US considering strikes on Syrian regime/Russians

Washington Post article

Obama administration considering strikes on Assad, again​

U.S. military strikes against the Assad regime will be back on the table Wednesday at the White House, when top national security officials in the Obama administration are set to discuss options for the way forward in Syria. But there’s little prospect President Obama will ultimately approve them.

Inside the national security agencies, meetings have been going on for weeks to consider new options to recommend to the president to address the ongoing crisis in Aleppo, where Syrian and Russian aircraft continue to perpetrate the deadliest bombing campaign the city has seen since the five-year-old civil war began. A meeting of the Principals Committee, which includes Cabinet-level officials, is scheduled for Wednesday. A meeting of the National Security Council, which could include the president, could come as early as this weekend.

Last Wednesday, at a Deputies Committee meeting at the White House, officials from the State Department, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed limited military strikes against the regime as a means of forcing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to pay a cost for his violations of the cease-fire, disrupt his ability to continue committing war crimes against civilians in Aleppo, and raise the pressure on the regime to come back to the negotiating table in a serious way.​

We violated the cease fire when we bombed his troops, killing 62. That showed that we cannot be trusted to be acting in good faith, and gave the Russians and Syrian regime every pretext to withdraw from any talks.

The options under consideration, which remain classified, include bombing Syrian air force runways using cruise missiles and other long-range weapons fired from coalition planes and ships, an administration official who is part of the discussions told me. One proposed way to get around the White House’s long-standing objection to striking the Assad regime without a U.N. Security Council resolution would be to carry out the strikes covertly and without public acknowledgment, the official said.​

Yes, the Obama Administration is reaching peak mental retardation. Nobody would ever suspect that the covert cruise missile strike that the WaPo just talked about would be from the US. We'll just point the finger at... the Haitians. Yeah, that's it. We'll blame the cruise missiles on the Haitians.

The CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, represented in the Deputies Committee meeting by Vice Chairman Gen. Paul Selva, expressed support for such “kinetic” options, the official said. That marked an increase of support for striking Assad compared with the last time such options were considered.

“There’s an increased mood in support of kinetic actions against the regime,” one senior administration official said. “The CIA and the Joint Staff have said that the fall of Aleppo would undermine America’s counterterrorism goals in Syria.”​

How is having Assad crush the terrorists undermining our "counter-terrorism goals"? If we were giving our full-fledged support to ISIS and al-Nusra, we'd be looking to bomb Assad's forces to stop his advances in Aleppo. Our military is looking to bomb Assad's forces to stop his advances in Aleppo. Ergo, our policy can't be distinguished from a policy that would be supporting ISIS and al-Nusra.

Later the article says:

The National Security Council’s senior coordinator for the Middle East, Rob Malley, and the president’s special envoy to the coalition for the fight against the Islamic State, Brett McGurk, are also said to be against any military escalation against the Assad regime, officials said. There’s no consensus on what options should be sent to the president’s desk. Other options include increased weapons for some Syrian rebel groups and an increase in the quality of such weapons, to allow rebels to defend Aleppo’s civilians.​

The administration is indeed retarded. We can't fly over Aleppo because of Russian air defenses, and Aleppo is surrounded, so how do they propose to get these advanced weapons to the rebel groups in Aleppo to "defend Aleppo's civilians". Second, how would better weapons help "defend Aleppo's civilians" when they're surrounded and have had their food and water cut off? The most more weapons would do is extend the amount of damage Putin and Assad's forces will have to inflict to complete their assault. If our goal is to make Aleppo worse than the siege of Stalingrad or the fall of Berlin, then by all means, send more weapons by smuggling them in UN aid convoys - to prove that Russia was wise to bomb such convoys.

If Obama does not approve greater support for the Syrian rebels or increased coalition pressure on the Assad regime, the only option left is to wait out the siege of Aleppo and reengage the Russians if and when Aleppo falls, albeit in a weaker position.

Former State Department Syria official Frederic Hof wrote Mondaythat any policy going forward that hinges on the assumption that Russia is looking for a near-term diplomatic solution in Syria is destined for failure.

“Whatever excuses the administration offers for leaving Syrians defenseless against mass murder, the continued search for common ground with Vladimir Putin should not be one of them,” he wrote. “If nothing else, John Kerry’s exhaustive diplomatic due diligence should retire that illusion permanently.”

Kerry’s deputy, Antony Blinken, testified last week that the U.S. leverage in Russia comes from the notion that Russia will eventually become weary of the cost of its military intervention in Syria. “The leverage is the consequences for Russia of being stuck in a quagmire that is going to have a number of profoundly negative effects,” Blinken told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.​

And the whole "quagmire" crock is a recurring theme with Kerry. A war is only a quagmire if you can't win or don't have the will to win. The Russians don't have that problem. They're willing to fight to the last Syrian Sunni. The repeated application of high explosives can solve all sorts of social and demographic problems that leave Kerry flummoxed. And when they're done they'll just up and leave.

The argument against more U.S. military intervention in Syria, including strikes against the regime, is based on risks that should be taken seriously but that are ultimately hypothetical. The effects of continuing the current policy are not hypothetical. They include more of what we are seeing now: Russia and the Assad regime committing war crimes against civilians with impunity and destroying Syria’s largest city.​

The city is already a pile of rubble. Bulldoze the whole place and start over. What Assad and Putin are doing is bringing the war to an end - on their terms, just was the US, UK, Canada, and the Soviet Union did in WW-II. The way to end the fighting was to end it - by the repeated use of high explosives. It works. What we've been doing does not work, and turning us into the ISIS Air Force won't work either.

Is President Obama TRYING to leave President Hillary Clinton a bigger mess than he inherited?

So, if we bomb Assad and kill him, wipe out ISIS, slaughter Al Queda & the Taliban, then other equally horrific despots / demonic death cults rises to take their places. The unending cycle of death that defines the entire Middle East region continues unabated. Ancient tribal vendettas that will never, ever be resolved.

Cough*S400*cough.

SAMs never work as well as claimed

Then why advocate placing them everywhere possible?

Who me?

SAMs are one more factor that an attacking force has to consider. Forcing them to outfit more of their aircraft as Wild Weasels or forcing individual aircraft to carry more defense suppression gear instead of offensive ordnance.

Also, western nations are hypersensitive to causalities. Especially pilots and air crew who are very often severely mistreated if captured.

The last time a pilot was shot down and captured in Syria, he ended up being burned alive in a cage.

I don't imagine the SAA would do that. They might rough him up some though, like Saddam's guys did in the war of '91.

The Russians would be more likely to treat him decently. No beatings, no torture. Well enough fed. They would likely keep him a while to use as a bargaining chip though. That said, if Russian forces in Syria captured a pilot they would likely hand him over to the SAA, at which point see paragraph 2 above.

If we go after Russian air defenses using naval assets, the likely Russian response would be to sink one of our aircraft carriers in the region to eliminate the threat.

You really think the Russians would go after U.S. carrier?

It would be the equivalent of declaring war.

And what if they failed?

Doesn't matter if they fail, the message would be sent. Declaring war would be launching cruise missiles or HARMs at Russian radar crews.

This is a massive load of horseshit.

Highly unlikely scenario. Russian air assets would be shot down well before they could get anywhere near our carriers in the region.

Cool story, bro. We have a remedy for SAM systems, such as the S400.

They would likely use a sub. Those often succeed in making a close pass of a carrier group. Plus, they've spent 50 years developing weapons to take out US aircraft carriers, and we'd likely remove our high-value assets from the area of the threat. Meanwhile they're practicing evacuating Moscow for a nuclear war scenario. Only an idiot would poke at them to protect bombed out suburbs filled with jihadists who we want to eliminate anyway.

We don't have good remedies for the S-400 except perhaps cruise missiles (which it can detect and engage), as we've instead let our anti-SAM capabilities rust in favor of stealth platforms and because it's been a long time since we faced a serious SAM capability. The S-400 is an extremely long range system (250 miles) that would be tricky to grapple with since we'd be flying over hostile territory the whole time, and with no ready ability to recover downed aircrews.

Where on earth do you get your information?

From some of the military writers at War on the Rocks who wrote at length about our neglect of the SEAD mission (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses). We're working on a new winged smart bomb that will give our pilots some much needed stand-off strike range, but it won't be fielded for some time.

The basic problem is that the Russians and Chinese now have access to very advanced electronics, something that used to be the domain of the West, and which had given us key advantages. We were going up against vacuum tube radars with missiles that had on board high speed digital computes. Well now they're fielding weapons that can, in many respects, outperform our Patriots, with a much longer range, bigger warhead, and a larger and more powerful radar, We've been spoiled by largely going up against Soviet 1970's or 80's era equipment.

Point of order: I think the Russians would well feed a captured pilot, then drown them in vodka, get the information they want, then just shoot him.

If they did that, Hillary would say "AT THIS POINT, WHAT DOES IT MATTER?"

A blog, huh? Figures.

Russian troops on SYRIAN soil are a huge diplomatic difference from U.S. ships in international waters.

U.S. ships are by U.S. , international and maritime law and centuries of tradition the territory of the United States. Attacking a carrier would be the same as attacking Norfolk, Virginia.

You know the U.S. could've prevented all this from the beginning if we had used 500,000 troops in Iraq and kept them rolling right on into Syria in 2003.

But the Bush Admin. was too scared to be that daring given Bush had only been elected by a minority of the voters in 2000.

Keep sucking dick for that petrodollar, shill.

That's a spectacular amount of wrong you've packed into a mere two sentences. Very impressive!

Putin loves Russia more than Obama loves America.

I can't wait until ol' Jug Ears is back in Hawaii picking up hookers while a real American works for America, not himself.

Then you should have no problems explaining the errors?

Good. The further away the better.

The majority of Syrians support Assad. That's not a "largest minority" pseudomajority either, i.e. they all support different things and Assad has the biggest share of support while still being less than 50% of the whole. Nope, it's not that at all. It's a true majority - all the other causes in Syria combined, Al-Nusra, the FSA, ISIS etc. etc. combined have the support of less than 40% of the population. Over 60% of Syrians support the government of President Assad.

The USA has no business sticking its nose in there trying to bring him down. None at all.