The news from Syria in recent days is more of the same—bad—except for when it is worse than bad. On Saturday a suicide bombing in Deir ez-Zour, apparently aimed at a regime target, killed 9 people and wounded more than eight dozen others. Coming after the suicide bombings in Damascus on May 10, these kinds of attacks appear to be establishing a pattern.
The government accused the opposition, which it calls terrorists in the most broad-brushed manner it can, for the attack; the opposition very implausibly accused the government of staging an attack against its own security forces. Nobody seems to be willing to tell the truth here: These are almost certainly the acts of specifically al-Qaeda terrorists, some homegrown in Syria but most probably coming across the border from Iraq. The Iraqi government, being de facto pro-regime on the basis of sectarian criteria, might want to prevent these attacks if it could; but it can’t.
As I wrote in this space earlier, the incipient civil war in Syria is now beyond a point of no return. Syria’s heterogeneous politics now appear to be militarizing rapidly, and its borders are becoming porous in the process. Not only are Iraqis coming in, but the influence of the mayhem in Syria is increasingly pouring out into Lebanon. Note in that light the killing of Ahmed Abdul-Wahid, a Sunni sheikh, by Lebanese Army soldiers—the exact circumstances of the killing appear muddy—and the eruption of rioting in Beirut as a result. This is the first sectarian explosion in the Lebanese capital for some time. Unfortunately, it isn’t likely to be the last.
Given the trajectory of events on the ground it is increasingly tragic, or, depending on one’s point of view, tragicomic, for President Obama to continue his mantra of hopeful support for Kofi Annan’s hopeless UN peace mission. The President did that at the G8 meeting in Camp David this weekend even as smoke and blood and debris poured onto the streets of Deir ez-Zour.
Now put this silliness in the context of a Washington Post story in Sunday’s paper, entitled “U.S, allies prepare to secure serious chemical arsenal if needed.” The story, by Joby Warrick, tells the tale of contingency planning among at least seven countries to secure Syria’s vast stocks of chemical weapons in the event the government loses control of them to radical Islamists. The article made clear that contingency planning covers a range of possible missions, but that securing the chemical stocks is of the highest priority. What is surprising about the article, assuming for a moment that it can be taken to be more or less accurate, is the scope of the effort. The United States seems to be the hub here, conducting a series of bilateral consultations with countries such as Great Britain, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.
Even more surprising are details of last week’s Eager Lion exercise in Jordan, which involved military forces from 19 countries, and was said to involve as many as 12,000 troops. Identified as primarily a special-forces exercise, this is a very large number of troops for that kind of practice operation. The Post article makes it seem as though Eager Lion was a response to concerns about developments in Syria, even as it quoted spokesmen pro forma denying that linkage.
Now, military exercises that large and involving that many personnel don’t just pop up overnight. They take lots of time to plan and implement, and while the Syrian crucible has been going on long enough to imagine it as the spark for Eager Lion, there is something a little fishy about the implied linkage. Call me cynical if you like, but this seems like another effort by the Obama Administration’s designated leakers to make a feckless policy look something other than feckless.
How else to explain the wealth of detail in this story? Reporters don’t go asking questions of high government officials about military exercises thousands of miles way that they know nothing about, for the simple reason that they’re classified and they’re not supposed to know anything about them. No, the Administration invites such reporters to have a little sit-down, where it dumps all sorts of juicy tidbits on them—in this case, for example, the fact that Syria’s VX and Sarin stockpiles are kept in “at least five heavily guarded sites” around the country. And it does not hold this little sit-down for no reason, like these officials have nothing better to do.
So, you see how these things go? Look for more fascinating stories in the Washington Post about the Obama Administration’s foresighted and stalwart policy in Syria as the campaign season moves along. As you do, maybe you’ll want to remember this stanza from a Katrina Wendt poem:
Hanging by a line,
Spinning and spinning
Getting dizzy just watching
The world around me