Pentagon
presses warnings on Syria;
Military
operation carries grave risks, officials say, as calls for action mount
ELISABETH
BUMILLER, March 12, 2012 Monday, IHT
Senior
officials say that a U.S. military intervention would be a daunting and
protracted operation, with the potential for killing thousands of civilians and
plunging Syria closer to civil war.
FULL
TEXT
Despite
growing calls for the United States to help stop the bloodshed in Syria, senior
Pentagon officials are stepping
up their warnings that military intervention would be a daunting and protracted
operation, requiring at least weeks of exclusively American airstrikes,
with the potential for killing thousands of civilians and plunging
the country closer to civil war.
The officials
say that Syria presents a far larger
problem than did Libya, which still required a seven-month NATO air
campaign last year in which hundreds of aircraft dropped and fired 7,700 bombs
and missiles.
Although the
United States has the military capability to launch sustained airstrikes in
Syria - ''We can do anything,'' the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen.
Martin E. Dempsey, told the Senate last week - defense officials say they are
concerned about four tough challenges: (military intervention)
(i),
Syria , (ii) splintered opposition, (iii) Assad’s allies , (iv) int’l community
against Assad
(i),
The risks in attacking Syria's plentiful and sophisticated Russian-made air
defenses, which are located close to major population centers;
(ii) arming a deeply splintered Syrian opposition; (iii) the potential
for opening up a proxy war with Iran or Russia, two crucial allies of
Syria; and (iv) the lack, at least so far, of an international
coalition willing to take action against the regime of President Bashar
al-Assad.
(So
is creating safe havens)
One
senior defense official said over the weekend that even creating ''safe
havens,'' or protected areas inside Syria for civilians, would be such a
complex operation that military planners were ''looking at a serious contingent
of U.S. ground troops'' to help establish and maintain them, should the United
States take such a course of action.
(Obama’s stance)
The
planning is in response to a request from President Barack Obama for
preliminary military options from the Pentagon, even though the administration
still believes that diplomatic and economic pressure is the best way to
stop the violent repression of Mr. Assad's regime.
The violence
continued on Sunday, with heavy shelling in the northern province of Idlib.
Diplomatic initiatives also continued, but Kofi Annan, former U.N. secretary
general who is serving as a U.N. envoy, left Damascus without securing a deal
to end the conflict.
The
American military options under review in Washington include humanitarian
airlifts, naval monitoring of Syria and the establishment of a
no-fly zone, among other possibilities, but last week General Dempsey and
Defense secretary Leon E. Panetta cast them as in the earliest stages. Modern
commanders in chief have routinely asked for military contingency plans during
foreign crises.
Senator John
McCain of Arizona and some of his Republican colleagues continue to argue that
the United States has a responsibility to lead.
With an
estimated 7,500 people killed in less than a year in Syria, Mr. McCain told Fox
News on Sunday, President Barack Obama was violating his own vow ''to prevent
massacres wherever they take place.'' The senator said that opposition members
in Syria were ''being slaughtered in an unfair fight,'' made worse by aid to
that country's government from Russia and Iran. He said the United States and
its allies had the capability to put a stop to it, adding, ''For us not to do
so, in my humble opinion, is disgraceful and shameful.''
Senator
Lindsey Graham, Mr. McCain's Republican colleague from South Carolina, said in
an interview that the United States has far more strategic interest in Syria
than it did in Libya and that the risks are worth it. ''We can't do every war
where you never lose an aircraft,'' he said.
Mr. McCain, a
navy pilot who was shot down and captured during the Vietnam War, and who ran
against Mr. Obama for president in 2008, has particularly angered military
planners for what they say are his emotional and cavalier comments about
getting into another war. The planners say they also need more direction from
senior officials in Washington on the administration's goals and desired
end-state in Syria.
The
US military role in Libya
''We've
been sucked into this open-ended arrangement before and we're not going there
again,'' a senior military official said, speaking of Libya, which required extensive
American air power - as well as hundreds of cruise missiles fired from
American ships and submarines - to take out Libya's air defenses so
that European warplanes could operate freely in the skies. Even then, the United
States continued to supply ammunition, refueling planes and to fly combat
missions.
As in Libya,
the early stages of an air campaign would be almost entirely American
because of the United States' arsenal and electronic warfare capabilities and
would probably take, General Dempsey said, ''an extended period of time and a
great number of aircraft.''
The problem
with safe haven
Once
the United States had air dominance, it would be possible to create either safe
havens or a ''humanitarian corridor'' - a secure exit route for refugees to,
say, Turkey - but military officials say the corridor and safe havens would
be vulnerable to attack by what American intelligence officials say is a
formidable, 330,000-troop strong Syrian Army.
''I don't know
how long they would tolerate those safe havens,'' Senator Jack Reed, Democrat
of Rhode Island and a former Army Ranger, said in a Senate hearing last week.
''But second, given safe havens, it would also I think imply that someone
would have to go in and organize training and organize, literally, an army.
That could take months if not years.''
what
challenges in intervention in Syria, compared to Libya
Defense
and intelligence officials say that Syria's integrated air defenses - a
combination of thousands of surface-to-air missiles, radars and anti-aircraft
guns - are not only more advanced than those in Libya, they are arrayed in
densely populated areas on the country's western border, meaning that even
with precision bombing, civilians nearby would be likely to die. ''There would
be some severe collateral damage going after those areas,'' Mr. Panetta said
last week.
weakness
of Syrian opposition
Military
officials say that the opposition does not have control of any one area in
Syria, unlike in Libya, where, General Dempsey said, ''we had tribal forces in
the east and west collapsing on the center,'' In Syria, he said, ''there's no
geographic density of population to collapse anywhere; they're all
intermingled.'' Military and intelligence officials say that the opposition to
Mr. Assad remains splintered, made up of as many as 100 groups,
and that so far no clear leaders have emerged. American officials are
considering providing the opposition an array of technical assistance,
including potentially communications equipment, but have yet to be successful
in bringing the disparate groups together into a cohesive council.
American
intelligence officials say they believe that Al Qaeda, which established
cells in Syria during the Iraq war, is trying to infiltrate the opposition in
order to stage attacks and try to overthrow the Assad regime. The officials
said that the opposition has no sympathy for Al Qaeda but that it might not
know of the infiltration. ''We haven't seen any indication
that the opposition is aware of this,'' one intelligence official said.
Iran
factor
Another
major concern of the Pentagon is Iran, Syria's most important ally. Military and
intelligence officials say that Iran has recently flown small arms in
Syria, chiefly rocket-propelled grenades, as well as technological equipment
and high-ranking experts to assist the Assad government in interrupting social
media communications and the Internet. ''They're providing listening
capability, eavesdropping capability to try and pick up where the
opposition networks are at, and they're providing experts who I can only
say are experts in oppressing,'' Gen. James N. Mattis, the head of the American
military's Central Command, said during a Senate hearing last week.
Russia
factor
At
the same time, Russia is a leading arms supplier to Syria and maintains a naval station at the Syrian
port city of Tartus, on the Mediterranean coast. Moscow has worked
ceaselessly in recent weeks to preserve its relationship with Mr. Assad, most
notably vetoing, along with China, a U.N. Security Council resolution calling
on Mr. Assad to resign.
''If we jump
in with purely military instruments as the U.S., absent a broader strategy, we
could very quickly hasten reactions from others, namely Iran and Russia, to
bolster the regime and start us down a road towards greater confrontation,''
Michele Flournoy, a former top Pentagon official, said in Washington last week.
Administration
officials say that they remain concerned about Syria's chemical and biological
weapons, believed to be among the largest stockpiles in the world, and that
they are in discussions with allies in the region about how to secure them.
