217. Attacking Assad: does analysis matter?

 

 

What is it about the Middle East that makes our best journals, our most thoughtful, our most analytical, journals so dismissive of careful thought, even their own, when they see a chance to act there?  Remember the Times in 2003.  Now look at the August 31 Economist.  The analytical writer (p.20) wipes out the big distinction President Obama has made (asphyxiating gases horrible?  "so are most weapons") but the lead editorial writer cries (p. 9) for us to end the peculiar horror of gassing in Syria.  Is it that they think that the results of analysis have only academic interest?

You don't have to be a Clausewitz to see what's wrong with our taking military action in Syria.  I think you just have to do the kind of ends-means, cost-benefit thinking we demand in our other enterprises.  And carry it through to the end, asking the usual questions, demanding specific answers.  "OK, we take the course of action X to accomplish Y which will bring the outcome Z which will be worth the cost A and be superior to the outcomes of alternative courses of action M, N, O, P, and Q measured against their costs B, C, D, E, and F.  Could you go over your projections for that in the Syrian operation?"

I feel sure, if only by the example of General Shinseki before Iraq, that military men like General Dempsey have put this kind of question, more acutely than I have, to the administration.  Nobody is better at getting the details of execution than those who are going to have to execute.  But nobody, in the case of our military, is more helpless.

But let's just  limit our analytical attention to the end, Y, which will justify the whole thing.  If we don't see that clearly everybody's in trouble.  The ends brought most urgently to our attention are (1) to punish the Assad regime for using gas, (2) to reduce their ability to use it, (3) to bring a better regime to power, and (4) to preserve American credibility.

Punish.  Just to make Assad hurt?  Say he's sorry?  Makes no sense unless you reduce it to (2), the material effect, and (2) imposes a great handicap.  You can't bomb stockpiles of gas shells without bringing about the very thing you're trying to avoid, clouds of people-killing gas.  In any event, there's likely to be enough gas left for him (or anybody who grabs it) to use if he wants to.

So (3), bring a better regime to power, a more co-operative, more enlightened regime?  Anybody who can see the makings of that regime now, in that scramble of guerrillas, has eyesight better than anybody I know.  I think (3) is about the longest shot on the track.

And (4), preserving America's credibility, America's word?  You don't ever want to dismiss credibility.  Too many wars have been avoided by one side backing down in the face of credible power and will.  But you can ask why our credibility is on the line here, and whether it's America's credibility. 

If President Obama had not drawn that red line the question would not have arisen.  He'd have no word to take back.  And here's the place to reflect on analysis, and pickiness with words, and Socrates' demand that we slice nature at her joints.  Obama's line, as I hope I established in Post #215, was drawn far from any natural joint.  It was drawn halfway up the horror bone, up where no knife can get through.  Gassing is not really distinct from other horrors.  Yes, it's horrible, but if you think it's much more horrible than the other horrors of warfare you just haven't looked closely enough at those other horrors.  Your eye, or your mind's eye, needs to take in what's in the stretchers coming back from the Iwo Jima beach, or at the barbed wire rolls on the Somme, with disemboweled draftees hung up calling all night for their mothers.

How do you know you're at a joint and not at the far end of a bone?  When your knife can't slide back.  Lyndon Johnson's cut into Viet Nam at Da Nang, when he ordered the Marines into combat with the Viet Cong, is a perfect example.  He couldn't go back because to do so would be to "lose," "fail," "get beat," "cut and run," and, after the first casualty, "betray those who had given their lives in this cause."  Once he had made it a fight, us against them, those expressions kicked in, and became obstacles to retreat.  None them applied when he was sliding around with advising and training and supplying the South Vietnamese.  He had hit the joint normally recognized in a declaration of war. 

I'm afraid that Johnson's failure to recognize a joint could be Obama's failure.  And Congress's and the Economist's.  And the public's.  We all need Socrates here.  Gassing, he could point out, is one point on a scale (of horrors) that has plenty of degree marks.  There are no degree marks on warring.  You either win or lose, succeed or fail. 

That's awesome, an alternative like that, so you want people facing it to proceed very carefully, even Socratically:  Just what will it take to win here?  What does it mean to win?  What does our experience tell us?  I think General Dempsey is proceeding carefully, and maybe even asking those questions, but I don't think President Obama is proceeding carefully.