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Putin’s paddle

Yesterday’s strange idea is today’s hot topic:  the proposition that Bashar al Asad will destroy chemical weapons he refuses to acknowledge possession of.  And it will have to do it under tight international control while continuing its slaughter of Syrians with conventional weapons.

There are a lot of things wrong with this idea, apart from those contradictions:

• Syria would have to declare all the sites at which chemical weapons and their precursors are held;
• Washington would need to be confident that chemical weapons and their precursors exist nowhere else in Syria;
• credible international observers would need to deploy to all the declared sites in significant numbers to ensure 24-hours per day that nothing is being moved;
• those observers would have to be housed and protected from the significant violence occurring every day in Syria;
• they would also need uninterrupted and reliable communications;
• if the chemical weapons are to be destroyed, the 1000 tons or so of material would need to be safely and securely transported to a specially constructed facility;
• the destruction would need to be carefully monitored.

I think it only fair to say that this is a very tall order of dubious virtue. Those who remember the difficulties nuclear inspectors faced before both Iraq wars should multiply by a factor of ten, or more.  I can’t wait to hear the quarrels over whether this site or that one does or does not hold chemical weapons. The observers themselves would become clear markers of where the chemical weapons are, making the sites tempting targets for extremists.

Once we occupied Iraq, it still took a year or so and cost hundreds of millions to verify that there were no weapons of mass destruction.  That’s when we could go anywhere, talk to anyone, read all the files and test anything  we wanted.  Or think about the more recent and ill-fated Arab League and later UN observers in Syria.  They weren’t trying to do anything technically difficult.  Just trying to monitor the military action and report.  Both groups were withdrawn without being able to accomplish their objectives.

The numbers of Syrians killed by chemical weapons likely don’t amount to 2% of the total 100,000 killed so far.  To allow the killing to continue while the international community invests many millions in securing, observing, collecting and destroying chemical weapons stockpiles would be not only hypocritical but also deeply offensive to the Syrians who suffer the depredations of the Asad regime.

But the Obama Administration finds itself up the creek without a paddle.  Approval of a military strike in Congress appears less and less likely.  Proceeding anyway after the Congress says “no” is possible legally, but politically it would be a disaster.  So the President is going to have a hard look at this “diplomatic” proposition, whose origins lie not in John Kerry’s supposed inadvertent slip yesterday morning but rather, as the President acknowledged in his interview last night with Gwen Ifill, in conversations he has had with Vladimir Putin.

The idea should be dubbed “Putin’s paddle.”  Mr. President, you may have to use it, but only because of the unfortunate situation you put yourself in.  That’s not an endorsement.