WASHINGTON (AP) — The intelligence linking Syrian President Bashar Assad or his inner circle to an alleged chemical weapons attack that killed at least 100 people is no “slam dunk,” with questions remaining about who actually controls some of Syria’s chemical weapons stores and doubts about whether Assad himself ordered the strike, U.S. intelligence officials say.http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/syria-chemical-weapons-intelligence-slam-dunk.php?ref=fpa
President Barack Obama declared unequivocally Wednesday that the Syrian government was responsible, while laying the groundwork for an expected U.S. military strike.
“We have concluded that the Syrian government in fact carried these out,” Obama said in an interview with “NewsHour” on PBS. “And if that’s so, then there need to be international consequences.”
However, multiple U.S. officials used the phrase “not a slam dunk” to describe the intelligence picture — a reference to then-CIA Director George Tenet’s insistence in 2002 that U.S. intelligence showing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was a “slam dunk” — intelligence that turned out to be wrong.
A report by the Office of the Director for National Intelligence outlining that evidence against Syria is thick with caveats. It builds a case that Assad’s forces are most likely responsible while outlining gaps in the U.S. intelligence picture. Relevant congressional committees were to be briefed on that evidence by teleconference call on Thursday, U.S. officials and congressional aides said.
The complicated intelligence picture raises questions about the White House’s full-steam-ahead approach to the Aug. 21 attack on a rebel-held Damascus suburb, with worries that the attack could be tied to al-Qaida-backed rebels later. Administration officials said Wednesday that neither the U.N. Security Council, which is deciding whether to weigh in, or allies’ concerns would affect their plans.
Intelligence officials say they could not pinpoint the exact locations of Assad’s supplies of chemical weapons, and Assad could have moved them in recent days as U.S. rhetoric builds. That lack of certainty means a possible series of U.S. cruise missile strikes aimed at crippling Assad’s military infrastructure could hit newly hidden supplies of chemical weapons, accidentally triggering a deadly chemical attack.
sound familiar?
War fatigue is just at an all time high in the US. Most don't want it.
So we all cool now with Clinton standing back and watching the slaughter in Rwanada in '94?
Just trying to keep my International Intervention scorecard straight here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w5JqQLqqTc
Well I'm convinced
:usacry
So we all cool now with Clinton standing back and watching the slaughter in Rwanada in '94?
Just trying to keep my International Intervention scorecard straight here.
1) No, it's not like Iraq. One was a relatively stable, if brutally autocratic regime that the US administration decided it wanted to oust, and believed it could replace with a friendly government (at minimal cost, no less). The other is a state involved in a very active, bloody civil war. If y'all didn't want a government that might intervene to stop ongoing mass slaughter, you should have made a stink when Samantha fucking Powers became a close advisor to the presumptive president of the United States.This is definitely something worth discussing. This was the one of the biggest worries when the war started... can Assad control his chemical weapons stockpiles? Regardless of who deployed them, it was up to him to protect them and keep them out of the hands of people who wanted to use them. Saying "It was the other side" is not a valid excuse
2) The British and French governments have been the hawks on Syria, generally being restrained by the US.
3) If you read the TPM story, the main caveat isn't whether the Syrian government has chemical weapons or whether they were used, or which side used them, but whether Assad personally ordered their deployment. Fine. So? If Assad didn't order the attacks, but allowed them to happen and is protecting the officers who gave the orders, he's given his sanction. If a US president tried that, we'd recognize it right away as a bullshit attempt to avoid responsibility.
4) The use of chemical weapons, even with the public "red line" rhetoric from the White House, is not the sole factor in US policymaking, and probably not even the most important one. To reiterate, there's a civil war happening in a state that borders three or four US allies (depending on how you want to count Iraq), with more allies (Saudi Arabia and some EU countries) demanding action and already getting involved themselves. Hopefully nobody gets any crazy ideas about a ground invasion and occupation, but this was never something that the US could avoid any involvement whatsoever.
Worth reading this (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/13/130513fa_fact_filkins) NYer piece from May on Syria. Take it with a grain of salt because Filkins strikes me as tilted towards the rebel cause, but it's an interesting snapshot of the pressures inside and outside the US government on Obama to act.
BTW, the GAF thread is disgusting. Bunch of armchair generals pounding their chest about "outdated" Russian military equipment and how easy the West could control this whole situation with military might.
:-\BTW, the GAF thread is disgusting. Bunch of armchair generals pounding their chest about "outdated" Russian military equipment and how easy the West could control this whole situation with military might.
Reminds me of the Iraq War. By the mid/late-00's Poli-GAF was pretty solidly liberal, but in 2003 when the invasion happened, there was an Iraq War thread which was almost like a sports thread: mostly immediate reactions to what was being shown on TV. There was a lot of enthusiastic discussion of the military hardware being used in the shock'n'awe campaign, IIRC.
BTW, the GAF thread is disgusting. Bunch of armchair generals pounding their chest about "outdated" Russian military equipment and how easy the West could control this whole situation with military might.
Reminds me of the Iraq War. By the mid/late-00's Poli-GAF was pretty solidly liberal, but in 2003 when the invasion happened, there was an Iraq War thread which was almost like a sports thread: mostly immediate reactions to what was being shown on TV. There was a lot of enthusiastic discussion of the military hardware being used in the shock'n'awe campaign, IIRC.
1) No, it's not like Iraq. One was a relatively stable, if brutally autocratic regime that the US administration decided it wanted to oust, and believed it could replace with a friendly government (at minimal cost, no less). The other is a state involved in a very active, bloody civil war. If y'all didn't want a government that might intervene to stop ongoing mass slaughter, you should have made a stink when Samantha fucking Powers became a close advisor to the presumptive president of the United States.
2) The British and French governments have been the hawks on Syria, generally being restrained by the US.
3) If you read the TPM story, the main caveat isn't whether the Syrian government has chemical weapons or whether they were used, or which side used them, but whether Assad personally ordered their deployment. Fine. So? If Assad didn't order the attacks, but allowed them to happen and is protecting the officers who gave the orders, he's given his sanction. If a US president tried that, we'd recognize it right away as a bullshit attempt to avoid responsibility.
4) The use of chemical weapons, even with the public "red line" rhetoric from the White House, is not the sole factor in US policymaking, and probably not even the most important one. To reiterate, there's a civil war happening in a state that borders three or four US allies (depending on how you want to count Iraq), with more allies (Saudi Arabia and some EU countries) demanding action and already getting involved themselves. Hopefully nobody gets any crazy ideas about a ground invasion and occupation, but this was never something that the US could avoid any involvement whatsoever.
Worth reading this (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/13/130513fa_fact_filkins) NYer piece from May on Syria. Take it with a grain of salt because Filkins strikes me as tilted towards the rebel cause, but it's an interesting snapshot of the pressures inside and outside the US government on Obama to act.
The endgame is likely to keep Syria embroiled in civil war because it keeps Iran right where we want them: stuck in a quagmire proxy war against Saudi Arabia. As long as the U.S. can avoid playing a its full hand (i.e. major military action--not surgical strikes) it's going to. After the failures of Iraq (where ironically many of the Syrian rebels were trained and seasoned fighting coalition forces), we're not in a hurry to go balls out for this one--especially as long as it suits our interests. Not only is this pay back to Assad for allowing fighters to use his country to fight the US in Iraq, but it keeps Iran bogged down as well.
President Obama is prepared to move ahead with a limited military strike on Syria, administration officials said on Thursday, even with a rejection of such action by Britain’s Parliament, an increasingly restive Congress, and lacking an endorsement from the United Nations Security Council.http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/30/us/politics/obama-syria.html?hp&_r=0
Although the officials cautioned that Mr. Obama had not made a final decision, all indications suggest that the strike could occur as soon as United Nations inspectors, who are investigating the Aug. 21 attack that killed hundreds of Syrians, leave the country. They are scheduled to depart Damascus, the capital, on Saturday.
The White House is to present its case for military action against Syria to Congressional leaders on Thursday night. Administration officials assert that the intelligence will show that forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad carried out the chemical weapons attack in the suburbs of Damascus.
The intelligence does not tie Mr. Assad directly to the attack, officials briefed on the presentation said, but the administration believes that it has enough evidence to carry out a limited strike that would deter the Syrian government from using these weapons again.
Mr. Obama, officials said, is basing his case for action both on safeguarding international standards against the use of chemical weapons and on the threat to America’s national interests posed by Syria’s use of those weapons. Administration officials said that threat was both to allies in the region, like Turkey and Israel, and to the United States itself, if Syria’s weapons fell into the wrong hands.
I don't think Obama is willing to go in alone. He probably recalls The Coalition of the Willing, and "You forgot Poland!" better than most.
I can't understand why the USA thinks it needs to be the world's policeman. Let them sort their own shit
I agree here, except I disagree that the policeman should be the states. The UN needs to shape up or fuck off. They need to sort this shit not cast a longing eye over to the USA every time some fucked up shit happens in the world. That the USA/UK/France need to start side coalitions to sort shit out is pathetic.I can't understand why the USA thinks it needs to be the world's policeman. Let them sort their own shit
i'm not a big fan of the idea from an idealistic standpoint, but practically, in every community, there needs to be a policeman, or else the weak will get fucked over again and again. if we could trust people to not be shitheads, then yeah, but we can't even trust people to not be shitheads on a neighborhood level.
and as world police go... ehn, america's been pretty good. i don't agree with everything they've done, but historically kings of the world haven't been nearly as benign as the USA. things are going to a be lot worse when china picks up the job, i tell you what.
your national hockey team still sucks, though.Too late to save face now :lol
I'd say that it's too early to say what the administration is going for, but it's not. It's not like this started last week. The Syrian Civil War has been raging for two and a half years now and my explanation, macabre as it may be, at least shows a reason why the U.S. has been dragging it's feet.
Yes, a Sunni-majority (and in power) state, or a hybrid, or a multi-state are all possibilities and have been since the beginning. And yes, it's extremely complicated, and yes, we do not know how long it will take to get there. I can tell you how long it won't take though, less than two years. And why? See above.
The hypothetical need to is too strongly aligned with "US interests" in this case. Remove veto and make UN majority vote based as a start, and go from there imo.I agree here, except I disagree that the policeman should be the states. The UN needs to shape up or fuck off. They need to sort this shit not cast a longing eye over to the USA every time some fucked up shit happens in the world. That the USA/UK/France need to start side coalitions to sort shit out is pathetic.
Too late to save face now :lol
I actually think the UN can never work as the police of the world. Too many foxes in the hen house, too many differing agendas. As long as veto power is a thing, it's never going to be able to apply force where it would hypothetically need to.
Not saying we should do that, but how many messages and leaks are there going to be? And why hasn't the president spoken to the American people about this, outside of a quick answer in a PBS interview?Yeah I think he is making a huge mistake by not being willing to really address people if he wants support to beat the war drum. A few news sites seem willing to do that for him though. Yahoo News has a big image showing Syrias defenses in numbers and locations of Western fleets.
Mandark, I don't know if I would say there is a deliberate, coordinated effort to prolong the war
"the US will allow the Syrian civil war to drag on largely because doing so hurts Iran."
Voting for a war a year before congressional elections? I doubt it.
The wait for Congress also gives Obama a chance to wait on UN chemical report, without having to say he's waiting on the UN.https://twitter.com/NPRinskeep/status/373869558513168384
Buys time and enhances legitimacy. Obama makes me swoon!
(http://i.imgur.com/EWXLBcV.png)
I'm glad that they're taking it to Congress :yeshrug
Obama keeps sounding like a huge fucking pussy to me, just assassinate the asshole dictator cold war style and be done with it.
Kerry also refusing to rule out boots on the ground. If Assad is toppled, someone has to secure the weapons; it's similar to Pakistan in that sense. This is probably going to get ugly.
Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday appeared to leave the door open to the U.S. deploying ground troops in Syria in the event the country "imploded, for instance."
“In the event Syria imploded, for instance or in the event there was a threat of a chemical weapons cache falling into the hands of somebody else and it was clearly in the interest of our allies — all of us, the British, the French, and others. I don’t want to take off the table an option that might or might not be available to the President of the United States to secure our country," Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, debating whether to authorize President Barack Obama's punitive strike in response to a reported chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime.
Asked by Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), the ranking Republican on the committee, whether the secretary of state truly believed combat troops could be an option, Kerry walked the comment back by saying he was only "thinking out loud."
"Let me be very clear now, because I do not want anything coming out of the hearing that leaves any door open to any possibility," he said. "Let's shut the door now as tight as we can. All I did was raise a hypothetical question about some possibility, and I am thinking out loud on how to protect America's interests, but if you want to know if there is any -- the answer is what ever prohibition clarifies it to Congress, there will not be American boots on the ground with respect to the civil war."
Welp...gotta look at the silver lining. At least most of the Bore is too old for the draft.
I'm in the Oklahoma Army National Guard. I'll give you two guesses as to what kind of soldiers we don't have.
I think we had a couple of those during our last deployment as interstate transfers. One more guess. :(
can't be black. There are black people in Oklahoma, just read about a couple that committed a crime. Some have to be in the National Guard...
I suppose it's possible in the support units, but I think the infantry is too much like extreme sports to attract a lot of black people.
The New York Times/CBS News poll showed that though just 1 in 4 Americans believe that the United States has a responsibility to intervene in the Syrian conflict, more than 90 percent of the public is convinced that putting all 535 representatives of the United States Congress on the ground in Syria—including Senate pro tempore Patrick Leahy, House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and, in fact, all current members of the House and Senate—is the best course of action at this time.
When asked if they believe that Sen. Rand Paul should be deployed to Syria, 100 percent of respondents said yes.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With the United States threatening to attack Syria, U.S. and allied intelligence services are still trying to work out who ordered the poison gas attack on rebel-held neighborhoods near Damascus.more at http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE98603A20130907?irpc=932
No direct link to President Bashar al-Assad or his inner circle has been publicly demonstrated, and some U.S. sources say intelligence experts are not sure whether the Syrian leader knew of the attack before it was launched or was only informed about it afterward.
While U.S. officials say Assad is responsible for the chemical weapons strike even if he did not directly order it, they have not been able to fully describe a chain of command for the August 21 attack in the Ghouta area east of the Syrian capital.
It is one of the biggest gaps in U.S. understanding of the incident, even as Congress debates whether to launch limited strikes on Assad's forces in retaliation.
After wrongly claiming that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 U.S. invasion, the U.S. intelligence community, along with the Obama administration, are trying to build as solid a case as they can about what it says was a sarin nerve gas attack that killed over 1,400 people.
The Syrian government, backed by Russia, blames Sunni rebels for the gas attack. Russia says Washington has not provided convincing proof that Assad's troops carried out the attack and called it a "provocation" by rebel forces hoping to encourage a military response by the United States.
Identifying Syrian commanders or leaders as those who gave an order to fire rockets into the Sunni Muslim areas could help Obama convince a war-weary American public and skeptical members of Congress to back limited strikes against Assad.
But penetrating the secretive Syrian government is tough, especially as it fights a chaotic civil war for its survival.
"Decision-making at high levels within foreign governments is always a difficult intelligence target. Typically small numbers of people are involved, operational security is high, and penetration - through either human or technical means - is hard," said Paul Pillar, a former CIA expert on the Middle East.
One possible link between the gas attack and Assad's inner circle is the Syrian government body that is responsible for producing chemical weapons, U.S. and allied security sources say.
Personnel associated with the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Council (SSRC), which has direct ties to Assad's entourage, were likely involved in preparing munitions in the days before the attack, they say.
A declassified French intelligence report describes a unit of the SSRC, known by the code name "Branch 450", which it says is in charge of filling rockets or shells with chemical munitions in general.
U.S. and European security sources say this unit was likely involved in mixing chemicals for the August 21 attack and also may have played a more extensive role in preparing for it and carrying it out.
Putin :bow2
Putin :bow2
I'm baffled by the "Putin won!" arguments on the right. Obama threatened to attack Syria...and Russia defused the situation by convincing Syria to give up their weapons (allegedly).
Don't conservatives love mentioning that time Quadaffi gave up his WMD out of fear due to the Iraq invasion? Isn't this a cheaper, less bloody version of that?
:obama
*assuming all this isn't bullshit of course
Hopefully David Brooks will bring both sides together and tell us what really happened, and why it matters.
My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-caution-from-russia-on-syria.html?pagewanted=all