According to the latest reports, the White House is getting ready to send missiles into Syria. Administration officials assure us, however, that the likely attack is not part of a broader plan for regime change but is simply "meant to send a message” to Bashar al-Assad.
As Charlie Pierce said on Monday, "The problem with 'symbolic' missile strikes is that the missiles are not symbolic and, therefore, people wind up considerably more than symbolically dead."
So what is the message the Administration wants to send?
In Secretary of State Kerry’s words, “The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children and innocent bystanders by chemical weapons is a moral obscenity. By any standard, it is inexcusable. ...President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who would use the world’s most heinous weapons against the world’s most vulnerable people."
And what might “accountability” look like in practice?
A wide range of officials characterized the action under consideration as “limited,” perhaps lasting no more than one or two days. The attacks…[would] be aimed at military units that have carried out chemical attacks, the headquarters overseeing the effort and the rockets and artillery that have launched the attacks, according to the options being reviewed within the administration.
But why not go after the chemical weapons, if those are the objects of concern?
The attacks, which are expected to involve scores of Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from American destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, would not be focused on chemical weapons storage sites, which would risk an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe and could open up the sites to raids by militants, officials said.
That is, a bombing campaign against Syria’s chemical weapons would be extremely risky. Indeed, in order to actually seize all of Syria's stockpiles, we would need upward of
75,000 troops on the ground, according to Pentagon estimates.
So since the White House wants to “send a message” that chemical weapon attacks will not be tolerated, but air attacks against the stockpiles are too risky and a ground presence is intolerable, we’re going to blow up about 50 military sites inside Syria.
What could go wrong?
[Tomahawk missiles] are not often effective against mobile targets, like missile launchers, and cannot be used to attack underground bunkers. Naval officers and attack planners concede that the elevation of the missile cannot entirely be controlled and that there is a risk of civilian casualties when they fly slightly high.
Some officials have also cautioned that Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants might step up terrorism around the region in reaction to American strikes on Syria. Another risk is that Mr. Assad might respond to the attack by firing missiles at Turkey or Jordan or mounting even more intensive attacks against civilians.
So our “limited,” “surgical strikes” may well kill some of the civilians we’re ostensibly trying to protect, cause blow-back in the form of Hezbollah terrorism, and/or contribute to an escalation of the conflict into a regional war.
Because when you make war in a place, actual people die actual deaths. Fathers get killed. Children get killed. School buildings and hospitals fall down all around the people inside them. The message you are sending with your missiles gets just a trifle muddled. Make no mistake. If we strike, we will be making actual war in Syria. Ordinary Syrians will not see our missiles as "bomb-o-grams," telling them with every deadly explosion that we're really on their side. We will be another belligerent making their daily lives brutal and deadly, and there will be enough of them to hate us for that to guarantee that we will have to make more war in that place, or in some other place, very soon. That is what we do now. We make war in a place without going to war in a place, and nobody is fooled except ourselves.