It is a good thing that Russia now has "skin in the game". Instead of sitting on the sidelines disrupting any and all peace efforts without cost, it is now a real party to the conflict and thus a real participant in any resolution.
I was gratified to read this in this morning's New York Times report on the Vienna negotiations because It neatly summarizes the end game I had in mind.
From the NYT:
"“If there is to be a deal,” Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official now at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, wrote on Thursday, the United States and Russia “must create a center of gravity to pull the other players together.”
American officials say they think they have a shot at that, because Russia’s alternative is to be bogged down in the Syrian war. But the Saudis seem to think a far more active military role to counter Iran is imperative.'"
As Jimmy Carter urged months ago, resolution of this conflict without the involvement of Assad, Russia and Iran is a pipe dream.
"
This may turn out to be an historic turning point in Israel policy for the victory over Netanyahu, Schumer and AIPAC on an issue that the Israeli government pronounces fundamental to their existence demonstrates what united world powers can achieve.
The US "trained" Iraqi regular forces but we TRAINED ISIS cadres.
Since we fought Saddam's mujaheddin irregulars in 2003 and on through the chaotic years of civil war and Surge, these cadres fought the most lethal military force on the planet.
After a decade of combat against theUS, Daesh can claim to be the best trained military force in the world
Thanks Juan. I made the point in a NYT post last week. I googled Kobane and found out but not from a US media source. Only get the agnst und sturm und drang from the media and this is but one example
I see the Cambodia parallel but as one of Juan's generation, I believe it on the whole inapposite.
The bombing was part of Nixon's Vietnamization which alternated modest troop withdrawals and massive escalations.
Cambodia was a fragile yet peaceful state. Cross border incursions by US forces had been occurring on a modest scale for years without upsetting Sihanouk's fragile state.
Harrison Salisbury in his "900 Days; The Siege of Leningrad" recounts an incident in which the Luftwaffe dropped leaflets on the besieged city announcing an imminent strike on one quarter and urging women and children to proceed to an open area wearing white to avoid being hit. They were massacred.
I've recalled this crime many times in recent days
I hope others caught last night's Newshour debate on the Gaza attrocity. The Palestinians have finally found a formidable interlocutor to take on the israel Lobby's shill du jour. Noura Erakat, a Palestinian American professor at George Mason did some serious damage to the AIPAC propaganda machine last night.
I have previously noted that the Biden Plan for Iraq years back is now being implemented de facto and on terms we should not feel at all comfortable with. And neither should Iran or Syria or the Shia of Iraq.
These facts suggest a strategy that Juan has endorse ie some sort of cooperative arrangement with Iraq, Iran,the US and I would add with Assad.
This is what Biden;'s academic adviser , Les Gelb, recommends today:
N.B - the Biden Plan didn't call for a partition of Iraq as popularly summarized in mass media. Rather Biden called for semi-autonomous Kurd, Sunni and Shia regions in a unitary state
I didn't think much of the plan when proposed. I was wrong.
I have this sense of deja vu, an intuition that we are seeing the Old Biden Partition Plan being de facto implemented. I don't think there is any immediate danger to Baghdad and indeed I expect this "war" to wind down into more or less of a stalemate as the Sunnis and Kurds continue to solidify their positions.
Of course we hear next to nothing about Iraq in the English language media these days no doubt reflecting a general hardness of heart but also, I believe, a certain a fair amount of guilt and shame.
Adroit policy making produces historic results. Syria was the opening
The President was much maligned for going to Congress but whether he intended it or not, the result was to freeze the War Party which is but a restatement of Juan's perceptive comments.
We won't be having to worry about the neo-cons for a little while at least and more importantly neither will our President.
Juan, whilst you were busy fighting the last war against the last Administration, our President pulled off the greatest triumph of coericive diplomacy since - dare I say - Munich--
The results speak for themselves.
Another week another triumph link to cbsnews.com
And so the decks are cleared for an advance in diplomacy with Iran.
Actually Juan, far from making it more difficult for other countries to support the Free Syrian Army, the fundamentalists' exit may make it easier and more urgent for them to do so
Oh the hypocrisy, the War Party is at the head of the line endlessly kvetching about domestic programs in the US as social engineering yet when it comes to destroying and rebuilding other cultures, nations, ever at the ready.
The President delivered what is, in the annals of International Relations, a rare triumph of whatpolitical scientists call "Coercive Diplomacy" It is indeed diificult to pull off, certainly with such speed, and well nigh without historical precedent, save one - Iraq 2003
Bush of course had already achieved his declared objectives without firing a shot but as we all know now, and many of us knew at the time, he was either too dense or too disingenuous to acknowledge it.
It is hardly surprising that the Tea Party and War Party Republicans aren't acknowledging Obama's triumph nor I suppose surprising that you haven't either Juan, just disappointing.
Sadly, we are likely to see even less in the way of Syrian civil war coverage in the coming weeks now that a chemical weapons control agreement has apparently been reached.
The Republicans in Congress, and the media with them, have already returned to what they know best - government shutdown/Obamacare sabotage.
"To my friends on the left, I ask you to reconcile your belief in freedom and dignity for all people with those images of children writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor, for sometimes resolutions and statements of condemnation are simply not enough"
- Barack Obama
This would not have happened had President Obama taken your counsel Juan, would not have happened without the credible threat that force would be used against Syria, if not in a strike on account of the last gas attack, but then certainly account of the next one.
I think at some level it is disingenuous for you not to concede this and very disappointing.
Ed Luttwak laid out the rather calculating strategy for dealing with Syria in a recent NYT op-ed. Cold indeed, Luttwak saw the President's strategy as based on the precept that if either Assad or the radical jihadi opposition prevails, US interests suffer.
While I believe there is more to the President's thinking, it seems that his strategy may have yielded dividends in the event
I am speaking of course of today's dramatic turn of events, an opening we'd have never seen absent the credible use of force.
Even if the President had lost the Congressional vote to the odd fellows alliance of neo-isolationist tea partiers and left wing Democrats, Syria and Russia should not doubt that the President would respond to a second chemical strike without pause or hesitation.
Bacevich: I mean, a little bit of creative statesmanship it seems to me might say that there are other things we could do that would actually benefit the people of Syria, who are suffering greatly, who are fleeing their country in the hundreds of thousands. Who are living in wretched refugee camps. Why don’t we do something about that? Why wouldn’t that be a better thing to do from a moral perspective than bombing Damascus?”
I screamed "WE ARE!" at the TV last night. We can do both. We can stop Assad from killing Syrians like so many cockroaches and care for his victims.
We can do both...thanks for letting me vent the steam over Bacevich's dissembling.
How can you be so sanguine about the prospects for peace with Assad holding the upper hand in the conflict (by all accounts even your own) and growing increasingly confident in his ability to "liquidate" his opposition as today's New York Times reports?
I think Assad himself is closer to the mark"
"In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro published on Monday, Mr. Assad said, “In the beginning, the solution should have been found through a dialogue from which political measures would have been born.”
That is no longer the case, he said, repeating his constant refrain that 90 percent of the opposition fighters are terrorists affiliated with Al Qaeda. “The only way to cope with them is to liquidate them,” he said. “Only then will we be able to discuss political measures.”
[New York Times]
I don't see how the action now under consideration will alter that calculus but he may well think twice before liquidating anyone
"Obama should pivot now and choose vigorous diplomacy over a military strike."
Sounds great. So what exactly is "vigorous diplomacy" Juan? What additional steps would you take that have not already been tried and self-evidently found wanting?
Maybe you are thinking of "coercive diplomacy", diplomacy coupled with the threat or actual use of force?
The US and its Allies cannot stand idly by while yet another state flaunts the international norm against the use of chemical warfare (a norm which all powers adhered to in WWII) and make a mockery of international deterrence against such weaponry.
That's point number one from a realist perspective but for point 2 (h/t to Edward Luttwak) if either side in the Civil War emerges victorious, US national interests suffer.
Perhaps peversely, and certainly ironically, it is much easier to tailor military action toward enabling stalemate than victory.
I hear all this talk of the US government's "leverage" that our $1.3 Billion subsidy of the Egyptian generals supposedly gives us. We are told that we cannot obey our own laws requiring an aid cut-off (aid that buys those tanks) because we will lose leverage over these bloody militarists.
What leverage?
There has been a military coup, an overthrow of a democratically elected government, and US law requires that the Obama administration cut off all aid to Egypt - yesterday
While I very much share your views on the Benghazi Witch hunt and like you have no way of knowing what various Administration actors may or may not have urged in this decision making, I very much doubt either Benghazi fear or political gamesmanship were determinative
Bush's failure to act in the face of 9-11 most likely provided all the incentive need to justify action. Indeed,I found it ironic that GOP Sen. Chambliss admitted as much in his comments yesterday.
Though I have no idea whether the underlying threat justifies the closings, I am dead certain that it is going to be some time before any US president isn't tempted to over-react to
Bill Clinton's foreign interventions were first cousin to the NeoCon disasters which followed under Cheney/Bush.
The Balkans prepared the ground for Iraqi Freedom
Fool me once
Besides, the propitious time for outside powers to intervene is at the point where insurgents have achieved a strategic stalemate and intervention could make their victory, which is hardly the situation in Syria
Not a whistleblower Juan. He's just exposed what many of us who opposed the Patriot Act's FISA amendments said at the time this program was, for all intents and puroses, authorized. Certainly PRISM is the forseen and forseeable and legal result of that enactment
US policy cannot be turned on a dime. Much like a super tanker, turns take miles to accomplish. Obama's been slow to change US policy abroad but as with the tanker, we can see the turn unquestionably. That is why the Neocon War Party rails and why I agree with Juan that this marks a major turning point
Apropos of Juan's earlier post raising doubt about the Kingdom of David, apparently the weight of the archaeological evidence is as Dr. Cole summarized it but the evidence does not support his categorical statements this at least according to an excellent NOVA program you can see here - NOVA: The Bible's Buried Secrets
Excellent program. I watched the re-run on PBS. All of the archaeologists both pro and con on the question of the Kingdom of David's existence, capital at Jerusalem, I believe, were Israelis. I imagine that Col Glick would say that those who believe the Bible's accounts are entirely mythological are self-loathing Jews.
© 2026 All Rights Reserved
Republican Warriors are oddly silent. What no calls from McCain/Graham for US intervention? I guess they've more pressing concerns about now.
To my sadness over the attacks, the Republicans add weariness.
Here we go again
It is a good thing that Russia now has "skin in the game". Instead of sitting on the sidelines disrupting any and all peace efforts without cost, it is now a real party to the conflict and thus a real participant in any resolution.
I was gratified to read this in this morning's New York Times report on the Vienna negotiations because It neatly summarizes the end game I had in mind.
From the NYT:
"“If there is to be a deal,” Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official now at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, wrote on Thursday, the United States and Russia “must create a center of gravity to pull the other players together.”
American officials say they think they have a shot at that, because Russia’s alternative is to be bogged down in the Syrian war. But the Saudis seem to think a far more active military role to counter Iran is imperative.'"
As Jimmy Carter urged months ago, resolution of this conflict without the involvement of Assad, Russia and Iran is a pipe dream.
"
The Russians now have "skin in the game," and that is a very good thing.
This may turn out to be an historic turning point in Israel policy for the victory over Netanyahu, Schumer and AIPAC on an issue that the Israeli government pronounces fundamental to their existence demonstrates what united world powers can achieve.
Oh that we might have brought charges against Bush II and Cheney for losing Iraq
At joint presser, Hammond tells Bibi to sod off
link to theguardian.com
The enemy of my enemy....
Opposition to this agreement has nothing to do with any Iranian nuclear threat but rather signals great fear of Western rapprochement with Tehran.
The US "trained" Iraqi regular forces but we TRAINED ISIS cadres.
Since we fought Saddam's mujaheddin irregulars in 2003 and on through the chaotic years of civil war and Surge, these cadres fought the most lethal military force on the planet.
After a decade of combat against theUS, Daesh can claim to be the best trained military force in the world
The US and Iraq specifically ordered the Shiite militias to stand down in the Ramadi fighting. In return the US increased airstrikes.
Can't win with airstrikes
Thanks Juan. I made the point in a NYT post last week. I googled Kobane and found out but not from a US media source. Only get the agnst und sturm und drang from the media and this is but one example
Perhaps the "ghost soldiers" are a new stealth technology???
To assume as Juan does, that Syria is a state in any sense but name, is a fatal to his argument.
I see the Cambodia parallel but as one of Juan's generation, I believe it on the whole inapposite.
The bombing was part of Nixon's Vietnamization which alternated modest troop withdrawals and massive escalations.
Cambodia was a fragile yet peaceful state. Cross border incursions by US forces had been occurring on a modest scale for years without upsetting Sihanouk's fragile state.
IF anything Pol Pot's counterpart is ISIS
Harrison Salisbury in his "900 Days; The Siege of Leningrad" recounts an incident in which the Luftwaffe dropped leaflets on the besieged city announcing an imminent strike on one quarter and urging women and children to proceed to an open area wearing white to avoid being hit. They were massacred.
I've recalled this crime many times in recent days
I don't recall the Afrikaners using artillery to enforce their apartheid
I hope others caught last night's Newshour debate on the Gaza attrocity. The Palestinians have finally found a formidable interlocutor to take on the israel Lobby's shill du jour. Noura Erakat, a Palestinian American professor at George Mason did some serious damage to the AIPAC propaganda machine last night.
Formidable.
I have previously noted that the Biden Plan for Iraq years back is now being implemented de facto and on terms we should not feel at all comfortable with. And neither should Iran or Syria or the Shia of Iraq.
These facts suggest a strategy that Juan has endorse ie some sort of cooperative arrangement with Iraq, Iran,the US and I would add with Assad.
This is what Biden;'s academic adviser , Les Gelb, recommends today:
link to thedailybeast.com
N.B - the Biden Plan didn't call for a partition of Iraq as popularly summarized in mass media. Rather Biden called for semi-autonomous Kurd, Sunni and Shia regions in a unitary state
I didn't think much of the plan when proposed. I was wrong.
I have this sense of deja vu, an intuition that we are seeing the Old Biden Partition Plan being de facto implemented. I don't think there is any immediate danger to Baghdad and indeed I expect this "war" to wind down into more or less of a stalemate as the Sunnis and Kurds continue to solidify their positions.
The deal with Syria opened the door to this agreement. The road to Tehran, as it turns out, lay not through Baghdad but through Damascus
Of course we hear next to nothing about Iraq in the English language media these days no doubt reflecting a general hardness of heart but also, I believe, a certain a fair amount of guilt and shame.
Adroit policy making produces historic results. Syria was the opening
The President was much maligned for going to Congress but whether he intended it or not, the result was to freeze the War Party which is but a restatement of Juan's perceptive comments.
We won't be having to worry about the neo-cons for a little while at least and more importantly neither will our President.
Juan, whilst you were busy fighting the last war against the last Administration, our President pulled off the greatest triumph of coericive diplomacy since - dare I say - Munich--
The results speak for themselves.
Another week another triumph
link to cbsnews.com
And so the decks are cleared for an advance in diplomacy with Iran.
Actually Juan, far from making it more difficult for other countries to support the Free Syrian Army, the fundamentalists' exit may make it easier and more urgent for them to do so
Hear! Hear!
Oh the hypocrisy, the War Party is at the head of the line endlessly kvetching about domestic programs in the US as social engineering yet when it comes to destroying and rebuilding other cultures, nations, ever at the ready.
The President delivered what is, in the annals of International Relations, a rare triumph of whatpolitical scientists call "Coercive Diplomacy" It is indeed diificult to pull off, certainly with such speed, and well nigh without historical precedent, save one - Iraq 2003
Bush of course had already achieved his declared objectives without firing a shot but as we all know now, and many of us knew at the time, he was either too dense or too disingenuous to acknowledge it.
It is hardly surprising that the Tea Party and War Party Republicans aren't acknowledging Obama's triumph nor I suppose surprising that you haven't either Juan, just disappointing.
Sadly, we are likely to see even less in the way of Syrian civil war coverage in the coming weeks now that a chemical weapons control agreement has apparently been reached.
The Republicans in Congress, and the media with them, have already returned to what they know best - government shutdown/Obamacare sabotage.
P.S. Juan,
"To my friends on the left, I ask you to reconcile your belief in freedom and dignity for all people with those images of children writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor, for sometimes resolutions and statements of condemnation are simply not enough"
- Barack Obama
Arguing With Juan Cole
Without the credible threat of serious force, we would not be reading this headline in the UK Guardian today:
Syria's Assad 'committed many crimes against humanity' Ban says - live
Live• UN head expects report to show chemical weapons use
• UN accuses regime of 'war crimes' for bombing hospitals
The President presented Assad and his Russian enablers with a credible threat to use force.
He came away with a case study in the use of coercive diplomacy that political scientists will study for decades.
I am truly disappointed in your obtuseness Juan. You don't have to cling to your position ever more tightly in the face of fact
This would not have happened had President Obama taken your counsel Juan, would not have happened without the credible threat that force would be used against Syria, if not in a strike on account of the last gas attack, but then certainly account of the next one.
I think at some level it is disingenuous for you not to concede this and very disappointing.
Juan,
Ed Luttwak laid out the rather calculating strategy for dealing with Syria in a recent NYT op-ed. Cold indeed, Luttwak saw the President's strategy as based on the precept that if either Assad or the radical jihadi opposition prevails, US interests suffer.
While I believe there is more to the President's thinking, it seems that his strategy may have yielded dividends in the event
I am speaking of course of today's dramatic turn of events, an opening we'd have never seen absent the credible use of force.
Even if the President had lost the Congressional vote to the odd fellows alliance of neo-isolationist tea partiers and left wing Democrats, Syria and Russia should not doubt that the President would respond to a second chemical strike without pause or hesitation.
Bacevich: I mean, a little bit of creative statesmanship it seems to me might say that there are other things we could do that would actually benefit the people of Syria, who are suffering greatly, who are fleeing their country in the hundreds of thousands. Who are living in wretched refugee camps. Why don’t we do something about that? Why wouldn’t that be a better thing to do from a moral perspective than bombing Damascus?”
I screamed "WE ARE!" at the TV last night. We can do both. We can stop Assad from killing Syrians like so many cockroaches and care for his victims.
We can do both...thanks for letting me vent the steam over Bacevich's dissembling.
Yelling at the TV, somehow inadequte
Juan,
How can you be so sanguine about the prospects for peace with Assad holding the upper hand in the conflict (by all accounts even your own) and growing increasingly confident in his ability to "liquidate" his opposition as today's New York Times reports?
I think Assad himself is closer to the mark"
"In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro published on Monday, Mr. Assad said, “In the beginning, the solution should have been found through a dialogue from which political measures would have been born.”
That is no longer the case, he said, repeating his constant refrain that 90 percent of the opposition fighters are terrorists affiliated with Al Qaeda. “The only way to cope with them is to liquidate them,” he said. “Only then will we be able to discuss political measures.”
[New York Times]
I don't see how the action now under consideration will alter that calculus but he may well think twice before liquidating anyone
"President Bets Republicans Capable of Governing"
Reckless? Brilliant? Both?
The Republican Party has a question to answer. Do they want to stand with the President or with Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah?
And who, pray tell, will enforce the Chemical Weapons Convention or is that a matter we leave to Russia?
"Obama should pivot now and choose vigorous diplomacy over a military strike."
Sounds great. So what exactly is "vigorous diplomacy" Juan? What additional steps would you take that have not already been tried and self-evidently found wanting?
Maybe you are thinking of "coercive diplomacy", diplomacy coupled with the threat or actual use of force?
The US and its Allies cannot stand idly by while yet another state flaunts the international norm against the use of chemical warfare (a norm which all powers adhered to in WWII) and make a mockery of international deterrence against such weaponry.
That's point number one from a realist perspective but for point 2 (h/t to Edward Luttwak) if either side in the Civil War emerges victorious, US national interests suffer.
Perhaps peversely, and certainly ironically, it is much easier to tailor military action toward enabling stalemate than victory.
The time to strike is now
I hear all this talk of the US government's "leverage" that our $1.3 Billion subsidy of the Egyptian generals supposedly gives us. We are told that we cannot obey our own laws requiring an aid cut-off (aid that buys those tanks) because we will lose leverage over these bloody militarists.
What leverage?
There has been a military coup, an overthrow of a democratically elected government, and US law requires that the Obama administration cut off all aid to Egypt - yesterday
This is all very sad and of a piece with the purges in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and Assad's increasingly strong counter revolution in Syria.
The Arab Spring looks more like nuclear winter
While I very much share your views on the Benghazi Witch hunt and like you have no way of knowing what various Administration actors may or may not have urged in this decision making, I very much doubt either Benghazi fear or political gamesmanship were determinative
Bush's failure to act in the face of 9-11 most likely provided all the incentive need to justify action. Indeed,I found it ironic that GOP Sen. Chambliss admitted as much in his comments yesterday.
Though I have no idea whether the underlying threat justifies the closings, I am dead certain that it is going to be some time before any US president isn't tempted to over-react to
Just what I was groping for to describe what seems a widely shared ambivalence about the events ..."revocouption" for indeed that is what happened.
13 Vendémiaire????
I wonder who arranged the extravagant fireworks at Tahrir Square?
Bill Clinton's foreign interventions were first cousin to the NeoCon disasters which followed under Cheney/Bush.
The Balkans prepared the ground for Iraqi Freedom
Fool me once
Besides, the propitious time for outside powers to intervene is at the point where insurgents have achieved a strategic stalemate and intervention could make their victory, which is hardly the situation in Syria
Not a whistleblower Juan. He's just exposed what many of us who opposed the Patriot Act's FISA amendments said at the time this program was, for all intents and puroses, authorized. Certainly PRISM is the forseen and forseeable and legal result of that enactment
The ultramontanist hate-mongers should listen to the Holy Father's hard words with a care for their immortal souls
Bravo Juan!
"a phalanx of moral midgets, stalking cat-men, vicious lobster boys and ethical werewolves"
I kept wishing he'd have ripped into them as well only to keep coming back to the realization that they were trying to bait him into exactly that.
Revenge is a dish best served cold
US policy cannot be turned on a dime. Much like a super tanker, turns take miles to accomplish. Obama's been slow to change US policy abroad but as with the tanker, we can see the turn unquestionably. That is why the Neocon War Party rails and why I agree with Juan that this marks a major turning point
No war on Christmas in Saraqeb
Didn't even make the TV news on Wed
Ricks thinks swiftly on his feet. That colloquy about the contractors killed in Iraq was deadly
Rogue state
Jane Harman would be a catastrophe
"Headline whores....You could make an analogy to the Ku Klux Klan in the United States"
The first headline whore that came to my mind was Romney
al-Maliki Declares Independence
Juan
I commend Steven Walt: Why do wars of choice last so long?
Apropos of Juan's earlier post raising doubt about the Kingdom of David, apparently the weight of the archaeological evidence is as Dr. Cole summarized it but the evidence does not support his categorical statements this at least according to an excellent NOVA program you can see here - NOVA: The Bible's Buried Secrets
Excellent program. I watched the re-run on PBS. All of the archaeologists both pro and con on the question of the Kingdom of David's existence, capital at Jerusalem, I believe, were Israelis. I imagine that Col Glick would say that those who believe the Bible's accounts are entirely mythological are self-loathing Jews.
Like replacing MacArthur with Eisenhower eh Juan?