Legality Aside, International Community Accepts Syrian Airstrikes
"On paper, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should be one of ISIS' greatest enemies. Assad runs a Shia dictatorship and ISIS is a Sunni extremist group. Assad is trying to regain his grip on all of Syria, and ISIS currently holds a big chunk of the country.
Except Assad has deliberately nurtured ISIS [that emphasis added here, see below also] or at least tacitly allowed its rise, as a means of marginalizing more moderate rebels whom outside powers like the US might have supported against him. The Syrian dictator and ISIS seem to have made an implicit deal: ISIS temporarily gets a relatively free ride in some chunks of Syria, while Assad gets to weaken his other opponents. This allows Assad to divide the rebels, and to force the world to choose between him and ISIS."
BY Siobhán O'Grady SEPTEMBER 23, 2014 - 07:23 PM
The first U.S. airstrikes on Islamic State strongholds in Syria Monday triggered a quiet hum from the international community, even though the bombing was launched without an invitation from the Syrian government.
The strikes, which attacked ISIS positions in Raqqa, a small city in north-central Syria, were conducted by a coalition of forces from Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power defended the attacks in a letter to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon Tuesday.
"The Syrian regime has shown that it cannot and will not confront these safe havens effectively itself," the letter reads. "Accordingly, the United States has initiated necessary and proportionate military actions in Syria in order to eliminate the ongoing ISIL threat to Iraq, including by protecting Iraqi citizens from further attacks and by enabling Iraqi forces to regain control of Iraq's borders," she wrote, using one of the Islamic State's acronyms.
Power may have specifically referenced Iraq because of the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution that gives the president authority to intervene militarily in Iraq. As for the attacks targeting the Khorasan Group, an al Qaeda splinter group in Syria, a senior administration official said the threat they posed was also strong enough to validate an attack against them .. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/09/22/us_begins_airstrikes_inside_syria_.
"Strikes against the Khorasan Group were taken by the United States, in U.S. national self-defense, because of the imminent attack plotting against U.S. and Western interests," the official said. "Intelligence indicated that these operatives were nearing the execution phase for an attack in Europe or the United States, which is why we needed to take decisive action against them."
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who is one of two congressional delegates to the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York this week, said in an interview that there was consensus at all the forums he attended on Tuesday that American intervention is necessary to combat the rising threat of the Islamic State, or ISIS.
"Extreme violence and this terrorist-led activity is an existential threat to so many states in the Arab world and a real threat to Americans and the West that people realize it has to be dealt with," he said. "I haven't heard any talk that the United States is overstepping its bounds, and the world is welcoming American leadership."
Earlier this month, Russian officials made clear they rebuke any offensive in Syria without explicit permission from Assad, calling the possibility a "gross violation of international law." But other than a quick comment from the Russian foreign ministry, even their lips were zipped Tuesday, likely because the areas targeted are no longer controlled by the Syrian government and will actually benefit Assad, a Russian ally, if they successfully drive out ISIS.
Daniel Byman, director of research and a senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, said that even Moscow probably won't speak up as the strikes continue because pushing the issue won't benefit it politically.
"Russia may make that claim but is not going to hark on it because Russia wants to see the United States intervening against ISIS," he said. "It's worried about the radicalizing spreading itself and the U.S. is attacking the enemies of the Assad regime, which is Russia's ally, from their view."
The rapid growth and wide scope of the Islamic State's threat have helped Obama garner support and get other nations on board, which was evident in the Arab coalition that participated in the strikes on Monday. Speaking before the U.N. Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry said ISIS threatens the region's stability and the West's safety.
"We have been very clear from the beginning: We will not allow geography or borders to prevent us from taking action against ISIL."
Elias Groll and Shane Harris contributed to this report.
But it may be time to ask whether this split — both in how extensive it is and what its significance might be — is getting overblown.
I’m not arguing that everybody’s in perfect agreement over the strategy to combat ISIS. There are no doubt some in the military who would like to re-invade Iraq, and some who think the strategy the President laid out won’t be sufficient to accomplish his goals. And there has been tension between this White House and the Pentagon before, particularly when Obama felt that generals were trying to manipulate him into approving policies in Afghanistan.
But let’s look closely at what it is they’re disagreeing about when it comes to ISIS. Many in the media seem to be a little fuzzy on exactly what has been ruled in or out. We could use some clarity on what we mean when we say “ground troops.”
This is actually a pretty innocuous, not to mention obvious, thing to say. War is complicated and dynamic, and of course we’d always want military leaders to tell the civilian leadership what they think ought to be done, even if it would contradict something the civilian leaders had pledged before.
Nevertheless, Dempsey’s testimony got a huge amount of attention, framed as a bitter conflict between the military and the President. Take the interview .. http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/robert-gates-week-25655428 .. George Stephanopoulos did yesterday with Robert Gates, who was defense secretary under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Stephanopoulos starts by all but begging Gates to go after Obama: “You were very blunt this week on the question of ground troops, said the strategy can’t succeed without boots on the ground, something the president has ruled out. So do you think the president’s strategy is doomed or is he not being straight with the American people?”
Gates responds by saying that when he refers to ground troops he’s talking about something far different from an invasion force: “some small number of American advisers, trainers, special forces and forward spotters, forward air controllers are going to have to be in harm’s way, and I think that number will be very small.”
That’s not too different from what Obama himself has already proposed, and Gates spent most of the interview agreeing with the President. But the chyrons running on the screen through the segment read, “Rift between Obama and military?” and “Power struggle over strategy?”
Meanwhile, over on Meet the Press, former Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen got asked a similar set of questions. He replied: “I think it’s been blown way out of proportion in terms of the disagreement between the military and the President.”
The question of what exactly is a “ground troop” is something we’ll have to be acutely aware of in the coming months, because there certainly is a danger of mission creep. We could start out with only advisers and trainers, then add those forward air controllers (who are near the front lines but aren’t firing at the enemy), then add special forces. It might stop there. Or it might not. At that point there might indeed be growing and significant differences between the military and the President, which are worth understanding. Obama himself has been emphatic about not using “combat troops,” but would we really be surprised if a few months from now he approves some limited deployment of special forces to carry out specific missions?
For now, though, the fact that some in the military don’t agree with the President on strategy is not only a feature of pretty much every military conflict, it’s also an inevitable outgrowth of the American system. When we established civilian control over the military, the purpose wasn’t to make generals happy. Some of them will grumble sometimes, and that’s fine. But we shouldn’t make more out of those disagreements than they warrant.
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