Op-ed: AN ACT OF WAR AGAINST SYRIA – WHY AND FOR WHOM? by John P. Flannery

Since when did a democratically elected official’s oath in the House and Senate become, “I will do what I want in your best interests even if you voters don’t understand how good this is for you?”

We have elected representatives from Virginia and across the nation who are telling us they are going to disregard what we’re telling them – and vote to attack Syria anyhow.

They treat us like children to whom they’re administering castor oil.

But we are not children, and the members of Congress are supposed to serve us, not the other way around.

More to the point, we should not be putting American lives and honor at risk in an uncertain and questionable act of war against Syria, taking sides, advantaging one side over another, in the midst of “their” civil war.

The Administration proposes to bomb “carefully selected targets” to Kingdom Come for as long as 90 days. 

We’re told we’ll accomplish this without killing any innocents, without spilling a drop of nerve gas, and without putting our nation at risk of reprisal from allies to Syria including Iran.

Most Americans don’t trust what we’re being told and why we need to make this war.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee resolution characterizes this bicameral congressional vote as an effort to “change the momentum on the [Syrian] battlefield.”  We say we’re warring to limit the use of chemical weapons, but the Senate seems to think it is to win the war instead for the rebels.

Of course, any bombing by the United States may not go as neatly as we imagine.  Syria may uncork stores of nerve gas in response, presuming they have already, because our bombing compromised their ability to conduct their civil war?    

My reaction has hardened with the Administration’s hard sell to war in Syria.

The more I hear the worse this plan to war sounds.

I doubt I’d trust any administration these days who told me why we needed to war.   

The bitter irony is that President Obama was our peace candidate (at least in 2008).

Senator Kerry, our Secretary of State, opposed the war in ‘Nam and had an explanation for why he wrongly voted to war in Iraq when he was a presidential candidate.

But when you have the power to war, the impulse is to war.  

Most wars begin with a lie that it’s a war of defense or of for humanitarian reasons – when it’s nothing of the sort.   

We propose to drop bombs in retaliation for those who were killed with nerve gas. 

This action favors the rebels who were unconcerned as a matter of public relations when they broadcast pictures of their own firing squads.

I believe President Jack Kennedy handled the Cuban missile crisis the way he did because he learned from the Bay of Pigs to take his own counsel if he wanted to avoid war. 

President Kennedy learned to dial back from a nuclear confrontation and had the capacity and resolve to resist those who would war rather than negotiate.

Presidents who get these powers, are confused that they are derivative, coming from the people, held in service for the nation, not their own historic legacy, not to see their names immortalized, not to break things up – but too few get JFK's second chance to get it right.

The mid-east is an open wound ready to hemorrhage in a way and at a time when America would be dragged into an international conflict that we, the people, plainly don’t support and can't afford at home.  Nor do you have to have attended West Point to understand this basic point.

“Yes we can”- as a slogan - accomplished a lot of other things.

But, there are some things, the guiding instruction is, “No, we can’t,” for we don’t have the stomach to tolerate this Syrian adventure.

Paraphrasing that great American philosopher Clint Eastwood, a nation ought to know its limitations. It should also know what is right and timely, and this war in Syria is neither.

OP-ED: “LIMITED” WAR IN SYRIA – REALLY? by John P. Flannery

Syrian dead – from nerve gas?

Right now we have elected officials in the U.S. Congress from both parties denouncing any military involvement in Syria.  

The public is against us getting involved in this brutal civil war.

President Barack Obama, however, wants to travel a different road.

The President’s avowed reason to force a “limited” aerial attack against Syria, notwithstanding the congressional and public resistance, is because the Syrian government in a civil war that has tallied more than 100,000 dead has recently used chemical weapons killing a thousand or more innocent women and children.

President Obama’s advisers believe the President shall suffer “a credibility gap” if he doesn’t act, to “punish” Syria for using chemical weapons since the President told Syria a year ago, “not to do it – or else.” 

There is no international treaty or law against killing women and children in war.

But we say we care if it happens with chemical weapons.

We have no problem if either side in Syria blows up women and children with bombs and bullets.

If the Syrian government uses chemical weapons, however, we are prepared to advantage the insurgent forces against the incumbent Syrian government in a civil war.

We have a different “credibility gap” on this score given that the United States lodged no objection, and made no aerial attacks, when Saddam Hussein used nerve gas (sarin) and mustard gas against Iran in the 1980s. 

Hussein unleashed mustard gas in Halabja, Iraq against Kurdish rebels toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war, killing 5,000 civilians.

The United States didn’t then invoke the Geneva protocol of 1925 that prohibited the use of nerve gas and deadly agents.

We are also plainly indifferent to how hypocritical it looks when we accuse others of using nerve gas and stockpile this weapon ourselves.

Some pundits and political officials are encouraged that the President asked Congress to weigh in on whether we should attack Syria or not.

Congress in my lifetime has rarely resisted any act of aggression that any President ever proposed.  It will be remarkable if they resist this one.

Whatever the soft fleshy backbone of Congress, the President should erase his impetuous challenge of about a year ago, warning Syria not to cross a line and use chemical weapons.

The President must know that a military punch in Syria's face shall likely change nothing for the better, is bound to make matters worse, and may have the disastrous effect of convincing the world leaders of nation-states including Iran that our “limited” attack is not so limited and is the opening salvo in a regional or world war.  

Incidentally, we once advertised Iraq as a “limited” war.  That Iraq was hardly “limited” disfavors the likelihood we can be believed that this proposed Syrian attack shall be “limited.”

Is it our purpose to demonstrate that the United States can commit terrorism on a grander scale than anyone else in this dysfunctional school yard?

Are we really going to act first, and think about the consequences afterwards?  

There appears to be a sinister microbe that infects every inhabitant of the White House, without regard to party or whatever threshold ideology they claim to hold when they cross over into the oval office.  This infection prompts our Presidents to war because the extraordinary power as commander in chief is the one power that coequal branches can hardly restrain. 

If President Obama doesn't dial back his bellicose threats for a “limited” assault, and do so soon, we all may reap the whirlwind.  If the next domestic terrorist attack in the United states is sarin, then we won’t have to scratch our collective heads wondering whence and why we were so viciously attacked ourselves.  

OP-ED: NO FINER MEMORIAL by John P. Flannery

Uncle Charles Flannery and the author

 I remember as if it were yesterday my Mom crying, a soulful wound torn open upon hearing that my Dad’s brother, Charles, died of internal bleeding because years earlier he’d been shot in World War II. 

President Woodrow Wilson’s promise that World War I was the war to end all wars didn’t prevent World War II.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in WWII, said, “There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.”

We could therefore erect no finer memorial to our war dead than to rededicate our nation to peace.

Eisenhower, in his farewell address in 1960, told the nation, “We must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.”  It is past time for us to reconsider his advice.

Our wars since World War II have been about property – the differences by and between communism, socialism and capitalism.  Also about ethnicity – over nationality, color, religion and region. 

The nation state now caught in the congressional and executive cross-hairs is Syria.

We insist our wars are honorable because we are fighting for individual freedom but those we would “save” all too often recoil at the definition of “freedom” we seek to impose.

We are hard-pressed to claim the high ground for freedom when the recent observable evidence, since 9-11, is that we distrust our citizens, frisk them, tape them, follow them, kill them with drones, kill innocent women and children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and imprison innocents in Cuba without any formal charges or evidence.

Now we are ramping up to weigh in to Syria’s civil war, to spend funds we don’t have, perhaps even to add our own men and women to the 80,000 dead and million already displaced.

Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham want us to create safe zones for the Syrian rebels, arm the rebels, train them, conduct targeted air strikes, and deploy scud missiles.

Days ago, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations voted 15-3 to arm and train these rebels. 

We are going to arm rebels that may include al Qaeda terrorists.  Radical Sunni preachers recently issued a call to jihad to support the rebels, spurring an influx of rebel fighters. 

Abu Sakkar, rebel leader of the Omar al-Farouq Brigade, should give us further reason to oppose intervention.  Abu cut out the organs of a dead Syrian soldier including his heart and liver, and bit down on one organ in a gruesome snuff video he filmed, while addressing the Syrian soldiers loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, saying, “I swear to God we will eat your hearts and your livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog.” 

Virginia State Senator Richard Black has called upon the United States to “end its intervention in Syria.”  I agree.  Senator Black cited the cannibalizing of the soldier as one of several good reasons, and published reports that we were training and equipping the rebels.

Is there any hope for peace?

There are peace talks tentatively set for June.  The rebels have, however, interposed a speed bump on the road to peace, demanding, as a precondition, that the Syrian President resign.

A step toward a worthy memorial to our war dead is to work for peace without war-like intervention. 

This would build on what President Barack Obama said last week in a speech at the National Defense University. 

The President proposed that we turn toward peace, given we have and are ending our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, after spending over a trillion dollars on these wars, after losing 7,000 Americans, after damaging many others irreparably. 

The President thought it time that we respect President James Madison’s warning that, “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” 

Acknowledging we still had to confront a “lethal yet less capable al Qaeda affiliates,” the President said, we must now supplement our military efforts and fight “to win a battle of wits, a battle of ideas.”  Eisenhower had similarly recommended “intellect and decent purpose.”

Robert G. Kaiser, a Washington Post editor, wrote that “the modern version of [congressional] culture is hostile to creative problem-solving.”  He said, “In the ‘world’s greatest deliberative body,’ there is little deliberation.”

We have to do better, because if we are not smart enough to make peace, then we may only make war, and thus shall we dishonor the memory of those war dead who served so this nation might be preserved and protected at peace.