A doubtfully intact American chain of command — Secretary of State John Kerry trying to pick up the pieces at the United Nations

© 2016 Peter Free

 

22 September 2016

 

 

Theme

 

A Commander in Chief ideally should have better control of his subordinates than this.

 

 

Background

 

Shortly after the United States blasted Syrian troops in violation of its own cease fire agreement, the Russian Federation, also party to the cease fire, almost certainly blew up a United Nations humanitarian aid convoy in Syria.

 

Secretary of State John Kerry was at the United Nations yesterday trying to distinguish between the U.S. "mistake" and the Russians' evasion of responsibility for their own war criminal act.

 

 

Secretary Kerry did his best with a bad factual situation

 

His premise appeared to be that the U.S. immediately confessed to the error and that was better than the Russians' litany of lies about how the convoy caught fire of its own volition.

 

If you watch the video clip of Kerry's presentation, you will notice that his list of the Russians' lying explanations parallel the weaseling that the United States did immediately after attacking an MSF hospital in Afghanistan in October 2015.

 

Secretary Kerry added that Syrian soldiers on the ground were easier to mistake for ISIS forces than the humanitarian convoy was. Thus, presumably, the American mistake was understandable and the Federation's was not. Evil Russians.

 

 

How this sort of talk is supposed to rescue the Syrian cease fire beats me

 

It is akin to Samantha Power's undiplomatic finger-waving immediately after the US troop strike.

 

Diplomats generally do not act like this, when they want to get anything constructive done.

 

 

I surmise that American policy is divided

                    

Secretary Kerry, on the one hand, feels that peace might best be achieved by getting the Russian Federation partly on board in Syria.

 

In contrast, the Department of Defense — as intuited by the New York Times (here) — is not happy with anything that requires sharing classified information (regarding Syrian targeting) with the Russians.

 

Thus, my Reality-experienced mind does not put it past Secretary of Defense Ash Carter's military command chain for intentionally having called for a "questionable" air strike. If you disagree with a policy, what's the harm in taking arguably unnecessary chances that might screw it up?

 

(And that's the generous interpretation of what might have happened.)

 

This command chain "looseness" ultimately leads us to the pathetic picture of John Kerry trying to favorably distinguish an American war crime from a Russian one. Especially with our own Kunduz hospital crime shouting in the near background.

 

(Sometimes you wonder if our leaders are capable of combining reason with more than 5 minutes of memory.)

 

 

The moral? — Our Commander in Chief needs to tighten both policy and chain of command

 

Right now the United States just looks murderously inept.

 

And our lame duck President certainly does not need to leave a (civilian over military) command chain Constitutional crisis on his successor's plate.