Listening to the Senate hearings on possible US action in Syria it came up a few times that Bashar Al Assad acted irrationally in (allegedly) using chemical weapons on "his own people" which was said "makes no sense" and therefore it must be considered that any action by the US against Assad may result in an irrational response. This line of reasoning is but one of a huge number of assertions and "beliefs" that were flying around in today's hearings and I don't know about you but no one's "belief" is a satisfactory answer to a hypothetical scenario--not on these issues and levels. John Kerry answered time and again "we believe not", or "we think not" or "we believe the opposite will happen". WTF? I don't believe in believing. Either I know or own up to not knowing. And one thing I can say I know is there is a rather alarming and stunning absence of open-mindedness on the part of Kerry and the administration. I really find so much sabre-rattling coming from the Obama crew and nothing else hard to "believe". Turkey Lurky the sky is falling. (Oh dear, did I just quote Donald Rumsfeld? Oh wait, I'm good. That was Henny Penny). They very much seem locked in on skinning their cat one way and one way alone and it's uncharacteristic and worrisome in the extreme.
Assad's (alleged) use of chemical weapons is not irrational. It's heartless. But completely rational if you understand the United States use of chemical weapons in Vietnam. That would be "Agent Orange"--something we were told was a defoliant. It was not. The united States military at the time was geared for World War II style warfare--dropping bombs from the air on factories and rail yards if not the seat of enemy government itself. Artillery was for open field warfare typical of Europe and America in the American Revolution, the American Civil War and the two great European wars of the 20th Century. America tried to apply that kind of warfare to an agrarian people in Vietnam who lacked factories (their arms came fully manufactured from northern allies), there weren't typical military bases with barracks and armories or even wide open battlefields. Millions of tons of bombs were dropped from the sky on jungles, rice patties, villages so flimsy they may have blown away all by themselves in foul weather. The bombs made a lot of noise, left craters and dead farm animals but more often than not they MISSED the ENEMY. And that cost America a lot of money, lives and pissed off Tricky Dick something fierce. So, he sprayed them with Agent Orange, killing a generation of children in the process (that's called genocide by the way). He fogged them out of the ground like cock roaches without missing a wink of sleep. That means everyone--mama san, pappa san, baby san and guerrilla san.
The Syrian rebels are analogous. And so is Assad.
Neither let it be said nor thought that I am trying to validate Assad or give him a pass. The world needs to learn from history and never repeat it. Regrettably however Americans in high places do not even know their own history. And that is especially unforgivable of two Vietnam vets like Mr. Kerry and Mr. Hagel. Maybe they still think Agent Orange was the industrial weed whacker that was the cover story. But it not only killed well more than 100,000 Southeast Asians, it killed a lot of Americans too who either dispersed it or were exposed to it. American history only seems to remember--reluctantly, after a lot of protest and demonstration, that Americans suffered from Agent Orange. When will the truth be taught and lived that we were the bad guys? We committed genocide because Nixon and the military brass were sick of dropping bombs and not getting the body counts they expected. International law was long in effect then. No ifs ands or buts.
This is completely rational to megalomaniacs at war who have no heart for collateral damage. And the Syrian rebellion has many parallels. The rebels don't have factories to bomb. They don't have bases and barracks for the most part. They get weapons from corpses or get them from "interested parties" of god knows what persuasion. Some they can't figure how to use--they plan an attack anyway, argue who is going to try to shoot the whatever it is, and by then Assad loyalists fly over and drop a bomb (missing the untrained rebels and killing a few women in a house thirty meters away). They are not organized. They are largely illiterate farm boys. They make hit and run attacks on Assad's forces and he can't stop them even with his planes and bombs. He has a thousand tons of sarin though. And maybe, just maybe he was pissed off with that particular faction enough to want them dead no matter how. Rational.
So all things considered, I for one have a real problem with the heavy-handed contentions John Kerry was making this afternoon before the Senate. I don't see a pattern of abject recklessness that makes no sense. I see a very calculated deployment of chemical weapons in a civil war for survival where perhaps conventional weapons would just be making a lot of noise, cratering the landscape, killing a cow or a woman here and there and mostly missing the enemy just like the US did in Vietnam. Nancy Pelosi said today that the "red line" was not drawn by President Obama but by humanity a long time ago. But I'm afraid that time was before the US let slip the "fogs of war" on the Vietnamese, and surely way before the US left Iraq poisoned with depleted uranium where it is now poisoning the Eco-system and causing birth defects so grotesque they are hard to look at--that is for the year or two they manage to live.
I'd like to give special props to the man who spoke out about this from the crowd who was quickly silenced by security. He was completely correct and did a courageous thing to try to remind Senators of our own history and, yes, our own atrocities. And special praise to Senators Tom Udall of New Mexico and Tim Kaine of Virginia who were right on in their larger view of the pivotal role of Russia and the need to not consider a solution that doesn't address if not harass this principle player into joining modern civilization and owning their responsibility in this chemical weapons nightmare.