by: John Hayward
The Obama Administration is quite intent on bombing Syria, unleashing a blizzard of statements and leaks that stopped just short of asking dictator Bashar Assad to RSVP for his scheduled punitive strikes. The bombing could begin as early as Thursday, will last for three days, and will not be designed to either kill Assad or turn the tide of the Syrian civil war against him.
It will be a "message" bombing of carefully calibrated "signals" delivered by cruise missile. Assad will remain in power (and, by all indications, on track to win his long and bloody struggle against the insurgency, which is unfortunately mixed up with al-Qaeda.) But he'll be chastised into thinking that using chemical weapons isn't worth the hassle.
Of course, authorization from Congress will not be sought for any of this - don't be silly! - but it looks like there won't be a green light from the U.N. Security Council, either, which is something President Obama and his Secretary of State, 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry, claimed to care deeply about, back when a Republican President was in office.
But this will be a bombing for the United Nations, as well as an effort to salvage President Obama's credibility. The international order is heavily dependent upon the concept of "red lines" for weapons of mass destruction. If Assad can ignore this one with impunity, his good friends and patrons in Iran will conclude they can ignore the red lines around their nuclear ambitions, too. This will be a bombing for peace, because if diplomats cannot declare certain actions unacceptable or unthinkable for rogue states, the entire system represented by the United Nations will be rendered transparently meaningless.
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