what we would now be doing
with any military action we undertake in Syria. This isn’t Libya,
...
[See rest at
links]
CDR, USN (Ret.)
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