Attack on Syria: White House misjudgments

Without a doubt, last night’s attack by heliborne US forces against a farm compound inside Syria must have been authorized by the President or Vice-President himself. Josh Landis has provided more than enough evidence to prove that.
So the question is Why? That is, why undertake this very evidently provocative act that constitutes, actually, an act of war against Syria instead of continuing the longstanding and generally very productive policy of working quietly with Syria to stanch the flow of anti-US militants into Iraq?
Was this intended to be– or to provoke– the last-minute, electorally related “October surprise” that many Obama supporters have been warning against? … That is, a “nice” (from the point of view of Cheney and McCain) little national-security crisis designed to change the subject in the US and get people lining up behind McCain instead of Obama?
I had thought, and wrote earlier, that it was already too late for such an October surprise to be successful. We are now just eight days from the election. Perhaps we are still at the outer edge of when– in the estimation of the McCheneys of this world– such a crisis might be “politically advantageous.”
If so, their judgment is deeply flawed on two counts.

1. First, and most important, a raid of this dimension– a handful of helicopters, going against one farm compound, and killing a reported eight people, all described as civilians and described as including four children– is not on its own going to provide or provoke the kind of security crisis that would make waves inside the US. For that to happen, the raid would have had to provoke a strong Syrian response.
But the Syrians have not responded, and are not about to respond, in any way that is violent or otherwise escalates tensions.
I’ve been studying the behavior of this Baathist regime in Syria closely for 34 years now. They have steely nerves. They are just about impossible to “provoke,” at any point that they judge a harsh response is not in their interest. They are quite ready to absorb material and human losses without making any kind of harsh response, and even to suffer repeated episodes of political humiliation from among their highly nationalistic political base, as they do so.
They are not about to over-react.
This stymies any McCheneyist plan for an October surprise.
2. But the idea of initiating some kind of security-related “October surprise” also, imho, represents a serious misread of US public opinion. A clear majority of US opinion is now clearly very angry over many aspects of the Bush-Cheney years, with the financial/economic crisis now top of the list of their (our) concerns. The US electorate might have been distractable with foreign military adventures for much of the past eight years. (I’m reading Bart Gellman’s masterly study of the Cheney vice-presidency. He sketches out what could be a convincing case that just about all of Cheney’s actions– in the realm of foreign affairs as well as economic affairs– have been directed centrally at increasing the powers of the presidency. Disturbing to think that at one level Cheney was simply “using” the whole of the GWOT and the foreign military projects just for that… )
But I think the scales have now fallen from the eyes of enough of the US electorate, regarding the lying and very damaging manipulations that have marked the Bush-Cheney years, that no additional military/security escalation anywhere could swing opinion back behind McCain.

So once again, in these two respects, the folks in the White House have seriously misjudged the world that exists outside their bubble. This is certainly the case if their intention was that yesterday’s raid would lead to a Syrian over-reaction that would then provide the excuse for further US escalations.
The Syrian government is deliberately responding only through strong diplomatic protests.
The American provokers may, of course, have a slightly longer-term project in mind– perhaps one in which a whole series of US raids into Syria, which are not “answered” by a response from the Syrian government that is “strong” enough to satisfy the country’s hardliners, could lead to rising anti-government unrest inside Syria?
And then– ?
But the Asad government has many additional things it can do, at the purely diplomatic level, to respond to even a lengthy campaign of provocation of this nature. Personally, I’m surprised they haven’t yet registered a strong protest with the Security Council. But that is always an option. And once the topic of this raid– or any follow-ons– gets taken up by the Security Council, Syria has a much stronger base of political support there than it did back in the 1990s or the late 1980s.
Also, if yesterday’s raid is indeed followed by a number of similar raids and the Syrians start seriously downgrading the cooperation they’ve been giving the US forces in Iraq until now, then the US military and Secdef Bob Gates will certainly start acting to rein in the Cheneyites.
But we also have a time of dangerous political uncertainty inside Israel these days. Maybe Olmert and Linvi would like to “wag the dog” with regard to Syria, even if they don’t want to attack Iran?
Nothing can be ruled out in the three months of uncertainty and political transition that lie ahead– within both Israel and the US. The outlook might be particularly risky if Obama wins the election and Cheney decides he wants to pursue a Samson-like option in some portion of the Middle East.
But as for this escalation– or indeed, any other– “saving” next week’s election for McCheney? No, for that I think it is already ways too late.