12 thoughts on “Denali”

1. Don’t fall in a crevasse!

   I’m full of helpful advice. 🙂

   I’ve been pondering on Syria, so here are my thoughts.

   I think we need to take a step back instead of spasmodically shooting from the hip. Kerry is out claiming that the evidence of chemical weapons use is irrefutable (duh), but so far the evidence they’ve marshaled doesn’t really implicate Assad directly. Normally I wouldn’t care, because rulers are all about deniability and the buck stops at the top. (Heck, Obama isn’t to blame for anything. If you ask him everything is Bush’s fault.)

   The stance the Obama Administration seems to be taking is that whoever actually ordered the attack (and at this point what does it matter!), Assad is in charge of Syria so he and the Syrian government must be struck with Tomahawks, to uphold international norms – and whatever tattered scraps are left of Obama’s reputation, though they won’t phrase it that way.

   But in this case I think it might matter very much who ordered the attack. Given the evidence presented so far, to me it kind of indicates that Assad may have been the indirect target, not the perpetrator. We really need to find out if that’s the case before Obama lashes out in anger “at something he saw… on a Youtube video.” (h/t to SooperMexican for that tweet).

   And that’s where things get interesting. As the Russians and others, even Americans, have pointed out, it makes no sense for Assad to order such an attack because the gains are small and the consequences for him are potentially huge. The Russians even suggest that the most likely culprits are the rebels. Yet that’s doubtful based on what we know from both sides.

   However, in a bitter civil war, there aren’t just two players, their are scads of them, rivals and factions and vain narcissists wanting to be in charge. The Syrian government made a post saying that the commander of the Republican Guards who was in charge of the chemical weapons was taken out an executed. If he really was, it indicates that either they’re trying to make him the fall guy (yet they don’t seem to be overly publicizing the execution, or else the Western media is largely ignoring it to stick with the narrative), or he attacked without authorization (and thus brought potential hell down on the regime), or they’re faking his death so he can retire to Southern France. Another obvious possibility is that his attack is part of a very clever, yet simple, indirect coup attempt (which would definitely get him shot).

   In support of that last possibility, look at our own Civil War. People loved Lincoln, people hated Lincoln, but people were really frustrated with the course of the war, the failings of various commanders, the political maneuvering of different factions, the inept conduct of the War Department, and all sorts of other things. Lincoln, blessedly, got things pretty much straightened out regarding his generals. What if Assad hasn’t?

   There’s also the backdrop of the bitter sectarian conflicts. Hafez Assad’s ascension to power and his dictatorial rule were, behind closed doors, unpopular in many circles. The naming of his son as his successor wasn’t particularly popular in many Ba’athist circles and among some other prominent Syrian families and power players, and I’m sure many felt jilted, thinking themselves the more obvious and worthy successors. So put that resentment on simmer for a decade.

   The war kicks off thanks to Assad’s brutal response to protests, or his lack of sufficient brutality, and there are undoubtedly Shi’ite, Alawite, Christian, and some Sunni families that are supporting the Syrian government, yet who despise Assad’s family and think his leadership in the war has ranged from wildly barbaric to blindingly incompetent. I’m sure there are countless players who are confident that they could do a better job of conducting the war and a far better job of ruling Syria.

   For those rival leaders, whether Syrian officers, families, or tribes, Assad, his family, and most of his inner circle are in the way and need to be removed. Given the high level of emotions involved in the war, many would be willing to martyr themselves for the cause if it would accomplish something as important as ensuring their people’s survival, not to mention putting their family or faction in power.

   However, this would make their family, friends, and associates targets not just for violent retribution, but eternal condemnation by everyone on their own side of the conflict, because Assad has a lot of loyal support. Just marching into his office and shooting him won’t do the job, and their actions would be branded as high treason, not just to Assad, but to the Syrian cause. They need Assad and his cronies taken out by an outside player so they don’t get the blame for it.

   But for something like that to work they’d need a powerful nation with the ability to decapitate the regime, but without the will to put boots on the ground and occupy the country. They need a nation with a leader stupid, vain, and hot-headed enough to kill Assad before what’s really going on becomes apparent, and do it in a way that doesn’t implicate the players and factions setting Assad up for a fall. They need Obama, and the perfect opportunity would be the first anniversary of his “red line” statement.

   It may be that Obama’s stance on chemical weapons was the overwhelming reason that somebody launched chemical weapons. A rival faction that wants to bump Assad aside and take power could well be using us as their bag man. And at this point, the intelligence we’ve been given doesn’t rule that out. I think it must before we commit ourselves to a course of action whose ramifications could be vast.

   If there is a faction trying to get us to remove Assad, part of their reasoning might be that the Syrian civil war cannot end while Assad and his cronies are still in power. His very existence spurs on the rebels, the Gulf states, and the international community, therefore his continuing rule is the greatest obstacle to any kind of Syrian government victory – especially if the eye-doctor in chief is particularly inept as a war leader, which is something that all other war leaders would naturally think, since the vaunted Syrian army sits bogged down in its second year of fighting rag tag dipshits.

   When the Grand Army of the Potomac kept getting beat by a bunch of poorly organized inbred rednecks (as some Union supporters would have it), people got frustrated with the leadership at the top. They talked about it at Washington cocktail parties, and that perhaps better leadership was called for. But they lived in a thriving pluralistic Republic inhabited by gentlemen. The Syrians live in the Middle East – ruled by a genocidal dictatorship run by a Nazi royal dynasty.

   Even if Assad wins, the country will never heal, violence and strife will never really abate, and the international community will keep the place buried under sanctions for the rest of history. Even worse, an Assad victory will just give Assad’s family something to gloat about in the state propaganda mills as they grind Syria under their heals for the next forty years, blocking the path to power of more worthy families.

   For many potential claimants to Syria’s de facto throne, whose families are now serving as second and third rate hangers-on at court, and especially to patriots absolutely committed to the cause of Alawite and Syrian government dominance, there are no upsides to keeping Assad’s family alive, other than as a symbol of unity in the current war. The only downside to removing him is the bitter backlash of the Assad loyalists and patriotic Syrians, and that backlash won’t matter if it’s directed at B. Obama and John Kerry. In fact, it will probably give his successor more loyalty than Assad ever got. It will help unite people behind the embattled Syrian government.

   So the plan would be simple. Get the West, preferably the US, to blow Assad and his family to kingdom come, and nothing more. The war will go better. The Syrian Sunnis will be somewhat mollified. The international aid to the rebels will peter out. Syria can return to the status quo ante. Since potential claimants to power are invariably convinced that they’ll do way better than their predecessor, they’d firmly believe that Syria will be even better off than before.

   So we might be the policeman, or we might be the patsy. Patsy seems more likely unless forthcoming intelligence can rule that out. If we are being played, then our strike would in effect represent an unwitting military alliance with the individuals, families, and factions who used chemical weapons to kill children.

   However, a successful decapitation strike might still be the best attainable path for Syria to follow. Just because a plot is a plot doesn’t mean it’s not a good plot, and good course of action. Unfortunately, it’s not likely to work because President Transparent McBombyPants has all but given our target list to Assad. The odds of us hitting anything remotely important are not high. Amazingly, this implies that if the chemical strike was in fact designed to con us into carrying out a coup attempt for parties unknown, the con’s mark was simply too stupid and inept for the brilliant plot to succeed.

   They’re probably realizing this as the US government reveals that the administration new about the preparations for a chemical attack on civilians three days in advance, which is possibly three days before Assad and his regime found out about it, and not only didn’t we warn the potential targets, we didn’t warn Assad’s regime that we knew what was coming and were watching, which if it was a plot, would have tipped him off to rogue general who was about to slit the Syrian government’s throat with such an attack. If we’re supposed to be the world’s policeman, we are a policeman who coldly watched preparations for a mass murder for three days, with the complete ability to derail the unspeakable massacre, and did nothing but take private notes about it.

   So now all sides in the conflict have a reason to bitterly despise the United States and Obama, even despise us more than they despise their own opponents – in a civil war based on ancient ethnic and religious hatreds. Heck, even the international community is going to have to look at us as almost bearing moral responsibility for gassing children, because we knew it was coming and didn’t lift a finger to stop it – even when the attack was directed at people we’re supposedly supporting. How on Earth can a US President be so incompetent and morally bankrupt that some genocidal maniac in a foreign military can launch a nerve gas attack on civilians and we, who were not directly involved and have been supplying weapons to the victims of the attack, come out looking like the bad guy? It’s astounding.

   Noting how he made everyone in Egypt despise him, Obama has pulled off that level of abject, utter, breathtaking failure twice in one year. I’m truly gobsmacked. And that’s even before we conduct a cruise missile attack in which we might merely be a semi-retarded trigger man conned into action by parties unknown. As Putin said, we’re like a monkey with a hand grenade.

   So when it comes to the Congressional debate, I sure hope they’ll have our intelligence agencies rule out the possibility that we’re being played by a Syrian faction opposed to Assad, and I hope our intelligence agencies don’t lie, because getting us to kill Assad would make too much sense to too many people on both sides of the Syrian civil war.

   … and if you can make it to the bottom of this comment, you can certainly make it to the top of Denali!

   1. Darn it. I forgot two points.

      If the chemical attack was an attempt to get us to remove Assad, the people involved would probably have created some evidence implicating him. So even if he wasn’t responsible, it’s likely there would be intelligence indicating that he is. That means we need to be really careful about what is certain and what is just implied. The Congressmen who attended the intelligence briefing described the evidence as “pretty convincing” that Assad was involved.

      Second, if he wasn’t involved, and if the attack was more than just a rogue operation and was an attempt to frame Assad, then it wouldn’t be in Assad’s interests to let anyone know that. If he needs to conduct some purges, he needs to do it quietly so the Syrians supporting his government don’t realize that powerful people on their own side are going for regime-change by proxy. Then they’d all think that either Assad is weak or that their own side is full of traitors, or realize that they should hook up with the traitors at the earliest opportunity. Assad isn’t going to air his regime’s dirty laundry just to avoid a pointless missile strike designed only to inflict enough damage to avoid mockery. And he certainly wouldn’t want the rebels to get even a sniff of a major crack in their opponent’s unity.

      So it might be hard to be certain that the attack wasn’t a con based on intelligence before and during the attacks, because any plotters would be trying to put Assad’s fingerprints on the attack, and hard to be certain afterwards because it’s not in Assad’s interest to let anyone know the truth if the attack was made as a way to take him down.

      So anyway, although it is a rather elaborate but simple conspiracy theory (in the real sense), is it asking too much to see if we can rule it out? The question is rather simple. Did Assad order the strike or was it an unauthorized operation? If it was an unauthorized operation, was its purpose mainly to get us to remove Assad from power to make room for someone else?

      Of course Congress also has other questions, since even if Assad is 100% responsible, our punitive attack is rather pointless, completely telegraphed, and unlikely to accomplish anything, with the potential for creating lots more problems in a country that’s already bleeding from a thousand wounds.

      1. George, two reactions:

         1) There is a lot of talk about Assad’s (living) brother being the rouge element. Lots of Kremlinology regarding the brother… …seems like that would fit in with your theories.

         2) You said “I think it must before we commit ourselves to a course of action whose ramifications could be vast.”

         Attacking Syria need not be momentous. Israel bombed their nuclear reactor not that long ago, and since the war started, Israel has conducted three airstrikes (and more trivially, returned artillery fire at the border). In each case, it was not momentous — there was no blowback, no reaction at all really, except that, comically, many otherwise anti-Israel Arabs cheered Israel on. The irony was not lost on them.

         Also: If someone wanted to provoke an airstrike (particularly a decapitation strike), provoking Israel would be a lot easier than provoking the USA.

2. I think that “Denali” is an anagram I’d “Denial,” making this post about global warming and how Rand is so far behind all science and fashion…

   1. Also needs a reference to how ANWR != ANSWER.

      1. ANWR is certainly part of the answer.

3. That should be “of “Denial”.” Damn autocorrect!

4. Fall started early here in Alberta too, the leaves started turning yellow at the beginning of August. Considering winter didn’t end until May here, this has to be the shortest spring/summer of my 44 years. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see snow in a couple weeks at most.

5. After my wife and I moved to Fairbanks in ’94 we booked a short ride on the Alaska Railroad, just down to the Denali Park station and back, with a layover there until the train returned from Anchorage to take us back north. It was September so the color was coming up but the clouds made it impossible to see much even of the mountains we were among, let alone the big one.

   The only wildlife I saw — other than ravens and red squirrels — was a muskrat in Horseshoe Lake when we walked to it from the station area, and a moose down by the Nenana River as we were heading back to Fairbanks. Both times my wife was distracted so she missed them.

   We lived up there for five years though so we both saw plenty of moose afterward. Never saw wolves or grizzlies but once a couple of black bear cubs in the ditch along the Dalton Highway. Ahead of us that time some people in a car with Yukon plates got out of the car to take pictures, as if Mama Bear couldn’t possibly be anywhere around. Fortunately for them Mama Bear simply called her kids up into the woods to get away from the crazy humans.

6. We did the Kantishna bus ride too…13 1/2 hours of spectacular scenery, except Mt. McKinley was totally socked in down to the base. In fact, none of the mountains over 7000 ft were very visible.

   Alaska was a great experience and it was a downer to come back home last week.

7. ” a big blonde grizzly — was right by the roadside, then wandered around the back of the bus over to the other side, too busy eating blueberries and low-bush cranberries to pay much attention to us.”

   Pity, you missed the chance to feed the grizzly.

   1. No, I didn’t.

      Idiot.

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