Western Warhawks Headed for Tough Times

For the first time since the end of last week a ray of sunshine, of reason, of hope this morning that there will be some pushback against the Western war machine. The Arab League declined to endorse an attack on Syria. This queers the pitch for Obama and the leaders of the old colonial powers Britain and France. They say that they got what they needed in the form of a Arab League statement blaming the Syrian government for the chemical attack in a Damascus suburb last Wednesday. Nonetheless they're embarking on an illegal war with very little if any popular mandate. They have no support domestically, and they can't even get a public go-ahead from the Gulf emirates who have been fueling the conflict and aggressively lobbying for U.S. intervention.

The story can be read this morning in David Kirkpatrick (thank goodness for David Kirkpatrick) and Mark Landler's "Arab League Stance Muddies U.S. Case." Doubtless the warhawks in the West wish for now they had Morsi back running the show in Cairo rather than the generals. It was Egypt that stood up to the Saudis and blocked harsher language against Assad from being included in the Arab League statement:

But while they will not say it publicly, several countries in the region have been working vigorously behind the scenes to topple the Assad government. For two years, the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey have been shipping money and arms to rebels challenging Syrian troops. Neither Saudi Arabia nor any of the Sunni-dominated gulf states have publicly endorsed Western intervention. But all feel threatened by the regional rivalry with Iran, and all have privately urged the Western powers to intervene on behalf of the rebels, Western diplomats say. 

In the Arab League meeting on Tuesday, Arab diplomats said, Saudi Arabia pushed for stronger language explicitly condemning Mr. Assad for launching the attack, which would have come closer to helping the Western powers justify military action. 

But Egypt, still the most populous Arab state with the largest Arab military, disagreed, Arab diplomats said. 

“It shows the schizophrenia of the Arab world,” said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center, noting that gulf states and Jordan also appear to be working closely with the West on possible intervention while refusing to endorse it publicly. 

But their silence created a potential problem for the United States and its European allies, he said, because it undermined the notion of a broad-based coalition with Arab support. “And every day that it goes on, opponents will try to exploit it,” he said.

And more trouble awaits the West today when Britain takes the Western case for war on Syria to the United Nations. At this point the West will have to reveal the evidence it has linking the Syrian government to the chemical attack in Ghouta. Up until now all that Secretary of State John Kerry and Press Secretary Jay Carney have mentioned is a circumstantial case: a chemical attack occurred; the Syrian government possesses chemical weapons; therefore it is beyond doubt that the Syrian government is responsible for the attack. This is the threadbare reasoning that the United States has relied on in its run up to war. Appalling, isn't it? There has been some whispering in the media about intercepted signal traffic that has Syrian government forces directing operations of the chemical attack. But the fact that Britain will be doing the heavy lifting at the UN leads one to believe that the Obama administration is leery about repeating a Colin Powell moment.

In any event, a debate will be had in a global forum, and it promises to be unkind to the bellicose Western perspective. The Brits will then hold a Parliamentary debate tomorrow which should also prove to be rough going for the Tories. Archbishop of Canterbury, Most Rev. Justin Welby, weighed in with a plea for caution and good sense in a Daily Telegraph interview yesterday. Foreign Secretary William Hague, who has been the point man for the Western warhawks, provided the case for intervention, which basically boils down to "We have to violate the UN Charter to protect decades of painstaking work to create rules and regulations to prevent the use of chemical weapons"; that, and the by now -- coming on the heels of support for the Egyptian military coup of a duly elected government -- totally unbelievable tripe about democratic nations living up to their values.

I imagine it's going to be rough going in the days ahead for the warhawks. It doesn't mean that an attack on Syria will not go forward, just that the West is going to pay a price for it, and I hope it's a steep one. Iran is threatening retaliation. Already the Obama administration is talking up the limited nature of its attack -- just some Tomahawk cruise missiles. I wouldn't believe it. And even if the strikes are limited there are always targeting errors and civilian casualties.

A major impediment to the Western case for intervention is the obviously counterintuitive nature of the Syrian government gassing a suburb shortly after the UN inspectors arrive into the country. Tactically there was no call for the attack. There is almost unanimous agreement that the SAA had no need for chemicals; the military was racking up steady gains in the area. The worst thing that Assad had to fear was foreign intervention, the very thing that the opposition has been trying to initiate for years. The rebels had everything to gain and Assad nothing by the use of chemical weapons.

So clearly the basic framework of the civil war up until now points to opposition being the perpetrators of the chemical attack in Ghouta. This is obviously a problem for the warhawks; hence, the story today by CIA scribe and rebel propagandist Anne Barnard, "Reports of Syria Chemical Attack Spur Question: Why?" It's a weak piece of tendentious reporting, but we've come to expect that from Barnard. From the outset she assumes that the Syrian government is the source of the chemical attacks; then she interviews a couple think tank hacks who explain that Assad ordered the attacks because he could, that he knew that there would be no repercussions.

If you were expecting more, that's all there is, which, incidentally, is identical to statement put out by the Syrian National Coalition. No where does Barnard engage the Syrian or Russian position and ask the question "Why would the rebels use chemicals on their own supporters?" The answer of course is too obvious. It's unfolding before our eyes.