For those who think that Donald Trump is thinking about issues, think again. From his utterances [let’s not dignify them by calling them “statements”] and early-morning bedside tweets, one can only conclude that no thought goes into his “pronouncements.” He merely stumbles from one shiny-object issue to the next, cribbing his remarks from whatever Trump TV has said, and garbling even that. Clearly, he does not actually understand what he is talking about, and we see that most vividly in his rambling, incoherent attempts to Trump-splain his latest policy lurch.

With that as an introduction, here is the complete [mercifully short] transcript of Trump’s attempt at an answer about US policy regarding Syria, from his  joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, on April 24, 2018. It seems as though he and Macron did have a discussion about Syria, from which Trump may have picked up a few phrases to sprinkle in as a way of trying to sound knowledgeable. [What, by the way, is “open season to the Mediterranean?”]  But I have no idea what he is trying to say. Do you? Does he?

As far as Syria is concerned, I would love to get out. I would love to bring our incredible warriors back home. They’ve done a great job; we’ve essentially just absolutely obliterated ISIS in Iraq, and in Syria. And we’ve done a big favor to neighboring countries, frankly, but we’ve also done a favor for our country.

With that being said, Emmanuel and myself have discussed the fact that we don’t want to give Iran open season to the Mediterranean, especially since we really control it to a large extent. We really have controlled it, and we’ve set control on it.

So we’ll see what happens. But we’re going to be coming home relatively soon. We finished, at least almost, our work with respect to ISIS in Syria, ISIS in Iraq. And we have done a job that nobody has been able to do. With that being said, I do want to come home, but I want to come home also with having accomplished what we have to accomplish.

The post Trump transcripts: Latest “thinking” on Syria appeared first on Occasional Planet.

“We are going to stop the policy of regime change overseas”

“[Hillary Clinton] wants to start a shooting war in Syria in conflict with nuclear-armed Russia. Frankly, it could lead to World War III and she has no sense.”

“You gotta give [Kim Jong-Un] credit…I mean this guy doesn’t play games. And we can’t play games with him.”

“We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with”

“We should stay the hell out of Syria.”

“Start focusing on OUR COUNTRY, jobs, healthcare and all of our many problems. Forget Syria and make America great again!”

These are the words of the President of the United States before he assumed that office. There are dozens of quotes to pick from that suggested that Trump wanted to pursue a foreign policy so non-interventionist that it bordered on isolationism, so that he could focus on domestic issues. It also seemed abundantly clear that whatever his feelings about Assad or ISIS, he thought US involvement in Syria was a bad idea as recently as late March. So, what changed between then and now? Poll numbers mostly.

According to RealClearPolitics, Donald Trump’s approval rating two days before he launched 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria was about 39%. Five days after the military action, his poll numbers improved to 42%. For the first time in weeks, the media loved him, he had bipartisan support (even Hillary praised the strikes), and no one was talking about investigations. Objectively speaking, it was a good week for the President, perhaps his best week. But then the glow began to wear off. Brian Williams was no longer talking about the “beauty of our weapons,” but like most Americans he began to question, “what is the broader military strategy?”

But there is something that The President, Sean Spicer, Sebastian Gorka, and the cabinet of deplorables will not tell you. There is no broader military strategy, unless one considers “bomb the shit out of them” and “take the oil” as strategy. Most of us knew that Donald Trump never had a plan to defeat ISIS, or any knowledge of international affairs generally speaking. But we thought we could assume, based on years of public statements that whatever misguided thing the President did, it would be “non-interventionist”. However, the administration characterized the strike as not a departure from “America First”, but more of an isolated humanitarian mission.

If we’re to believe Trump, this was just a moment of compassion spurred by Assad’s butchery towards his own people, especially the children. He said “It crossed a lot of lines for me.  When you kill innocent children, innocent babies… that crosses many, many lines”. The narrative in the media is that Trump was shown these photos, and he was moved to act, with a little prodding from Ivanka and Jared Kushner. If it were true then one could argue that he’s a rational actor open to shifting policy as new situations develop, that perhaps somewhere deep down, the president does have a real sense of humanity and desire to end human suffering.

Here’s why that’s horseshit.

Trump’s first military action as President was the Yemen raid; resulting in 14 civilian deaths, including 8 children, one of whom was an American citizen. The President didn’t seem especially moved by that event, especially after he dodged responsibility for the loss of Ryan Owens, a Navy Seal, when he said “[The Generals] lost Ryan”.

Then there’s the American-led airstrike in Mosul, which was allegedly responsible for over 500 civilian deaths, undoubtedly dozens of those murdered were children. In fact, Human Rights groups in Iraq and the Pentagon have noted an increase in civilian deaths after Trump launched a more “aggressive” offensive in liberating Mosul, as many as 3,000 have died; surely hundreds of these dead were also children.

If Trump was truly moved by the suffering of children, then we would have known long before Assad’s latest chemical attack. For several years, we have known of the barbarism, the devastation, and the human cost of the Syrian civil war. Yet, it took Trump 4 years of watching the carnage from his gold tower to approve of intervention in Syria. Back in 2013 when we were first given a glimpse of Assad’s brutality, Trump tweeted at then President Obama “We should stay the hell out of Syria, the “rebels” are just as bad as the current regime.”

So no, Trump is not a champion of human rights nor a protector of the lamp of liberty. Trump is almost certainly still unconcerned with the fate of the Syrian people, and probably still can’t grasp the complexities of the civil war.

Let’s also not forget the recent actions in North Korea, which not only endangers our South Korean and Japanese allies, but perhaps in a few years, the continental U.S. Trump has managed to inspire the Kim regime to accelerate their nuclear program with “more missile tests on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis.” if necessary. Trump has also threatened to send an armada to the Peninsula, if he can remember where it is.

So, what’s happening with Trump’s foreign policy, not just in the Middle East, but with North Korea as well?

Trump has not been consistent, if any overarching theme exists in Trump’s foreign policy decisions, it’s that each provocation and escalation is an attempt to appeal to the electorate. A whopping 57% of Americans, including 40% of Democrats approved of Trump’s strike on Syria according to CBS. According to Pew Research, 64% of Americans support force if “North Korea got into a serious conflict with an Asian ally”. Trump has apparently realized that jingoism has more upside politically speaking, than non-interventionism.

If this all sounds familiar, a Republican President with middling approval looking for a conflict to insert the United States under the guise of protecting human rights, it’s because we have lived through this before. It worked out well for George W. Bush, who also lost the popular vote but was elected to a second term to “finish the job” in Iraq. Wartime Presidents get re-elected, so we have to be vigilant because we are witnessing mission creep. In Trump’s own words “I’m really good at war.  I love war in a certain way”.

As much as the mainstream media (I’m talking to you Fareed Zakaria) would like to normalize Trump, we’ve got to stop pretending that Trump somehow can become more than what he is. He doesn’t care about strategy, he doesn’t understand the consequences of his actions, and he has no intellectual curiosity about the world. He’s figured out that America loves a good war, and he’s more than willing to give it to them. It starts with Tomahawk missiles, next it could be an ICBM headed towards North Korea or Iran, whatever polls better. There is no becoming “Presidential”, there is only Trump, and what serves his selfish interests.

The post Bombing His Way to Re-Election: The Trump Doctrine appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The longest running joke on the leftist humor podcast Chapo Trap House is that its hosts are fervent devotees of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Edogan. Chapo’s American hosts frequently make in-jokes about the Turkish deep state, “the traitor” Fethullah Gulen, and endlessly praise Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). But even Chapo Trap House would be hard-pressed to laugh at Erdogan’s recent authoritarian and repressive behavior. Modern Turkey was never really a democracy, as its state apparatus was run mostly by its military, which has repeatedly overthrown civilian governments with impunity. Still, Turkey’s slow descent into nationalism and Islamism has been one of the tragedies of the early years of our century. There is little evidence to indicate that this fall will stop anytime soon: April 16th’s referendum on presidential power could centralize Erdogan’s control of the Turkish state even further.

There are multiple reasons for the increasingly authoritarian nature of AKP. One is the continuing war with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a far-left insurgency dedicated to establishing a socialist enclave within Turkey. This low-intensity struggle has been waged on and off since 1984. Since the most recent truce in 2015, the conflict has taken the lives of over 2,000 people, most of them murdered by the Turkish state.

These clashes with the PKK allude to another cause for Turkey’s movement towards authoritarianism: its involvement in the Syrian Civil War. Since 2012 or earlier, Turkey has sponsored the Free Syrian Army, an opposition group as hostile to democracy as it is to Bashar al-Assad. More recently Turkey has elbowed its way into the fight against ISIS in Iraq. This increased intervention seems to be aimed more at defeating Kurdish rebels than subduing ISIS. These actions indicate that Erdogan views Syria as an opportunity for more regional power and, via a crushing of Kurdish movements, a key to consolidating AKP’s authority at home.

These internal and external security threats, in addition to the recent enigmatic, failed coup, have led Turkey away from the secularism (and limited pluralism) that the West has admired for so long. Erdogan’s most recent diplomatic misadventure with the Netherlands reeks of the bizarre populism of a Trump or Gaddafi more than it does an intelligent statesman.

Which brings us to Trump’s unfolding relationship with Erdogan and Ankara. For the moment, the United States is supporting the YPG, the People’s Protection Units, a Syrian analogue to the PKK in Turkey. The YPG fights against ISIS for socialism and local governance in northern Syria, which they are calling Rojava, or Western Kurdistan. There thus has developed an awkward situation in which the US and Turkey are supporting two anti-ISIS groups that are in turn at war with one another: the FSA and the YPG. This situation will likely endure until ISIS is ousted from Raqqa. Then Turkey will have the ability to bring its entire military might to bear against YPG.

It would be easy to close this op-ed by recommending the United States apply soft power to the situation, using diplomatic channels to guide Turkey back towards secular democracy. But are America, and the Western bloc, even willing to promote democracy abroad? Even under the best circumstances, it would be foolish to believe Western governments are inherently democratic, or want the same for the rest of the planet. With Donald Trump as president and the far-right ascendant in Europe, however, it is difficult to imagine a United States that pays even lip service to democratic values globally. Trump’s admiration of Bashar al-Assad for “killing terrorists” most likely extends to Erdogan as well, despite his Islamism; and it is difficult to see Trump’s administration supporting YPG any longer than it needs to; we can safely assume Trump and company are not in this war because of their love of Kurdish socialism. And it remains unknown if and how Trump’s recent missile strike against a Syrian airstrip will change the Middle East’s complicated playing field.

There is a remote possibility that the US, EU, or Russia (which supports YPG and Assad, making them a potential mediator) could intervene diplomatically on behalf of the Kurds and Turkey’s pluralist tradition. But barring that possibility, the future of Erdogan’s Turkey appears to be that of an authoritarian backwater.

The post Erdogan Makes A Mockery Of “Justice And Development” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

How does Trump’s refugee ban affect people’s lives? Two recent videos document the real impact. They take the viewer behind the partisan policy debates, behind factual distortions, and behind the spin, to demonstrate how lives have been altered by decisions made in Washington DC.

  “Starting a New Life in America: A Syrian Refugee Story,” follows the Abdo family of war-torn Aleppo who gained entry to the U.S. during the Obama presidency. Filmed and produced by a young Syrian-American, the video takes us into the Abdo home, where we learn of the family’s hopes for the future and of their deep gratitude to America and their successful adjustment to life in Lowell, Massachusetts.

The second video tells the story of Clemson University PhD graduate Nazanin Zinouri, an Iranian who found herself caught in the chaos and uncertainty of Trump’s disastrous first refugee ban. Zinouri, who has lived and worked in the U.S. for seven years, was taken off her return flight from Dubai and denied re-entry into the U.S. after traveling to Iran to visit her family. Following a public campaign on her behalf, which included the advocacy of Senator Lindsay Graham, Zinouri was allowed to return to her life and her home in South Carolina.

The post Videos document the human cost of Trump’s refugee ban appeared first on Occasional Planet.

With the advent of a Trump presidency fast approaching, the American Left appears despondent and discouraged. They may take potential hope from a series of remarkable events happening amidst the bloodshed of the Syrian Civil War.

The northern areas of Syria have long been home to a substantial Kurdish population. In 2011, when hostilities of the civil war began, Kurdish militants drove out Syrian government forces and established an autonomous zone known as Rojava, meaning “The West” of theoretical Kurdistan.

But Kurdish self-determination is only one aspect of the struggle for Rojava. Within the areas controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a multiethnic coalition created to fight ISIS and other belligerents, nothing short of a revolution has taken place. SDF and Kurdish personnel have experimented with Athenian-esque direct democracy, racial and gender equality, and participatory economics. Many (including The Guardian) have compared Rojava’s innovations in governance to the brief period of anarchist control in Spanish Catalonia during that country’s own civil war.
The achievements of Syrian Kurdistan are nothing short of miraculous. Based on direct democracy methods articulated by American philosopher Murray Bookchin, Rojava is a confederation of democratic municipalities. Women have a 40% quota in every assembly. Non-Kurdish ethnicities enjoy affirmative action and relative equality. Economic cooperatives are encouraged to promote egalitarian and environmentally sustainable autonomy. In the midst of a religious and political civil war that has taken close to half a million people’s lives, this functioning leftist democracy is an achievement.

In addition, SDF and YPG (People’s Protection Units, the military arm of Rojava) have proved to be perhaps the most effective force against ISIS, even according to US military personnel. But just like the Spanish Revolution of the mid-1930s, crushed by Stalinist Communism, Rojava remains isolated and fragile. It has an uneasy, on-and-off truce with the Assad regime, though Assad insists that Kurds don’t want self-determination. The looming threat to Rojava is Turkey, which is understandably concerned with YPG’s ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an insurgent group active in Turkey. An offshoot of the PKK recently executed a bombing campaign on Turkey military targets. This in turn led to further repression of Kurdish organizations within Turkey, evidence of Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian rule. Turkish forces, during excursions into Syria, have targeted not only ISIS but YPG and Kurdish groups as well, claiming they are the equivalent of the PKK terrorists in Turkey.

The United States is a supporter of both Turkey, a NATO ally, and Rojava, indirectly: At the continuing siege of Mosul, US troops have provided training, logistical support, and airstrikes to the YPG in their struggle against ISIS. Therefore the US is in a contradictory position, supporting two opposing forces. Likely, support for one will lead to termination of support for the other. It is difficult to imagine President-elect Trump supporting a far-Left, stateless insurgency over Turkey’s authoritarian stability. He is, after all, a businessman, and is more likely to be favorable towards keeping Turkey in the US bloc than he is towards Kurdish self-determination and socialism.

Thus the future of Rojava may fall, in part, into the hands of the Left outside of Syria. It remains to be seen if activists in the West and beyond will help Rojava survive, either by pressuring their governments for support or by joining the fight themselves: thousands of foreign fighters journeyed to northern Syria to help defend the revolution, including one recently deceased American. If this trickle of funds, state support, and fighters becomes a flood, Rojava could survive to become an enduring experiment in human freedom.

The post How does the revolution in Rojava fit into the Syrian Civil War? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

This year’s catastrophe of an election cycle has led some on the Left to seek refuge with Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein, and while I am not necessarily a member of these refugees, I do sympathize. Hillary Clinton’s neoliberalism, for better or worse, is as abhorrent to many leftists as Donald Trump’s ultra-nationalism. Stein has run on a platform of human rights, political and racial equality, and anti-imperialism. It was therefore extremely disappointing to me to see her vice presidential running mate, Ajamu Baraka, write an editorial that supports Syria’s autocratic Bashar al-Assad. What is worse, Baraka isn’t alone in this trend: There is a long history of leftists supporting oppressive regimes simply because of their supposed “anti-imperialism”. For the left to be truly internationalist, to truly support human rights for all peoples, we need to bury this phenomenon once and for all.

Assad is not an anti-imperialist

First, let’s talk about Baraka’a article and dispel the notion that Bashar al-Assad is somehow an “anti-imperialist.” Baraka has two central points:  First,that the recent Syrian elections, which Assad and his Ba’athist party won handily, represents “a vote that was more about Syrian dignity and self-determination than any of the candidates on the ballot”. Baraka’s obvious mistake here is that the word candidates is plural; though there may have been candidates besides the Ba’athists and Assad, we can assume the system was going to deliver an Assad victory no matter what. Therefore, the idea of “the Syrian people” going out and voting is undermined.

Second,that the opposition in Syria is composed almost entirely of Islamic radicals. One can’t deny the presence of Islamic groups like the al-Nusra Front in the anti-Assad forces in Syria. But this refocuses the debate away from Assad, who is still a dictator, still a supporter of mass repression and state murder. The elementary school-level logic of “he’s fighting bad people, so he’s a good person” that Baraka applies to Assad is not grounded in a legitimate concern from human rights, or a nuanced understanding of international relations.

And, even if Baraka was correct about the content of the Syrian opposition, to what extent does Assad actually oppose imperialism? Sometimes Assad has aligned himself with Chinese and Russian interests, which are equally oppressive as U.S. hegemony, but more importantly, he has collaborated with U.S. anti-terror human rights abuses. Namely, the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian terror suspect who U.S. officials seized and sent to Syria to be tortured. In a sense, the U.S. exported our human rights abuses to Assad’s regime. But this is the man Baracka says is “in opposition to the efforts of the imperialists states” and with whom we should “stand in solidarity…no matter how we see the internal contradictions of that nation/state.” “Internal contradictions” in this context is a fancy way of saying “the murder of over a thousand people with chemical weapons”.

 So it is a delusion that Assad is somehow anti-U.S. His Syria is a “frenemy” regime, sometimes opposing and sometimes collaborating with the imperial powers. There also may be those among Baraka’s camp that may tend to view his “Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party” as leftist. They may be surprised to learn that since pro-business reforms in 2004, Syria’s capitalists have become the backbone of Assad’s support. The idea that this combination of economic inequality and state repression is what the Left should strive for is ludicrous. Supporting Assad for his “socialism” is akin to supporting Hitler because his party had the word “socialist” in its name.

The left’s awkward position on foreign policy

But more generally, the western Left still finds itself in a perpetually awkward position on foreign policy: As citizens of the West, they belong to countries which have frequently subjugated the rest of the world. Resistance to this is obviously a must for anyone concerned with a better planet. But who do you stand with when those who oppose Western imperialism are frequently just as evil as the imperialists themselves?

 There’s no perfect answer to that question, and this is why the Left has no answer on how to solve the Syrian Crisis, in which more than 400,000 people have died.

Some smug intellectuals have found an easy way out of this conundrum: Simply root against the West, in favor of whatever force might be opposing it. This easy way out is the reason Telesur took the baffling position of defending Col. Gaddafi as the good guy in Libya’s civil war. It’s the reason, Ashley Smith writes in CounterPunch, that regressive leftists

…stood with Russia’s crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring in 1968 and Poland’s Solidarity in 1981. They supported Mao’s China when the regime wrecked workers and peasants’ lives through the Great Leap Forward and oppressed Tibetans in a decades-long occupation. They defended regimes like Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe as anti-imperialist, despite his relentless crackdown on all dissent

Even today, when all the world’s states are obviously capitalist, these leftists support oppressive regimes as “anti-imperialist” so long as they oppose the U.S. in some form. Under the faulty logic that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” popular struggles for democracy are denounced as the work of American imperialism if they protest the wrong regime.

For these folks, pointing out that the West is hypocritical, that America and company do not actually stand for freedom, is the end of the argument.  Another way of putting the anti-Western-at-any-cost streak in the Left, as The Guardian did in 2015 when discussing an attempt to extract the genocidal Sudanese president from South Africa: “if your white western war criminals are roaming free, then we reserve the right for ours to roam free as well”. The Guardian rightly called this strain of thought an “obvious self-harming failure”. Just because the U.S.’s imperial projects are false, hypocritical, and atrocious, does not mean those who claim to support their abolition are magically transformed into anti-imperialist heroes.

Some leftists actually are fighting ISIS

The sad coda to Ajamu Baraka’s article is that an actual, living-and-breathing leftist community, in the form of Kurdish Rojava, are fighting and dying against ISIS, Syrian government forces, and the Turkish army. Baraka’s article doesn’t even mention these courageous fighters, who have made tremendous strides in radical democratic participation, feminist inclusion, and racial equality. I suppose  Baracka’s blind support for Assad means that real radicals who are fighting Assad’s autocracy every day must be put to the sword. Perhaps now that Rojava is supported by the US, Baracka and fellow armchair leftists halfway around the world get to dismiss the Kurdish socialists as “sellouts”. But hey, it’s all worth it, just to spit in the eye of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus.

Supporting the fight for freedom, justice and equality, wherever it comes from

I say none of this to advocate for some Bush II-esque crusade against supposed dictators, or any other ill-advised Western adventures abroad. I reject arguments like that of Christopher Hitchens, whose left-of-center liberalism led him in a roundabout way to support the Iraq war. Neocon apologists like Hitchens and regressive leftists like Ajamu Baraka are incapable of articulating a truly just way for the United States to interact with the world, and there is little hope that they will in the future. We need an internationalist foreign policy that is loyal not to whoever fights the West, but to whoever supports freedom, justice, and equality. I refuse to tacitly support Vladimir Putin, or Hugo Chavez, or whatever tyrant or terrorist the regressive Left will romanticize for resisting Western imperialism. And for my fellow leftists, we should emulate one of one of the most anti-Western figures in modern history, Malcolm X: “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it’s for or against.”

The post The left has no answer for Syria appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Tony Dale, a Republican State Representative to the Texas legislature, wants to ban Syrian refugees from his state because it’s too easy for them to buy guns in Texas. According to Salon, in a letter he sent to other Texas lawmakers, Dale said that…

…the state should not accept any Syrian refugees because its lax gun-purchasing regulations would make it easy for any terrorists hiding among them to acquire a weapon and carry out an attack.

To be more specific, Think Progress notes that,

in a letter to Senator Jon Cornyn, [Dale] characterized as an insufficiently “robust” screening process and it’s not difficult to “imagine a scenario were [sic] a refugees [sic] is admitted to the United States, is provided with federal cash payments and other assistance, obtains a drivers license and purchases a weapon and executes an attack.”

But, of course, gun-purchasing laws in Texas are so lax that purported refugee/terrorists can them so easily precisely because legislators like Dale—who have “A” ratings from the NRA–have staunchly opposed gun-control legislation and have opposed background checks of any kind for decades.

Which brings us to another Republican meme: “We can’t let refugees in because we can’t do background checks on them.” [See: Marco Rubio]

So, let me get this straight: We should be doing deep background checks on Syrian refugees, because they might get guns, but we must not ever, ever, ever require background checks for American citizens–or anyone else–who want to buy guns at gun shows or from private individuals.

Interestingly, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, 23 states whose governors are opposing the resettlement of Syrian refugees do not require background checks for firearms purchased at gun shows from private individuals. The Center also says:

Within our own borders, weak gun laws in most states make it easy for deadly firearms to fall into the wrong hands. And this fact is far from a secret—a senior al-Qaeda leader even lauded how simple it is to obtain firearms in America, releasing a video message to urge followers to buy guns in states without universal background checks.

Think Progress also notes that:

While those applying for refugee status must complete “the most stringent security process for anyone entering the United States,” those attempting to purchase guns through private sales at gun shows in Texas and many other states are not required to undergo any background checks whatsoever. Virtually none of the millions of refugees admitted into the United States since 1980 have become terrorists, but the U.S. leads the world in mass shootings — almost all of which are perpetrated by people born in America.

The post Ban Syrian refugees from gun-lax TX, says NRA-backed TX lawmaker appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Agreeing to get rid of Syria’s chemical weapons was the hard part—and “was” is, admittedly, an optimistic word. But if Russia, the U.S. and Syria can actually agree to destroy Syria’s chemical weapon arsenal, it turns out that the process of destroying them is not as difficult as one might imagine [um, except for the slight complication of securing them during a raging civil war in Syria, replete with lots of groups who would love to get their hands on these weapons of mass destruction, and the possible harm that could be done to civilians and the environment by a military approach to chemical-weapons destruction.] But, military and political logistics aside, here’s a roundup of articles describing how to get this job done, and some new developments that are in the works:

Incineration and neutralization

The two most common ways used by the U.S. to destroy chemical weapons are incineration and neutralization. According to Wikipedia:

The primary method is incineration, where liquid agents are burned in a furnace of temperatures over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.  For chemical agents in delivery vessels (i.e. mortars, bombs, artillery shells, etc.), this is a multi-step process. First the delivery vessels are robotically disassembled in a reverse order from that which they were originally assembled. Next the chemical agent is drained out of the projectile and sent to the liquid incinerator as the disassembled projectile parts are placed on a conveyor belt and fed into a metal furnace where they are melted at close to 1,500 °F for 15 minutes to ensure that any contamination has been completely destroyed. [This method has been used since 1979.]

The second method is neutralization. Basically, this method chemically neutralizes and cooks the weapons. Wikipedia says:

In the United States, neutralization was first selected as an alternative to incineration to destroy stockpiles of chemical agent stored in bulk. Depending on the type of agent to be destroyed, neutralization destroys the chemical agent by mixing it with hot water or hot water and sodium hydroxide. The U.S. Army’s Chemical Materials Agency applied this method to safely eliminate its stockpile of mustard agent in Edgewood, Md., and VX nerve agent in Newport, Ind. Both stockpiles were stored in large steel containers without explosives or other weapon components. The industrial wastewater produced by the process, known as hydrolysate, was sent to a permitted commercial hazardous waste storage, treatment and disposal facility for treatment and disposal.

Military options

If a military attack is the “preferred” method [we can hope not], there are options [no guarantees that nearby civilians wouldn’t be hurt, though].

Before we commence bombing, here’s some background: Some earlier forms of chemical weapons presented problems for disposal, because they were essentially large amounts of toxic substances packed into containers such as bombs, artillery shells and canisters. They also were prone to leaks and premature explosions, so weapons makers split them into “binary” devices, in which the two essential substances were kept separate within the weapon, until an explosive force broke down the barrier and created the chemical reaction that resulted in the poisonous substance. This “safety” feature made them harder to destroy, because bombing them would release the toxins.

But, according to Extreme.tech.com:

…fortunately, some common precursors, like the isopropyl alcohol used to create sarin gas, can be incinerated. If enough heat is created quickly, the military believes the production of sarin gas can be greatly reduced or even eliminated. For this purpose it has funded the creation of the BLU-119/B (aka CrashPad — with the PAD standing for Prompt Agent Defeat.) The CrashPad is a 420-pound weapon with a “blast-fragmentation” warhead designed to incinerate chemical agents and precursors before they can escape into the surrounding area. This is accomplished by using white phosphorous in the payload, resulting in a thermobaric or high-heat weapon that uses oxygen in the environment to burn.

Extremetech also describes another chemical-weapons-busting device, something incongruously called a “Passive Attack Weapon (PAW), an oxymoron if ever there was one. But I digress…

For chemical and biological agents that are heavier than air, simply ripping things apart can work. Destroying their containers — whether bomb casings, artillery shells, or storage canisters — and letting the agents settle to the ground could greatly reduce the area affected. The CBU-107 is a specially designed bomb containing up to 3,700 metal fragments — 350 14-inch rods, 1,000 7-inch rods, and 2,400 2-inch rods — that scatter throughout a 60-meter target area. If exploded in a WMD stockpile, this PAW (Passive Attack Weapon) should destroy nearby canisters, shells, and bombs, releasing their agents locally.

Extreme Tech adds, somewhat sanguinely:

The result of a PAW strike will still be a toxic mess, but hopefully one that only affects a limited area. The PAW has one other trick up its sleeve: Because the rods are propelled at very high speeds, they will heat up whatever they hit. So, much like an…anti-tank round can melt its way through tank armor, the PAW’s payload may be able to incinerate many of the chemicals located where it is detonated.

But, in the end, Extreme Tech does acknowledge the risks:

Use of any of these munitions is made much more complex if the targeted weapons are housed near populated areas, of course.

New and improved: Mobile unit for on-site, chemical weapon destruction

A new approach to destroying chemical weapons is a something known as the Field Deployable Hydrolysis System (FDHS). Newly created [in 2013] by the U.S. Army, the device, says Navy Times, is a mobile processing plant “designed to destroy chemical warfare agents in bulk that . It can be up and running within 10 days of arriving on site.”

A crew of 15 people is needed to operate the system at any given time, according to the Army. The system can neutralize between five and 25 metric tons of chemicals per day, depending on the material.…The system is “designed to convert chemical agents into compounds not usable as weapons. Neutralization is achieved by mixing the agent with water and other chemicals and heating it.”

If that sounds like an easy solution—one that would avoid bombing Syria—think again. To destroy Syria’s chemical-weapons cache in site would require first securing the weapons where they are stockpiled. That would be a very challenging and unpopular scenario, says the Washington Post.

In the wake of any sudden regime collapse, efforts to find and secure stockpiles would be both a high priority and a difficult challenge.

The Pentagon has estimated that it would take more than 75,000 troops to secure Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles, and the United States has reportedly been working with NATO to prepare for several scenarios along these lines.

Oh, oops, did I say that destroying chemical weapons was going to be easy? Technically, it could be. Logistically: that’s a different story.

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The natural reaction to Russian president Vladimir Putin writing an op-ed piece in the New York Times, in which he critiqued American foreign policy, was that his words were inappropriate, intrusive, and offensive. New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez said the piece made him almost want to throw up. Other Americans were equally put off.

Americans seem to collectively get their spines up when someone from a foreign country offers thoughts on how the United States might improve itself. It is not unlike when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said that there was no need for him to incorporate legal thinking from other countries into his deliberations, because everything he needs to know is in the United States Constitution and case law.

Scalia’s literalist decisions have given him a very narrow view of the Constitution.  He calls it a “dead Constitution.”  This seems to exclude common sense from much of his thinking.

Putin’s op-ed was criticized or ignored by many Americans in part because he is not American. In fact, he is the leader of a sometimes opponent of the U.S. Many Americans feel that the U.S. has a corner on wisdom and that it is offensive for others to offer us advice.

Let’s consider some of what Putin said in his op-ed:

Recent events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies.

Putin is suggesting that it would be helpful to both Russia and the United States if there was more communication between the societies. There is nothing to object to here.  Can we at least given him credit for something as American as apple pie–or even Rodney King?

The word “exceptional” seems to be a real powder keg in Putin’s op-ed. Putin said, “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”

This is both a light swat at the United States and a major blow. It is light in that it somewhat challenges what President Obama said in his Sept. 10 2013 speech on Syria:

America is not the world’s policeman. Terrible things happen across the globe, and it is beyond our means to right every wrong. But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional. With humility, but with resolve, let us never lose sight of that essential truth.

The President is saying that America is exceptional because it stands up against atrocities. His words are definitely subject to challenge; there’s no empirical evidence that America stands up to atrocities more than other countries. It was a “feel good” line to the American people.

However, there is a broader use of the term “American exceptionalism,” which may be what Putin was targeting.

Although the term does not necessarily imply superiority, many neoconservative and American conservative writers have promoted its use in that sense. To them, the United States is like the biblical shining “City upon a Hill”, and exempt from historical forces that have affected other countries.

The term does indeed seem to imply superiority. It is continuously used by conservatives, and especially Tea Party members, in the U.S. These are people who clearly see the U.S. as greater than all other countries. They feel that the United States is entitled to superior standing to other countries. The fact that Putin is critical of such a perspective does not make him unique. The leaders of many other countries object to the “we’re better than every other country” meaning of “American exceptionalism.” This is clearly not what President Obama said, and any criticism of Obama by Putin in this regard must be considered to be largely off base. Putin’s punch is directed at the “American exceptionalism and entitlement” spoken and practiced by President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other neo-cons. Many progressives in the United States find the neo-con perspective of exceptionalism to be both unwarranted and dangerous, and they have evidence to substantiate it.

It would be helpful if those on the right, as well as many in the middle, would actually think about what Putin said. Many who do not want America to go to war in Syria may already agree with Putin, but they won’t acknowledge it. One thing is certain; foreign countries will not listen to the leaders of the United States if our leaders don’t listen to them. Hopefully, at some point,  President Obama will recognize that Putin’s words contain the same mixture of honesty and pander as his own words do. What’s important  is to listen to that which is real, and ignore the hype. Obama is certainly smart enough to do this.

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There’s so much “no” in Washington, that you have to wonder if, given the opportunity to get it right, Washington [politicians and pundits included] is capable of saying yes. Although we don’t yet know precisely how it happened, Russia, Syria and the U.S. appear to have found a third way out of the chemical weapons, red-line problem: Syria’s president Bashar Al-Assad has indicated willingness to relinquish his trove of chemical weapons to international control.

However, in today’s knee-jerk, “no” political climate, will politicians on the right—who don’t want to do anything [including the basics of governing] to help President Obama—and those on the left—who insist on perfection from the president they elected—give peace a chance? Or will the right find a way to obstruct a development with so much up side, just because it’s associated with the president they revile so viscerally? Will the left, impatient with a president they thought was going to single-handedly change everything and give them everything they ever wanted, nitpick this to death, question President Obama’s motivations, give the Obama-haters even more cover, and doom the whole thing to an ignominious fizzle?

I hope not.

I also hope–in my cockeyed optimist, Obama-true-believer way–that if we do get to yes, we recognize that President Obama’s red-line stance, while politically risky, was the moral high ground–the position we should all hope that a president takes. I’ve noticed that, in most of the discussions about possible bombing scenarios, the phrase “American interests” has been thrown around a lot. Unfortunately, the “interests” most often referred to are geopolitical and financial. Rarely do you hear anything about moral interests–you know, the need to stand up against people in power who allow their own citizens to be massacred.

Also, I hope that, if Assad’s chemical weapons end up in United Nations safekeeping, President Obama gets to share some of the credit for averting a Middle East conflagration. Although I can’t believe I’m writing this, I’ve come to understand that the diplomatic solution we are all hoping for may well be the result of the sabre-rattling that has preceded it. Isn’t that how diplomacy has generally worked in the past? Alas, I’m afraid that no matter what happens, President Obama will get zero credit for a positive outcome, and all the blame for a negative one.

I acknowledge that it’s a very complicated situation, and that  actually gaining control of Assad’s weapons–in the middle of an active civil war–will be an uphill climb. Even the negotiations to get the process started are going to be very tough and very dicey.

But my bottom line is this: Sometimes, you just have to take yes for an answer. Russia seems to be saying yes. Assad seems to be saying yes. Can we?

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