Syria again - the cost issue

There is growing opposition in the US and around the world to a "symbolic strike"against Syria, and that is a good thing. Not only is the aftermath unpredictable (retaliation against Israel?  Even more hatred of the US in the Arab world?  What if he uses chemical weapons again?), but the costs are enormous.  Assuming we use Tomahawk cruise missiles for a stand-off strike, at something like $1 million apiece, not counting probably as much additional costs per missile in the costs of running and maintaining the navy ships that would fire them, a modest strike on Syria, that would probably have no real effect on the ongoing struggle, might run us $150-250 million or more.

Is this really a wise use of money at a time when we have real economic problems? Yes, I know Congress wastes money in the billions every year. But still, $150-250 million or so just so the president can say he did something, even if it is ineffective???

Are chemical weapons really “different”?

President Obama has repeatedly said that if the Syrian government used chemical weapons it would cross a “red line” and there would be consequences. It is pretty certain they now have, and so now the president is boxed in to doing something in Syria or appearing to have just bluffed, with significant consequences for other situations in places like North Korea and Iran.  So the president, perhaps in cooperation with some allies, will no doubt make some sort of symbolic (but probably largely ineffective)  military strike in Syria.

But one has to ask if chemical weapons really are any different than other kinds of weapons. People are just as dead from bullets or machetes or shrapnel or bombs as they are from chemical attacks. What, really, is so different about chemical weapons in the end?

This is a repeat of the phobia about nuclear weapons, which in fact killed less people in World War II than firebombing.

In fact, both nuclear weapons and chemical weapons are really just terror weapons, not particularly effective battlefield weapons.  In the case of nuclear weapons, there is a tremendous amount of energy released, but it is too concentrated. On the battlefield it would only be useful if the enemy conveniently massed all their troops and tanks and artillery into a small area.  It might, for example, conceivably have been useful if the Soviet Army had ever invaded Germany through the Fulda Gap, thereby concentrating its forces into a very small area.  And it might conceivably be useful against an aircraft carrier group.  But otherwise it is just a terror weapon against civilians in cities.  

Chemical weapons are also of questionable use in the battlefield. Yes, it hampers the enemy, who have to wear cumbersome protective gear, but then so do the approaching friendly forces, since the winds can carry the gases or aerosols back into one’s own lines as well.  Again, chemical weapons are really just terror weapons, not particularly effective battlefield weapons.

The real concern is that rebel forces will get their hands on Syria’s stock of chemical weapons and they will pass into the hands of terrorists who might well like to use them against civilians in cities.  That concern has been there all along, not just now. And if President Obama really wants to deal with that threat he will have to send troops in (up to 60,000 troops by one general’s reckoning) to capture and remove those stocks before the rebels get them.  He doesn’t seem prepared to do that.

It is true that there are no good choices for the administration in the Syrian situation, just bad and worse choices.  But just staying out of the whole mess may well be the best of the bad choices, despite the ongoing slaughter.  The only effective way for us to stop the slaughter would be a full-scale invasion, giving us another Iraq.  We can do without that!.

Recommended: Obama's Bluff

George Friedman at STRATFOR has a very good and very perceptive piece today: Obama's Bluff.  He lays out clearly the foreign policy dilemma that faces the administration in the Syrian civil war as the claims of chemical attacks grow.

Obama's College Reform Plan

President Obama has just proposed a college reform plan. As is usual with such federal initiatives, it completely misses the point, and if implemented will probably not have the intended consequences.

The president proposes to use federal power to make public some key attributes of colleges and universities, like their graduation rates and proportion of graduates who get jobs.  That part is fine in theory, though exactly how they will figure out if a graduate has an "adequate" job is a question (will flipping hamburgers at a McDonalds for a PhD graduate qualify as "having a job"?).  He also proposes to adjust federal grants on the basis of such numbers.  Apparently -- once again -- he has forgotten how people game such rules.  If grants are apportioned according to graduation rates, colleges will simply increase graduation rates by inflating grades and lowering the already abysmally low bar for passing a course.

The president's plan simply doesn't take into account that it is federal grants and federal intervention that have caused much of this problem in the first place. Because of all the federal infusion of money, colleges have gone on wild building sprees, increased their tuition dramatically, and raised the salaries of their top administrators to ridiculous heights. And what is more, several recent studies show that all the federal tuition help and grants that were supposed to make college available to more low-income students hasn't, in fact, made much of a difference.  For example, when the government increased the amount of tuition help it would provide, colleges just reduced their own contributions proportionally, so the student saw little or no net change.

Once again the politicians propose to spend a lot of taxpayer money doing something that sounds good, but in fact is useless and misses the main problem entirely.

The silence is deafening

When George Zimmerman (a Hispanic) shot Trayvon Martin (black) while Trayvon was sitting on top of Zimmerman and beating him up, the usual highly vocal self-appointed civil rights activists like the Rev Al Sharpton and Rev Jesse Jackson inundated the media with claims that this was another racist crime.  And when a jury found Zimmerman innocent of murder, we had to hear days of ranting by such black activists that this was yet another case of white America being racist.

But when three older (black) kids in Florida viciously beat up a (white) 6^th grader on a school bus on July 9, we heard not a peep from these gentlemen. Not even when the media contacted them for comment.

And when three (black) kids gunned down a random (white) Australian jogger in Oklahoma on August, simply because they were bored, all we got from Rev Jackson was a comment about how senseless it was – not a word about why black boys picked a white target.

Nor has President Obama, who spoke so eloquently about the Trayvon Martin case, found it expedient to say a word about these cases.

It is pretty clear that there is racism in America, and some of the worst of it is to be found among the current crop of black civil rights activists.

Is the NSA scandal a tipping point?

Edward Snowden’s leaked documents about current US government surveillance programs have produced a predictable flurry of news reports and Congressional outrage. The vast expansion of the government counterterrorism bureaucracy since 9/11 has been documented repeatedly, with little real effect. Nor is it unexpected that all these agencies would push for ever more powers and funding, and rely on ever more secrecy to avoid as much oversight as they can get away with. So I don’t find it surprising to discover that the NSA has been collecting information about the telephone habits of Americans. It was common knowledge years ago that the NSA had installed major tapping equipment – whole floors of buildings - at several major telephone and internet hubs in the US.

 I do find it appalling:

(a) that the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, by the recent admission of its own chief justice, receives such limited, biased, and one-sided information from the agencies that it supervises that in effect it can’t really supervise them at all. In fact, one program ran for months before the court heard about it, declared it unconstitutional, and brought it (we hope) to a halt. (see the Washington Post article Court: Ability to police U.S. spying program limited. )

(b) that last March, before the Snowden leaks, when Director of Intelligence James Clapper was asked by Senator Wyden at a Senate hearing if NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans”, Clapper lied and responded “No sir.” It is hard to see what effective oversight Congress can exercise if the agency heads it questions can lie, apparently with impunity, since Clapper hasn’t been fired for this.

(c) that the NSA broke its own privacy rules, if perhaps inadvertently, thousands of times in a year, according to its own internal investigation, but never revealed this fact to the Congressional intelligence committee that is supposed to have oversight. Only when Edward Snowden leaked the report was it ever acknowledged by the NSA. (see the Washington Post article NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds. )

It’s pretty clear from these revelations that the government counter-terrorism agencies are running amok with their surveillance activities, no doubt at a horrendous cost. Despite President Obama’s rather feeble public assurances, it is clear that the oversight procedures in place are thoroughly ineffective. And in fact, without Edward Snowden’s indiscretions, we wouldn’t even know about it.

The question is whether these revelations will be a tipping point, resulting in any effective action to restrain them, or whether after a short media feeding frenzy things will simply go back to the way they were, and the government will continue to infringe increasingly on the privacy of American citizens without their knowledge or assent.

Egypt and the illusion of democracy

When the “Arab spring” was in full flower there was lots of optimistic talk among politicians and the “chattering classes” of how wonderful it was to see democracy taking root in the Middle East. Now that many of those nations are in full-blown civil wars, including Egypt and Syria, it should have become apparent that democracy was never on the agenda for any of these nations, despite “free and fair elections”, nor could it have been.

I don’t know why we keep falling for the progressive claim that elections means democracy. Repressive regimes like Iran and Russia have been running rigged elections for decades now and no one was under any illusion that these were becoming “democratic” nations. Why should we think it would be any different in the Middle East? In fact, democracy requires a whole set of cultural preconditions, including a real rule of law, enforced legal protection of property rights, enforced legal restrains on the government, and dozens of others.

Nations which are tribal in organization, imbued with ancient ethnic and religious hatreds within their populations, in which nepotism and bribery are a way of life, and used to authoritarian rule are nowhere near ready to try democracy, and an election doesn’t change anything.

This is, I think, another example of looking at the world through our own cultural myths rather than seeing it the way it really is.