"Stopping Russia Starts in Syria" Anne-Marie Slaughter

"The US, together with as many countries as will cooperate, could use force to eliminate Syria’s fixed-wing aircraft as a first step toward enforcing Resolution 2139. “Aerial bombardment” would still likely continue via helicopter, but such a strike would announce immediately that the game has changed. After the strike, the US, France, and Britain should ask for the Security Council’s approval of the action taken, as they did after NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999. 

Equally important, shots fired by the US in Syria will echo loudly in Russia. The great irony is that Putin is now seeking to do in Ukraine exactly what Assad has done so successfully: portray a legitimate political opposition as a gang of thugs and terrorists, while relying on provocations and lies to turn non-violent protest into violent attacks that then justify an armed response."  Anne-Marie Slaughter

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Slaughter? This woman is aptly named although I understand she experienced a name change somewhere along the way.  She took control of the "New America Foundation" last fall.  Now she is emeritus at Princeton.  You Princetonians can explain to me how a 55 year old woman can be emeritus.

Her basic idea is that the US should bomb Syria's fixed wing air force out of existence AND THEN go to the UN for approval.  She thinks that would start the ball rolling for a rebel victory in Syria and that all right thinking people should welcome that, especially I suppose the religious fanatics in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia who are funding and more or less equipping the Islamist fighters.  The fanatic supporters would do more but they have always been organizationally challenged and usually will not listen to foreign hired help.

She also believes that this ferocity on our part would frighten the Russians into accepting our dictum everywhere.  My, my,  I have seen her occasionally on Zakariah's Sunday festival of mutual admiration.  I find her obvious self love and pomposity to be quite a "turn-off."  She always has a smug little smile and seems to me to suffer from always having been one of the pretty AND smart girls in the class, school, sorority, etc.  A lot of young men and a good many older ones as well cannot resist such creatures and find themselves nodding uncontrollably while saying in Bill Cosby's words, "I loves Mozart."

Her preposterous "proposal" should be seen as satire of actual strategic thought,  I am tempted to compare this to Dean Swift's "Modest Proposal..." but that would be giving her far too much credit.

She and all the other  R2P ladies and male hangers-on continue to see the world as a school yard where the naughty must be taught to do better by whatever means prove necessay.

This frame of mind betrays an inability to see other places and people as they are rather than how they can be described in a graduate school seminar. 

The Russians are damned tough people.  They will not be cowed.  They will simply be irritated and angered.

Her arrival at "New America..." undoubtedly indicates a new phase in her progress toward the Secretary of State's office or the chair of the National Security Adviser.

God help us all.  pl

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/anne-marie-slaughter-on-how-us-intervention-in-the-syrian-civil-war-would-alter-vladimir-putin-s-calculus-in-ukraine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne-Marie_Slaughter

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Comments

[Alba Etie]

All
This could well be one of the cohorts that HRC takes to the Whitehouse should she run & win in 2016 . Sen Paul is looking better & better ...

[Petrous]

Col. Lang
Impeccable appraisal of the person and the policy she preaches. How do so many of these non-thinkers rise to the top occupying nearly every niche where foreign policy is made (using the term made loosely).!

[Fred]

I see the "New America Foundation" has a board of directors with a combined experience on active duty defending the United States of - Zero. I'm sure that's equal to the number of times Ms. Slaughter asked anyone to enlist and risk their lives in defense of her principles. I'm sure they are all skilled in spitting out 'thank you for your service'. Just the kind of woman for a "New America", which apparently consists of just NYC and D.C. I defended the old one, which included places like Des Moines and Billings and every little Podunk town in the republic. Too bad these rich people don't have the courage to go see what the rest of the United States is actually like.

[Castellio]

I read the article when it came out. I was blown away by its naivete.

This paragraph, in particular, indicates both stunning moral immaturity and contemporary historical ignorance: "Putting force on the table in resolving the Ukraine crisis, even force used in Syria, is particularly important because economic pressure on Russia, as critical as it is in the Western portfolio of responses, can create a perverse incentive for Putin. As the Russian ruble falls and foreign investment dries up, the Russian population will become restive, giving him even more reason to distract them with patriotic spectacles welcoming still more “Russians” back to the motherland.""

She clearly, I mean clearly, has not walked the many neighborhoods of any large Russian city and talked to people there. They came out of the 90's (following the disastrous Yelstin years) needing a lot more than "patriotic speeches", and they put their heads down and worked on it. It's not just Putin rebuilding Russia, it's a collective action, and they are succeeding at it in all fields.

The Putin-Medvedev alliance is not decorative, it is not icing on a cake: its a functioning long term committment that represents different Russian interests in a collaborative relationship that has proven itself in practical ways. Nor is it shaken now.

The Colonel calls the Russians a "damned tough" people. He is right. I would add, and I don't do this thoughtlessly, and smart.

Let me put the nub of the matter very simply, the nub of which Slaughter and the rest of the official intelligentsia of the US seem entirely clueless: the great majority of the Russian people admire Putin not due to any fantasies he weaves, but due to the conservative realism of his outlook.

The US can fight Russian conservative realism if it insists; but its not to the advantage of either country, neither short term nor long term.

[Tyler]

That this woman is in charge of anything shows that we are a fundamentally unserious people.

[walrus]

There is a solution to this mess, but a full blown American Military coup to root out these animals is not likely. Oh for a Zhukov and Batitsjy.

[oofda]

Good comment, Castellio, on the economic issues. Remember that neither the USA nor the EU now have the ability nor the will to tackle Ukraine's economic problems, which are indeed very deep.

And Colonel, you have done a service in outlining this woman's naïveté, which makes one wonder how she got to her position as head of the "New America Foundation" and becoming an emeritus at Princeon.

She IS correct in saying that "shots fired in Syria will echo loudly in Moscow." The problem is what will lead Moscow- and others to do. She really has not given that much thought.

Note: Having seen her in the environs of DC, I am not to quick to ascribe her to membership in the "smart AND pretty girls in the class".

[seydlitz89]

Col. Lang-

Amazing. How could we have ever gotten to this point? The country that represented the perspective/notion that won the Cold War . . . because in the end it was our vision that won it, in Prague, in Leipzig, in Warsaw, in Dresden, in Ost Berlin . . . Moscow . . .

[turcopolier]

oofda

She exhibits the syndrome. pl

[tv]

Unserious?
How about those college coeds playing at State Dept. "spokespersons" and diplomacy by tweet?

[GulfCoastPirate]

Alba Ebie wrote:

'Sen Paul is looking better & better ...'

I guess you didn't notice his little genuflecting in front of BiBi tour.

Guy is all hat and no cattle.

[GulfCoastPirate]

Should we put Cliven Bundy in charge? Wasn't he your 'patriot of the week' last week? Who is it going to be this week?

[JohnH]

Slaughter was not just a professor at the Woodrow Wilson school. She was the dean. She was responsible for training future generations of foreign policy bots.

It's how Washington's delusion leaders perpetuate themselves...

[robt willmann]

Notice that Ms. Slaughter, a name probably not on her birth certificate, speaks of getting to Russia through zapping Syria, and does not mention an earlier reason to militarily attack Syria: to get to Iran through Syria. Not one word about Iran in her venomous little screed.

She says, "In Ukraine, Putin would be happy to turn a peaceful opposition's ouster of a corrupt government into a civil war". So, snipers murdering both police and protesters which agitated and inflamed more violence in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government is "peaceful"? This woman is said to be a lawyer, but obviously one who has not been around a courtroom in the presence of a jury very much, if ever. If you tell blatant falsehoods like that to a jury, the six or twelve citizens of the community will deliver a verdict against you so emphatically your head will spin.

She has also been involved in so-called "international law", Wikipedia says. For the U.S. to bomb the Syrian Air Force, an act of war, and then after that is done go to the U.N. "security" council to try to get that extensive act of violence approved retroactively is "international law"? That would be a fun legal system, would it not?

Hillary Clinton put her in the State Department as "Director of Policy Planning" in 2009. She returned to Princeton in 2011, because if she would be away longer she would lose her tenure status there. But never fear, she remains a "consultant" to the State Department.

Hillary Clinton will run for president in 2016, unless she would have such an obvious medical condition that it would not likely be politically tolerated. Ms. Slaughter, an apt name indeed, will be standing nearby.

[Yours In Peace....R.L.Kirtley]

In My Rage, I Realize That My Education And 71 Years Of Living Still Do Not Give Me The Ability To Express My Utter Contempt For This Woman And Her Kind!......."Where's My Whiskey?"

[Tyler]

Go long rope, torches, and pitchforks.

[confusedponderer]

You'd probably have to massacre a whole lot of people whose primary crime would be to be for being unsuited for government. For effect, it would need to be as bad as Stalin's purges.

Except for their crime they are probably completely representatives for the average college and university educated upper class American.

The problem is one of education, not one of individual people. As with America's economic lunacies, this rot comes right out of US universities.

If anything, the electorate is even less educated or interested in the rest of the world (ROW) and the ways of the world than Powers and her ilk. They, by and large, have shown little compunction whatsoever to subject people and places they can't find on a map to aerial bombardment and use of military force in general.

ROW, by the way, is a handy little acronym I first saw in a US publication two decades ago. It meant at the time everything not American and Russian.

Powers can find these places and people on a map but that does little to dampen her enthusiasm to inflict violence to ... do what?

Rescue people by bombing them? Burning the village to save it? If she thinks that that massive bombardment plan for Syria cooked up for the White House would only hit Assad's government she must be on opium. But, alas, just as with the Iraq sanctions, that's be worth it? Because America has a responsibility to protect? Just with the regime changing in Ukraine and the colour coded trail that led there? Please.

If it wasn't for that fluke in Libya, which in its current outcome has clearly served nobody and for which I for the life of me still can't find a rational rationale, this is about nothing but expanding US influence.

I wonder who many of the nuts in the Obama team are disciples of Brezinski, and try to play on his Grand Chessboard. All these people, R2Pers, neo-liberals and neocons are American empire builders all the same. They differ only in flavour and which particular form of aggression or violence they want to employ for their utopian ends. And as Ms. Slaughter shows, the D hawks are every bit as rabid and bloodthirsty as the Cheneyites.

Who was the last US president who didn't kill half a million people at a minimum?

[Will]

After 60 years of Zionist propaganda most Americans believe Syria is the enemy. There has been a constant barrage of propaganda through the Mainstream media (the pressitude), film, TV, magazines, radio, entertainment- you name it.

Witness this exchange on Facebook.
YYYT So somebody explain it to me again why the secular regime in Syria is our enemy and the Al-Kaida flying club is our friend?
Like · · Promote · Share

XXXXX Cause they hate Americans
54 minutes ago · LikeReply

YYYY And what is your source? The Israeli controlled press. Have you ever met any Syrians?

[turcopolier]

CP

"Who was the last US president who didn't kill half a million people at a minimum?" It is unlike you to resort to hyperbole of this kind. pl

[William Herschel]

The thing that, to me, is truly impressive is the extent to which Ukraine has brought the CIA assets in the media, academia, etc. into the open. It's like turning on the light in the kitchen and seeing the cockroaches scurrying for cover.

Putin has turned their latest adventure on its ear. Naughty, naughty Putin.

http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/ukrainian-special-forces-team-caught.html

I have called all this win-win for the neo-con/CIA axis. Perhaps they don't see it that way. Did Slaughter question Obama's manhood?

[William Herschel]

One other thing. Apparently, the United States has a supply route through Russian for its forces in Afghanistan. I suspect that Putin would keep that open right up to the moment when those forces attacked Russia. He undoubtedly correctly perceives the adventure in Afghanistan as weakening the US, particularly given we are doing nothing there to interdict the opiate trade.

[charly]

It is not Zionist propaganda that makes Syria an enemy of the US. It is the US that did that completely on its own. Syria was one of the few capitalistic countries allied with the USSR and they did that before the US and Israel were really good buddies

[Fred]

Perhaps a fine leader like this:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/jesse-jackson-jr-moved-prison-skirmish-guards-solitary-confinement-stint-report-article-1.1748290

[jon]

Slaughter's recommendation is absurd and counterproductive. I'm sure that Putin sees no parallels between himself and Syria; Assad's fate foes not threaten Putin in the least.

If Assad was to fall, then Russia's Syrian naval base might be at risk. If anything, that makes the seizure of the Crimea much more important. Russia might decide that it would be worth the costs to reinforce that position, and to ensure that the Ukraine remains a buffer between the West and Russia.

The play for the US would be to assure Russia that its Syrian base was safe, if they stop destabilizing the Ukraine. From this you could negotiate a climb down from the Syrian civil war, and find a space for the rebels in future political life and a broadening of the government.

Slaughter's suggestion that the US seeks UN Security Council approval, following a bombing of Syria, is ridiculous. Neither Russia nor China would be likely to sign on to that.

[SamuelBurke]

Watching Tony Blair this morning is depressing as hell. Does anyone think these guys ought to get interrogated properly by someone in the Press. The narrative they pitch is ideologically driven and tries to fly in the face of the facts that have refuted almost every premise of their strategy. They just drag society along into these governances of theirs.

Our Press sucks.