Daily Alert Archives

No Good Military Options for U.S. in Syria

(Reuters) Phil Stewart and Peter Apps - Despite President Obama's pledge that Syria's use of chemical weapons is a "game changer," he is unlikely to turn to military options quickly and would want allies joining him in any intervention. "There's a lot of analysis to be done before reaching any major decisions that would push U.S. policy more in the direction of military options," a senior U.S. official said. "The most proportional response (to limited chemical weapons use) would be a strike on the units responsible, whether artillery or airfields," said Jeffrey White, a former senior official at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency who is now a defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "It would demonstrate to Assad that there is a cost to using these weapons." Another option involves the creation of humanitarian safe areas that would also be no-fly zones off limits to the Syrian air force. This would involve taking down Syrian air defenses and destroying Syrian artillery from a certain distance beyond those zones, to protect them from incoming fire. The U.S. fears anti-Assad Islamist rebels affiliated to al-Qaeda could grab the chemical weapons, but a U.S. intervention into Syria to get the arms would require tens of thousands of American troops.
2013-04-29 00:00:00
Full Article