The Obama Administration’s Convenient Discovery that Sarin Was Used by President Assad’s Regime in Syria Seems Questionable — and Simultaneously Typical of How American Presidents Operate these Days — Why Tell the Truth, when It Is so Much Less Politically Problematic to Lie?

17 June 2013

A dumb statement followed by a probable lie

President Obama’s penchant for deviously cavorting around for political gain simply makes intelligently run American foreign policy that much more difficult to achieve.

After the President foolishly told us that he was drawing a “don’t cross this line” in Syria — regarding President Assad’s potential use of chemical weapons — he put himself in box. He could either, according to his whim or political tides:

(a) deny that Dictator Assad had done any such thing

(b) say that he had.

Option (b) became more appealing for President Obama after:

(a) Senator McCain, America’s most vociferously omnipresent warmonger,

and

(b) former President Bill Clinton, apparently replowing his personal psychic earth with regret for not having intervened while hundreds of thousands died in the 1994 Rwandan genocide —

both began calling for American intervention in the Syrian civil war.

Not surprisingly, the Obama Administration suddenly found expedient “evidence” that Assad had used sarin gas on Syrian rebels

From the New York Times:

The Obama administration, concluding that the troops of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria have used chemical weapons against rebel forces in his country’s civil war, has decided to begin supplying the rebels for the first time with small arms and ammunition, according to American officials.

The sarin connection is, at best, a deliberately puffed up estimation of “maybe”

Here is one perspective:

Chemical weapons experts voiced skepticism Friday about U.S. claims that the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad had used the nerve agent sarin against rebels on at least four occasions this spring, saying that while the use of such a weapon is always possible, they’ve yet to see the telltale signs of a sarin gas attack, despite months of scrutiny.

Foremost among those missing [evidentiary] items, [expert Jean Pascal] Zanders said, are cellphone photos and videos of the attacks or the immediate aftermath.

“In a world where even the secret execution of Saddam Hussein was taped by someone, it doesn’t make sense that we don’t see videos, that we don’t see photos, showing bodies of the dead, and the reddened faces and the bluish extremities of the affected,” he said.

Jean Pascal Zanders was reportedly also skeptical of reports that victims managed to wend their long ways to hospitals, given how quickly sarin kills.

He also wondered why sarin, presumably still lingering on patients, would not have affected treating physicians.

And he challenged a report from one doctor, who allegedly told Le Monde that he had given a sarin-dosed patient 15 shots of atropine in quick succession. Zanders suspected that such an apparently large amount of atropine, administered in such an apparently short time, would have killed the victim.

Note

I would be more cautious than Zanders, who is not medically trained, in assessing a physician’s comment regarding a situation whose specifics I did not know.

For example, an apparently authoritative English source (now more than two years old) prescribes massive cumulative doses of atropine under some circumstances:

Atropine: 1.2 mg intravenous bolus, repeated and doubled every 2-3 minutes until excessive bronchial secretion ceases and miosis resolves (up to 100 mg of atropine may be required).

However, in Zanders’ favor, consider this seemingly more conservative approach from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control:

Atropine and pralidoxime chloride (2-PAM Cl) are antidotes for nerve agent toxicity;

however, 2-PAM Cl must be administered within minutes to a few hours (depending on the agent) following exposure to be effective.

There is also generally no benefit in giving more than three injections of 2-PAM Cl.

Atropine should be administered every 5 to 10 minutes until secretions begin to dry up.

If the military Mark I kits containing autoinjectors are available, they provide the best way to administer the antidotes to healthy adults.

One autoinjector automatically delivers 2 mg atropine and the other automatically delivers 600 mg 2-PAM Cl.

© 2013 National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), Sarin (GB): Nerve Agent, Emergency Response Safety and Health Database — Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (08 March 2013) (paragraph split)

There are two obvious geopolitical flaws in the Administration’s Syrian reasoning

First, there is no reason why anyone should classify the use of chemical weapons in Syria as more harmful to American security interests than Assad’s profligate use of every other weapon in his arsenal to cause the immense suffering that he has. That is a point I made, here.

If there is a national security reason to intervene in Syria, it was present a very long time ago.

Second, given the reported depth to which terrorists have infiltrated Syrian rebel ranks, why would anyone think that arming them further would enhance achievement of American security interests in the region?

The only thing trustworthy about the Syrian civil war is that arming anyone there is eventually going to result in more American troops being killed or maimed (probably someplace else) with the very same weapons.

Brusquely put, I am not interested in indulging Bill Clinton’s guilt about his arguable mishandling of the Rwandan genocide situation. There is a noticeable strategic difference between reacting to:

(a) an explicit genocide (Rwanda)

and

(b) an agglomeration of religious sectarians, justifiably irritated revolutionists, and run-of-the-mill terrorists taking on a reprehensible dictator like President Assad.

In genocide, people’s religion or ethnicity becomes virtually the sole basis for their elimination. In civil war, myriad other reasons motivate people to slaughter each other.

One can make a decent case that the United States has a legitimate strategic interest in preventing large-scale genocide, wherever encountered. To not intervene denies America’s claim to metaphorically color-blind equality of human beings. To the degree that we fail to live up to our own principles, we lose the “soft power” ability to lead and stabilize the globe to our economic and geopolitical advantage.

In contrast, civil wars of the Syrian kind are not genocides. They are visibly the result of a mess of competing and often indiscernible motivations that America needs to be cautious about interpreting in blanket and intervention-inspiring terms.

The problem with armed conflicts like Syria’s is that their outcomes are unpredictable, no matter who wins and who intervened. From an Art of War perspective, there is no point in inserting oneself into a situation in which one cannot even remotely calculate the benefits and harms of doing so.

“But Pete, we can’t let our enemies intervene in Syria, while we do nothing!”

Why not?

I can virtually guarantee that whoever wins in Syria is going to have a miserable time trying to consolidate their ostensible gain(s).

The Shia-Sunni divide is not going to vanish. The medievally minded nuts who favor Sharia law are going to have their hands full with Syrians who live in the 21^st Century. And Iran is not going to be successful in taking over a region that is emphatically not Persian or “mullah” in outlook. Certainly, al-Qaeda makes a mostly bad impression wherever it goes.

The U.S. options in the Syrian situation are essentially:

to do little and face uncertain consequences

to do more than a little and still face a completely ambiguous outcome.

What the strategically “right” thing is, nobody can say with dispositive certainty. But, as a general rule, it is better to do nothing than indulge in a questionable something in those situations that are so complex as to defy evidence-based predictions.

From the purely moral perspective, a nation that simply bases its foreign policy on forcibly clashing with “bad guys”— wherever found — is going to run out of money and blood long before it achieves a visibly result in combatting humanity’s penchant for cruelty and stupidity.

In sum, America’s vision of its national interest needs to be more practicably and concretely based than Senator McCain and former President Bill McClinton appear to think (in this instance). My moral heart is with them, but my strategic brain is not.

The Obama Administration’s politically devious and direction-lacking dithering about Syria is harmful

America either has vital interests in Syria or it does not. In my view, we don’t — aside from the overly general humanitarian one that Senator McCain often uses as a moral excuse to engage in bloodletting.

In view of the poor outcomes America had in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should be reluctant to propose even the limited Syrian intervention(s) some people are.

Libya is a good example of why.

Libya — an example of an impetuous action that continues to have bad long-term results

We need look back no further than the results of President Obama’s ill-advised intervention in the Libyan revolt to see that even its consequences were arguably not favorable to the United States.

Weapons set loose in Libya reportedly made their way to Mali, where people hostile to the democratic West’s ways have been using them to foment a widening insurgency there and elsewhere:

Weapons are spreading from Libya at an "alarming rate," fueling conflicts in Mali, Syria and elsewhere and boosting the arsenals of extremists and criminals in the region, according to a U.N. report published on Tuesday.

The report said that the trafficking of arms from Libya through Egypt to the Gaza Strip had allowed armed groups there to purchase new weapons including more modern assault rifles and anti-tank weapons systems.

Weapons from Libya were also being transported through southern Tunisia, southern Algeria and northern Niger to destinations such as Mali, but some arms were remaining in those corridor countries for use by local groups.

"These zones also serve as bases and transit points for non-state armed groups, including terrorist groups and criminal and drug trafficking networks with links to the wider Sahel region," according to the report.

You will recall how the French sent troops to Mali recently — again with unforeseeable results.

The moral? — Look before leaping

We have way too many thoughtless leapers in our midst. And far too many people who have difficulty seeing beyond next week.

We also live in an era in which the American presidency has ethically de-evolved to the point where it lies to initiate whatever short-sighted scheme that it has come up. More often than not these connivances favor the Administration’s political self-interest and the Military-Industrial Complex’s financial one.

I do not favor a short-sighted interventionist course in Syria, especially one that is just designed to:

(i) profit the President’s political ambitions

and

(ii) satisfy the ruinous Military Industrial Complex’s predilection for killing people for money.

Syria is indeed a tragedy. But I see no need to make it an American one, as well.

PeteFree.com

The Obama Administration’s Convenient Discovery that Sarin Was Used by President Assad’s Regime in Syria Seems Questionable — and Simultaneously Typical of How American Presidents Operate these Days — Why Tell the Truth, when It Is so Much Less Politically Problematic to Lie?