President Obama's Syrian policy is all at sea. Of that there can be no doubt. He's bought some time for himself short-term, by offering Congress a say on what happens next. But if he now seems like a hostage to fortune, the only person who's made it so is President Obama himself.
A year ago the same man, unprompted and against the better judgement of anyone with even a modicum of education in history, arbitrarily declared that the use of chemical weapons would be a "red line".
You could see the thoughts chugging around in his embattled brain: "I'll look tough and they'll never actually use chemical weapons anyway".
Not wholly unreasonable, since Syria signed the global convention against chemical weapons in 1968, and there have only been a handful of recorded cases of chemical weapons use in the years since World War II.
But the idea that killing children by one particular method is more abhorrent than killing them by another sits ill in any system of thought, and certainly doesn't seem to have bothered whoever it was who set off the attack on August 21st.
After all, the first rule of war is to win. All other considerations are secondary. This thinking lay behind the widespread use by the USA of chemical weapons in Vietnam, by Japan in China, by the British in Iraq (look it up), and by all sides in World War I. And that's to name but a few.
Losing a war is far worse than being accused of winning it brutally. And this home truth is as old as time itself.
It is the fundamental theme in the Iliad, one of the cultural cornerstones of Western civilisation, in which war is waged in brutal unremitting fashion between the Greeks and the Trojans for ten bloody years. The prose may be beautiful but the message is clear: the idea that war is anything other than a fight to the death is ludicrous.
President Assad knows that this is a fight to the death. He's seen what's happened to Saddam and Gadaffi, and he's fighting for his very life. Will a "shot across the bows" change his outlook. Arguably, it will only make him more determined to fight to win by any means.
But one thing is for sure: as long as this uncertainty persists upward pressure on gold and oil will continue.
| 95th Minesite Forum - 17th October 2013 |
95th Minesite Forum
Thursday 17th October 2013
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