I suppose Gates would find it mosre than a bit ridiculous for another country to fire cruise missiles into, say, San Diego, just to maintain its credibility. I’m sure that if you asked him that, he would find it a “stupid” question, presuming that he could even understand the premise at all. The notion that other countries might have the privilege of commiting murder in order to avoid admitting that they don’t know what they are doing could scarcely be dreamt of in his philosophy.
Panetta, of course, was not so squeamish. Since the President had “given his word,” Congress and the American people were duty-bound and honor-bound to back him up. Again, it’s the credibility thing.
Credibility is the mantra of these “experts” because it relieves them of the burden, which is often quite heavy, of actually explaining why the policies they advocate are desirable, and why the often disastrous results of the policies they actually implemented, such as the War in Afghanistan, should not be held against them.
According to the write up in the New York Times of the session, by Thom Shanker and Lauren D’Avolio, Gates said he “also supported a strategy of sanctions that labeled members of the Assad government as war criminals, with the threat of arrest if they left Syria, and suggested sanctions on Assad family members living or studying overseas, including on their financial holdings. Such pressure might prompt some in the inner circle to negotiate an end to the civil war, Mr. Gates said.”
Again, one is tempted to pose the sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander, do unto others thing to Gates: What if some other country declared you a war criminal, threatened you with arrest if you left the United States, or, perhaps best of all, suggested sanctions on Gates’ family members living or studying overseas, including on their financial holdings. Would that be “reasonable”?
Afterwords
I’m not going to waste pixels on Panetta here, because he’s just too much of a jerk. But it has to be said that both men justify bombing Syria if for no other reason than to assure our credibility with (of course) Iran, and its dreaded imminent nuclear capability, or perhaps its imminently if not eminently imminent nuclear capability, said imminence having not yet materialized after almost twenty years of fervent prediction. I know I’m a damn outlier on this one, but I’m predicting that the Iranian bomb, if it ever materializes, will do less damage than the North Korean one, which has yet to destroy Honolulu, as predicted by Charles Krauthammer et al. back in the Clinton Administration.
UPDATE
I will note for the record that North Korea is behaving obnoxiously again, flexing its tiny nuclear muscles. I will also note that the Soviet Union, armed with thousands of thermonuclear weapons, each with hundreds of times the power of North Korea’s tiny “arsenal,” never used them in its decades-long, globe-girdling ideological struggle with the United States. And I will further note that the only nation that has used nuclear weapons is the United States itself.
