"Only politicians and defense contractors want this war"

Syrian President Bashar Assad

US President Barack Obama

We should all be engaged in some hard thinking this week as the Obama Administration goes all out to convince us that launching a war with Syria is the "last resort" available in responding to Assad's alleged use of chemical weapons on his own people.

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass puts the matter into perspective:

Dogs aren't as beloved in Syria as they are here. In the Middle East, our four-footed friends are generally considered unclean. They don't live inside houses. They're not allowed near a kitchen.
And they don't legislate war policy or decide the fate of millions of people.
 
But watching President Barack Obama stumble through his news conference from the G-20 summit last week and trying to talk us into war with Syria, I couldn't help thinking about dogs.

It was a stupid thought, yes, but I didn't put it there. One of the president's men put it there. A guy named David Axelrod, who brought it up on Twitter.

Axelrod, the Democratic mouthpiece of Chicago mayors, is the guy who aligned himself with an inexperienced Illinois legislative back-bencher and ended up installing him in the White House.

And after the president announced he would seek congressional approval for military strikes against Syria, Axelrod signaled his journalists by spinning them a tweet.

"Big move by POTUS," read Axelrod's tweet. "Consistent with his principles. Congress is now the dog that caught the car. Should be a fascinating week!"

Consistent with his principles? Like the drone strikes? Like the NSA surveillance? Like the IRS investigations of conservative groups? Like no answers about the dead from Benghazi? All those principles?

If Axelrod thought last week was fascinating, this week should be even more entertaining. The president doesn't have the votes in Congress for his war in Syria, but he'll try to make his case in a national television address scheduled for Tuesday.

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Good question: has there ever been a successful humanitarian intervention?

In case you're wondering where Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was when the Obama Administration began its drumbeat to war with Syria, it's important to remember that Hagel's nomination as defense secretary was originally opposed by his own party members as he was described as anti-interventionist. That could be the reason he appears to have been left out of the current war preparations.

At the Christian Century, Steve Thorngate raises more than one good question about the Obama Administration's drumbeat to war with Syria. Leading off his thoughtful analysis of the wisdom of pursuing "nebulous and unlikely goals via deadly, expensive missiles that are all too concrete," Thorngate writes:

This weekend President Obama surprised everyone by choosing to seek permission now rather than forgiveness later on the Syria front. While the congressional leadership quickly got behind Obama’s plan for a military strike, it’ll be a harder sell for others on both sides of the aisle.

James Fallows is impressed with Obama’s decision to go to Congress. So, presumably, are the almost 40,000 people who signed this MoveOn petition. And sure: if your main concern is (1) constitutionality, (2) the growing power of the executive branch, and/or (3) legislators’ ability to make a lot of noise about (1) and (2) without having to actually record a vote one way or the other, then this is welcome news.

But as always, it’s tempting to let the politics on this side of the world overshadow the death and destruction on that side. Waiting for congressional authorization is good. Better still: not pursuing nebulous and unlikely goals via deadly, expensive missiles that are all too concrete.

Last year, Steven Cook called for intervention in Syria, arguing that the situation was not as different from Libya as anti-interventionists insisted. Now he’s changed his mind: the situation is Syria has deteriorated so much that intervention “would advance Syria’s dissolution.”

But even if the comparison to Libya still holds, the intervention in Libya was not the unqualified success we’ve often heard about, as Freddie deBoer explains. Writing from liberal interventionists’ left flank, deBoer aims to expose the limited value of their good intentions; R. R. Reno does the same from the right. They’re both correct. As this n+1 editorial—reposted from the time of the intervention in Libya—puts it, “that there has never been a successful humanitarian intervention does not mean that there cannot be one in the future. But the evidence is piling up.”

Of course, the Obama administration isn’t calling this a humanitarian intervention. We’re not considering missile strikes to protect Syrian people; we’re doing it to punish Assad for using chemical weapons and to enforce the international norm against their use. But this isn’t as simple as it sounds, either. William Polk argues that chemical weapons are everywhere and their use isn’t as rare as we think. And Richard Price is skeptical that Assad has eroded the anti-CW norm:

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Where has Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel been?

Sec. of State Kerry and Sec. of Defense Hagel, May 2013 (public domain).

Secretary of State John Kerry's mug, along with his pronouncements on the case for a military strike against Syria, have been all over the media in the past several days. It's almost enough to make you forget the State Department's primary responsibilities are traditionally in diplomacy; whereas, the Defense Department, currently led by Secretary Chuck Hagel, is responsible for military matters.

In all of the excitement in the wake of Obama's threat to bomb Syria and Kerry's somber "making the case" for the president, Defense Secretary Hagel had not been heard from - not publicly, at least - until Reuters reported that along with Kerry, he will be making conference calls. You have to note that Kerry's name is listed first:

(Reuters) - Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, and other senior U.S. national security officials will hold conference calls about Syria on Saturday afternoon with the Senate Democratic Caucus as well as the Senate Republican Conference, a White House official said.
The calls, which will be unclassified, are part of "the Administration's consultations regarding the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons in Syria on August 21," the official said.

Here's the question: has our secretary of defense been left out of the process in Obama's war-making efforts and if so, why?

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Military justice - an oxymoron for sexual assault victims in the armed forces

NY Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat (official portrait).

NY Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is right. Military justice is an oxymoron when it comes to sexual assault victims in the armed forces. And it’s way past time to take these decisions out of the hands of commanding officers.

The NY Times editorial board agrees with Sen. Gillibrand:

In his commencement address at the United States Military Academy late last month, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel urged the newest graduates of the two-centuries-old academy to help stamp out the “scourge” of sexual assaults in the military. His call had special resonance. It had been revealed just days before that a sergeant responsible for advising cadets had been charged with secretly videotaping female cadets in the shower — just one of an alarming cascade of incidents in recent weeks evidencing the depth, frequency and sheer brazenness of the military’s sexual misconduct problem.

Last Friday, allegations surfaced that three members of the United States Naval Academy football team had sexually assaulted a female midshipman in April 2012. When she reported the attack, her lawyer said, she was disciplined for drinking but the academy did not bring charges against the three and allowed them to keep playing football. 

A Pentagon report released in early May estimated that as many as 26,000 people in the military were sexually assaulted in 2012, up from an already unacceptable 19,000 in 2011. Only a small fraction of victims — 3,374 in all — reported their attacks, despite new assistance programs, with many fearing harm to their careers and that their complaints would not be taken seriously anyway. 

The issue will get an airing Tuesday at a hearing convened by Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, to consider possible changes in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, using the annual defense authorization bill as a vehicle. The question, however, is whether Congress will undertake the broad reforms necessary to encourage more victims to come forward and to show that legislators take seriously the pledge of zero tolerance for such crimes that military leaders and successive administrations have been making for decades. 

A bill offered by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, and co-sponsored by four Republicans and 13 other Democrats aims to do just that. Under the current system, senior officers with no legal training but with lots of conflicts of interest get to decide whether court-martial charges can be brought against subordinates. They also pick the jury pool, and they can throw out a guilty finding even after a verdict is rendered. A recent series in The San Antonio Express-News detailed instances in which senior officers put pressure on victims to get them to drop charges. 

Ms. Gillibrand’s bill would mandate immediate referral of formal complaints of sexual misconduct to investigators, and would take charging decisions out of the hands of commanders and give them to senior military lawyers independent of the chain of command. While not the entire answer, this is a necessary step for bolstering the system’s credibility. The bill would also strip commanders of the power to toss out verdicts involving serious crimes. 

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