Raid Syria? Actually, that's a terrible idea.

The implications of the US military strike into Syria are manifold. Counterinsurgency 101 tells you to eliminate all insurgent safe havens, but there will be serious negative consequences that might outweigh playing Al-Qaeda whac-a-mole in Syria.

But first, it is confusing as to who actually ordered the strike into Syria. It would appear that the White House has delegated the responsibility for ordering strikes into insurgent sanctuaries to the military commander of Central Command, David Petraeus.

Wow.

We take from Clausewitz that war is merely the continuation of politics by other means, but is it acceptable to give the Pentagon the ultimately political choice of when to potentially start a war? Clausewitz, and I say a definite no- even though Petraeus is a pretty good guy. And there could also be confusion as to who even ordered this particular attack. This is also a tad worrisome.

Syria is granting insurgents and terrorists safe haven in their countryside, as I discussed in the previous post, and this was getting on Iraq and the US’s nerves. But perhaps who ever thought it would be a good idea to conduct a US raid in Syria was banking on Syria’s response to be similar to Israel’s bombing of their suspected nuclear reactor last fall? (Which was rather muted at the time.) But Israel bombed a remote region that was closed off to the Syrian public, and the US sent ‘copters in the middle of the day near a pretty large town. It is hard to just write that off… It might be a little more expensive in the short run than a quick helicopter trip into Syria, but I would advocate that Iraqi and US forces man the border and we work towards getting the Syrian police to roll up the undesirables that might run amok along the Euphrates. Violations of sovereignty tend to upset people.

Most Syrians desperately would like to be free from Iran’s sphere of influence and rejoin the international community sans sanctions. Anyone who has taken an Iranian-made taxi in Damascus will sympathize. The Syrian government had recently been making overtures towards the west, but this raid is likely to set that back a quite a ways.

Finally, one must wonder what this will do to the SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) negotiations back in Baghdad. Iraqis want the US military out of Iraq, and since it is a now a democracy (that’s a good thing, right?), the government needs to respond. The raid into Syria has thrown yet another wrench in the equation. And I’ll bet that it’s a pretty big wrench.