Don't Intervene in Syria

President Barak Obama is looking at two types of precedents for his intervention in Syria.  There is Bill Clinton who waited too long to intervene in the genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda resulting in thousands of additional deaths.  And there is George W. Bush who jumped into Iraq and Afghanistan too soon, without adequate planning, resulting in wasted deaths of US soldiers and outcomes that probably will be detrimental to the US, rather than advantageous.  The Clinton example urges him to get in; the Bush example urges him to stay out.

For me, the Bush example urging him to stay out is more apposite than the Clinton example.  In both Bosnia and Rwanda there was a pretty clear villain carrying out the genocide.  That is less clear in Syria.

The first question is to be resolved is whether the Syrian government used chemical weapons.  It’s pretty clear that chemical weapons were used, but it’s less clear who used them.  Given Obama’s “red line” it would appear stupid for Assad to use chemical weapons; he would just be inviting the US to intervene.  But maybe Assad is stupid, or maybe he is counting on that appearance of stupidity to discourage retaliation.  On the other hand, the rebels have been pleading for the US to intervene against Assad.  Because of Obama’s “red line,” the rebels have a strong motivation to make it look like Assad used chemical weapons, but do they have access to chemical weapons?  It seems possible that they might, either brought from Syrian stockpiles by defectors to the rebels, or given to them by sympathizers in other countries.  However, I know of no evidence that the rebels to have such weapons, except for some suspect photos circulated by the Syrian government.

If the Syrian government did use the chemicals, then what were the circumstances?  Was it a top level government decision by Assad himself, someone lower but still senior, or were they used by a low level person without permission from the government.  The New York Times said that the intelligence it knew of did not show a “smoking gun” linking Assad to the weapons’ use, although it did link someone in the government to their use.  If the weapons were used by some low-level person, an American attack on Syria’s command and control network might actually increase the likelihood of CW use.  Because of defections, I would be leery of communications intelligence; defectors might have Syrian government radios, for example.  The intelligence would have to be good, in light of the disastrous intelligence presented to the UN to justify the US invasion of Iraq.

On balance, I think the US should stay out of the Syrian civil war at this time.  Condemn the use of CW, but don’t intervene militarily.

Recent Letter to Congerss

I am writing to you because of a program on the new Al Jazeera cable news network.  I turned it on just to see what it was like, and happened upon a David Frost interview of the Cuban ballet dancer Carlos Acosta.  I knew nothing about Acosta, but the interview made me reflect on US-Cuban relations.  As a Vietnam veteran, I find it odd that after a hot, fighting war, we have become best friends with Vietnam, while because of a small guerrilla action in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, we are still consumed with virulent hatred of Cuba.  I think it is time to change this policy and develop a rapprochement with Cuba.

American policy toward Cuba is a legacy of Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina.  The Helms-Burton Amendment restricting visas for people connected in almost any way with Cuba was one of the reasons I retired from the State Department Foreign Service.  I was serving as science officer in Rome where my job required me to attend a cocktail party celebrating the launching of an Italian satellite by the US.  I was chatting with an executive of the Italian telephone company, who said something like, “You Americans must really hate us.  My daughter was just denied a visa to go to Disneyland because I work for the telephone company.”   I was totally surprised, and the next day went to ask the Consul General, who oversaw visa issuance, about it.  She said it was true.  Because the Italian telephone company had some connection with the Mexican telephone company, which had some connection to the Cuban telephone company, they were prohibited by Helms-Burton from issuing visas to family members of people who worked for the Italian telephone company.

Many years ago, I had read Herman Wouk’s books on World War II: Winds of War, and War and Remembrance.  At some point somewhat late in the books, I think the Jewish heroine is trying to get to Israel from Rome.  The Germans who controlled the visas said they would give her a visa, but they would not give a visa to her daughter, in effect preventing her from leaving.  I realize that these books are fiction, but the idea of punishing parents through their children was one of the worst things Wouk could think of to tar the Nazis with.  I found abhorrent the idea of the United States doing the same thing to penalize Cubans rather than Jews.  Why should the Bay of Pigs make Americans act like Nazis?  We need to put this hatred of Cuba behind us.

This was only part of the reason I retired because of my disappointment with the US government.  The main reasons had to do with government funding, which promises to be an issue again in the next few months.  I hope that you will not shut down the government as I happened to be scheduled to transfer from the American Embassy in Warsaw, Poland, to the American Embassy in Rome on the day that Speaker Gingrich closed down the government.  I was saying goodbye to friends at the Warsaw Embassy and was in the military attaché’s office, when my Polish assistant (who could not enter that classified area) called and said Embassy Rome was on the line.  They said that because of the government shutdown I could not leave Warsaw for Rome.  We had left our house; our car was packed, including two dogs, and we had planned to leave as soon as the Embassy closed for the day.  The State Department had a few weeks earlier asked me to curtail my assignment in Warsaw, because Italy was about to assume the Presidency of the European Union, and as a result of some dustup with the State Department personnel system, the Science Counselor in Rome had just resigned or been fired.  When a country assumes the EU presidency the workload for the embassy more or less doubles, because it has to maintain a dialogue about EU-wide issues, as well as the usual dialogue about bilateral issues.

Most Foreign Service officers fight for an assignment in Rome, but in this case I was doing it because the State Department said it needed me.  I didn’t know it until I got that 5:00 pm call, but I found out that the Deputy Chief of Mission (deputy to the Ambassador) was a friend I had served with in Brazil.  He made arrangements for me to travel to Rome, so that my wife and I were not turned out on the streets of Warsaw by the US government.  This was a bitter reminder of a night during the Vietnam War at Firebase Barbara on a mountaintop west of Quang Tri.  We received intelligence that an enemy unit was forming at the base of the mountain.  Because of Vietnamization, we had no American infantry support; we had air defense “dusters,” vehicles with twin 40 mm cannons to protect us.  Our battalion headquarters radioed and said that the dusters were notoriously lazy and had not resupplied with gasoline, which was difficult to get to the mountaintop.  Headquarters said we were not to give any of our gasoline to the dusters.  Under the circumstances this could have been a death sentence.  Of course we made sure the dusters had gas; they fired hundreds or thousands of rounds into the area where the enemy was massing and the attack never materialized.  I was not happy to have the government say that I was expendable in Poland, as it had in Vietnam.

Once I arrived in Rome, part of my nuclear non-proliferation portfolio was the US-North Korea nuclear agreement overseen by KEDO, the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization.  Under this agreement one of the US responsibilities was to supply North Korea with a certain amount of fuel oil to keep their electrical generators going until the nuclear reactors promised under the agreement came on line.  This cost the US about $2 million per year, as I recall.  However, the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee refused to appropriate the money to pay for the fuel oil.  Thus, part of my job in Rome was to go hat in hand to the Italians (representing both Italy and the EU) asking them for money to pay for the fuel oil so that the US would not be in breach of the agreement.  Again, I was horrified at the immoral US position.  We had an agreement with the rouge state of North Korea, but we were about to be guilty of breaching it, rather than the North Koreans, unless the Europeans helped us out.  I don’t know how this issue was resolved; I left before it was, when Italy’s EU Presidency ended, and the battle for money was being fought in Washington as well as in Rome.  I do not think that we breached the agreement at that time because of financial constraints, but I was not happy that there was even a question that we might do so.  

Israel Is Center of US Middle East Policy

A New York Times headline today sums of US Middle Eastern policy for the last 50 years, "Chaos in Middle East Grows as the U.S. Focuses on Israel."  US policy toward Arab states has always been subordinate to our policy toward Israel.  This started when early in its life the United Nations accepted the partition of Palestine, thus allowing the creation of the state of Israel.  One of the first countries to recognize the new state was the US.  (For a slightly different view of how this happened, see "The Myth of the U.N. Creation of Israel.")  In any case, the State Department, led by General George Marshall, strongly opposed President Truman's immediate recognition of Israel, motivated in part by Truman's desire for Jewish votes in the upcoming election.

The US relationship with Israel has evolved over the years, becoming closer and closer, as the US sided with Israel in the various wars that the Arabs waged because of what they saw as the Jewish usurpation of Arab land.  The Arab states joined in various degrees of enthusiasm with the resistance of their Palestinian brethren, placing the US more and more at odds with the overwhelming majority of the states and populace of the Middle East.  But for Israel, there may never have been on OPEC and an oil crisis in the US.  The twin towers of the World Trade Center might still be standing in New York.  The US might not have fought two wars in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.  The US might be many billions of dollars richer for not having supplied Israel with massive aid over the years, about $135 billion by one estimate, and $118 billion by another estimate.

Israel is truly the tail that wags the dog of US foreign policy.  There are many reasons for this, but I do not think that many of them are driven by the national interest of the United States; they are driven by the national interest of Israel, represented by the high number of Jewish politicians in America, the huge influence of Jewish money in national elections (e.g. Sheldon Adelson), and the religious beliefs of a number of conservative, evangelical Christians that Israel is essential to the endtime or rapture.  Clearly there is also the charitable motive of helping an oppressed minority that suffered terribly in World War II.  But it's not clear to me why the Arabs had to pay for Hitler's atrocities, except that it was more convenient for whites of European ancestry.  Part of the original UN settlement also must have been that Britain was exhausted by World War II and did not want to get involved in another war in the Middle East over its Palestine mandate.  It just wanted to get out of Palestine, and giving it to Israel was the easiest alternative at the time.  It was also in accord with Britain's 1917 Balfour Declaration.  But these "easy" decisions have a way of coming back to haunt us.

At the current time, I am not sure that I agree with the New York Times article whose title I quoted above.  Israel and Palestine are still the core of the troubles in the Middle East; so, I don't think Kerry should ignore them.  But the article is right that the fires in the Middle East are now in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Jordan, Iran, Afghanistan, maybe Turkey and other countries.  However, the ember that stays hot and ignites these other conflicts is the Israel-Palestinian conflict and there will be no long-term solution to Arab-spring arc of crisis until there is a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.  

Bernanke stimulus v Congress sequester

The stock market was upset by Fed Chairman Bernanke's statement that he might let the Fed's quantitative easing bond purchases taper off as the economy improves.  The market's view was apparently that a good economy was worthless; all that mattered was the Fed-supplied QE stimulus.

While the Fed was supplying stimulus through its purchases, the Congress was applying austerity through the sequester, slowing the economy by reducing government spending on many programs. I would not blame Bernanke if he has gotten tired of trying to save the American economy single-handedly, while the idiots in Congress, especially the House, are trying to bring back the Great Depression.  The economy must be somewhat better, or Congress would have killed it, but it was not ready for Congress to start beating on it with a stick.  So, I would guess that Bernanke will be happy to walk away from this mess, but he may want to start to unwind QE so that he does not get blamed if his successor does not do it right.

 This may mean that he will have to start unwinding it a little earlier than he would like to.  If that is the case, then the market may be right that there will be some rough patches ahead, as Bernanke begins to withdraw his first aid while Congress continues to inflict harm on it.