The Stupid Continues
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has approved a resolution to give Zero 60-90 days to blow things up in Syria, but there will be no US troops on the ground. The debate was so intense that überHawk John McCain played poker on his iPhone [verified].
Now it goes to the full Senate for more ‘serious debate’ and possibly a vote.
This is not going to affect the use of chemical weapons by Assad. The conflict is existential, a matter of survival, for both sides. The ‘winners’ will massacre the ‘losers’ and both sides know it. The Saudis have released their ‘dogs of war’, the charming group that cuts out hearts and bites out a chunk. Hezbollah remembers these fighters from when the Saudis sent them into Lebanon.
This isn’t about politics, it’s about survival. If the Opposition ‘wins’ it will be a replay of the ‘Reign of Terror’ that followed the French Revolution. The ‘dogs of war’ are already talking about killing all of the non-Sunni inhabitants of Syria, not just the Alawi. If Assad’s forces win, they will make sure there is no one left to oppose them.
13 comments
The main difference is that Assad *can’t* kill all the Sunni. If he does, he doesn’t have a nation left, because that’s around 75% of the population. There would not be enough people left to keep Syria viable. Whereas the Sunni very well *could* kill all the Alawites without destroying the viability of the nation.
From a viewpoint of preventing genocide, in other words, hope for an Assad victory. The aftermath will be bloody, as anybody who ever said a good word about Islamists is put to death, but at least it won’t be genocide.
The rest of the world is two years too late to do anything meaningful in Syria. At this point the surrounding nations are going to need a lot of help dealing with the refugees fleeing the fighting. Part of the problem was the pressure put on Syria during the middle of a drought by the influx of Iraqi refugees.
Food and water is the most urgent need, not explosions.
From WikiPedia, “Dog (engineering)”: “In engineering a dog is a tool that prevents movement or imparts movement by offering physical obstruction or engagement of some kind.” You might consider the possibility that a “dog” is not a critter but rather a mechanical device, a catch to be released.
Although another wiki says “dog” has its usual meaning in “let slip,” I’ve always imagined some sort of blocks under the wheels of engines of war, ready to be pulled out to send those engines careening forward toward an enemy. If they were, instead, literal canines, wouldn’t Shakespeare have used “unleash” instead of “let slip”?
This message has been brought to you by The Ghost of Steve’s English Teacher Mother…
Most good workbenches have ‘dog stops’, basically holes drilled in the surface into which pegs are inserted to hold things in place while they are being worked on. On some catapults, there is a ‘dog’ or peg used to hold it in place for loading after it has been hauled down under tension. That type of catapult is released by hammering out the peg [similar to the ‘firing pin’]. The reference is probably to the shape of these pegs, as many have a ‘dog-leg’ bend to give you something to grip when pulling them out.
War dogs were on very short leashes, and the handlers simply let go as there were none of those convenient hooks that we now use available, i.e. they let the dogs slip out of their hands.
Wheels are chocked.
Added: OT – Steve, Blogger hates me again and I’m having no luck commenting using name/site or my WordPress ID at your place. I don’t even get to Captcha when I try preview or post.
don’t know how they did it with the dogs of war in the days of yore, but nowadays it’s more like let slip the dogs of flyball, or lure coursing…
http://mylifewithflyballdogs.blogspot.com/2011/09/lure-coursing-slip-leads-and-giveaway.html
Syria started calling for help when they were swamped with Iraqi refugees back at the beginning of The Chimperor’s Most Excellent Adventure. Nobody seems to have cared then, or now. As for Baby Assad, it appears that his biggest flaw was that he actually listened to some of those neo-liberal types rather than reverting to his daddy’s authoritarian Communism, which at least would have made everybody equally miserable instead of the vast inequality between suffering lower classes and comfortable upper classes. Instead he listened to the neoliberal types who told him that the solution to widespread hunger was more “free market”. North Korea has endured far worse food crises without exploding but when “free market” results in much famine and misery suffered by only part of the population rather than the whole population, no country is going to remain stable. Once the food riots started, the chance of things ending without bloodshed basically went to zero.
He pulled a ‘Stalin’ in the second year of the drought when wheat prices went through the roof and exported what amounted to Syria’s seed grain to score major hard currency, and make the food problems even worse. When the displaced farmers went to the cities to compete for jobs against the Iraqi refugees while the price of food was soaring, as you say, the outcome was going to be riots. People won’t willingly starve to death.
Bryan, as you are one of my three or so regular readers, it is frustrating that you aren’t able to comment on my site. But damned if I know what to do about it. Have you tried commenting under a different identity?
Bryan, farmers in Syria used to get heavily subsidized fertilizer and seed and were also loaned the money to buy seed and fertilizer by the government. Baby Assad listened to the neo-liberals and quit doing that. So even though the drought is now over, the farmers have neither seed nor fertilizer. They’re fscked. And they blame Baby Assad.
I’ll try that, Steve, and ID in the text. It seems like the last time this happened it straightened itself out in a day or so. I may be trying to comment when they are working on the system.
Yeah, and if the US decided ‘to help’, it would probably be with neutered GM grain to makes them bond servants of US agribusiness. They need the wheat that they have always grown, because it is the best suited to the conditions, but Assad sold it to make a few bucks for his friends and family.
If they don’t restart the farmers, they have nothing to sell, as well as nothing to eat. Until people start to feel the conflict is no longer existential, there is less than no chance for a truce, much less negotiations. Without food and water, what is there to talk about – the make-up of a parliament?
I will assume that the majority of Syrians just want the killing to stop, and life to return to a state as near to normal as is possible. They want to get back to their real lives, with some assurances that they will be alive tomorrow.
The most productive variant of wheat in the area was created by a research group in Aleppo, and is grown throughout the Middle East. So a supply of seed is not a problem, there is plenty of seed in the area well adapted to Syrian conditions, because the Syrians created the most popular variety of wheat grown in Jordan and Iraq. But the farmers have no money to buy it, or to buy fertilizer, or to buy fuel for their tractors. The chaos of civil war doesn’t help, because armies trampling back and forth over wheat fields and blowing up the infrastructure (barns, silos, tractors, etc.) don’t do them much good either.
It is a tragedy, and blowing up yet more of the infrastructure is not going to resolve it. Because Assad and his loyalists certainly are taking measures to make sure that they themselves aren’t in the line of fire when the cruise missiles start landing…
Blowing things up seems to be the only solution the US has anymore, and it doesn’t make any difference what the problem is. We wait until the situation reaches a crisis and then we make it worse by blowing something up.
It would be nice if just once we would put a little effort out to stop something from getting worse by spending a little money and effort early in the process. You just can’t convince the US government to do anything until things have gotten so bad, that nothing we do will make any real difference.
We both know that the Assad clan has already prepared a comfortable ‘retirement’ for themselves if things get critical.