Syrian Chaos: Can this end well?

Well then you know he's going to be popular!

Like I said in an earlier post, I think there's a lot to suggest that defectors(even more than is usual) are not credible, given how much of Assad's problem (in the analysis I lean towards) was competition among factions in the ruling class. I don't think that's something that was lost on Syrians, to be sure.

In any case, I think you have a strong list there of potential warlords and people who might be put in place as transition leaders by a (potentially disastrous) foreign intervention. I just don't see how they settle it outside of killing each other when things reach this extreme level of violence. AFAICT, the only thing that unites them at the moment is opposition to Assad's faction.

It's going to come down to personal ties and personality conflicts. Impossible to even guess how it might go without knowing the specific people involved.

You're depressing me even more than I already was. I can't say I disagree though.

Holy Crap, is he actually mad enough to go through with it?!

I recall in the Iraq war discussion it came out that chemical weapons are far less effective than just blowing people up.

It's more of "what does he expect to accomplish?" Just dropping more bombs would be more effective. Some sort of psyops business?

The fighting is about to hit Damascus proper. Maybe using chem weapons to avoid damaging his own stronghold?

Who knew, Bush and his neo-con cronies were right all along! They were just off by one country.

Chemical weapons aren't about effectiveness, by and large. They're about making your enemy suffer. Nerve gas is, by all accounts, a *terrible* way to go.

You also get peripheral benefits in the terrror you cause in the enemy camp. But I suspect the terror is more of a sideshow than the actual point of it.

It actually has quite a bit to do with effectiveness. The body count is low if the target has NBC protection and antidote/prophylactic (usually atropine + pralidoxime + diazepam/valium). But I imagine getting a soldier to perform tasks effectively after a cocktail of valium and deadly nightshade is, umm, difficult. Besides which, he's sitting in a plume of toxic gas which will kill him if he takes his mask or gloves off, which crimps your ability to do useful stuff. Which means setting up shelters and decontamination zones if you intend to be anywhere near an affected area for long, which means a lot of wasted time sitting in or passing tools through a chemical shower. Lizard_King probably could and should correct me if I'm wrong, but I imagine that the US military's doctrine for dealing with gas involves keeping the ground forces moving forward so that they don't have to deal with operations in an affected area while the air force explodes anything and everything that looks like it can store or deploy gas.

Against unprotected targets, like I imagine the rebels are, it's run or die. Then stay right the hell away from the affected area for hours at the very least, which makes it a potent area denial weapon.

Yes... and what area is being denied? They found during WWI that chemical weapons had an unfortunate tendency to blow in directions they didn't want.... sometimes right back onto their own troops. That's not exactly the height of effectiveness.

Syria isn't WW1 and the participants aren't warring states.

The only obvious targets for chemical munitions in this conflict are cities. If that happens the casualties will be staggering.

Worse than having a limb blown off? Explosives provide plenty of horrible ways to die too.

Yes, quite a bit worse, actually.

I'm not saying explosives are fun. But nerve gas is even worse, based on what I've read. And the sheer terror with which it was regarded in WWI seems to support that idea.

The Syrian Army has NBC gear and vehicles for use with their own weapons, the rebels largely won't. Thus any area the rebels are likely to overrun, have overrun, are retreating to, or use as a logistics base is a target; because using gas you can corral them away from an area with relative impunity, otherwise they die horribly while your own soldiers are inconvenienced by wearing NBC protection. Probably water sources as well if Assad decides he's going down swinging.

Nerve gas wasn't used in WWI. That particular little horror didn't show up in time. Back then they mostly used choking (chlorine, phosgene) and blister/vessicant agents (sulphur and nitrogen mustards). Which are roughly one tenth as lethal as the G and V series gasses.

WWI armies gassing themselves was largely due to the use of gas cylinders. Nobody in their right mind would light the valve of a propane cylinder on fire and call it a flamethrower, but apparently that sort of behaviour is acceptable with poison gas.

If the Assad regime engages in chemical warfare, do you folks think that will loosen Russia's/China's fingers off the veto button in the Security Council?

If not, what's the likelyhood that NATO will jump in regardless? I have to imagine in that eventuality Turkey will be a lot less hesitant to invoke self defense next time some shell lands on their soil.

I don't know what to make of the arguments upthread that chemical weapons "aren't effective", as it's not like I have any firm proof that they are...

Yet they all strike me as short sighted in much the same way that some argued (prior to WW2) that airplanes and aircraft carriers were ineffective essentially because they'd not yet been put to smart tactical use.

Stack NBC armor, chemical weapons, and a willingness to use them to their fullest against a foe that doesn't have such weapons and the results seem sure to be crushing -- and that's without even getting into the potential for civilian casualties.

You know how it goes. A few lost cities, and suddenly people start thinking "fewer people will die overall if I end the war quickly and decisively, so it would be immoral not to use nerve gas on the mob of anarchists threatening society."

I hope it's been made very clear to him that he will face invasion, genocide charges, and execution if he does it.

I was basing my arguments on WWI experiences (They really weren't effective then), but a combination of the posts by Sheepherder and independent reading have convinced me that I was very very wrong. They're not necessarily effective in a standard battlefield sense*, although they can be used there too, but Sheepherder was dead right about their extreme usefulness in certain situations & with certain goals in mind.

Chemical weapons have come a long way, baby.

*I wrote this, but now that I consider it, do we ever face "standard battlefields" anymore? It seems like all conflict nowadays is either assymetrical or at such a range that the idea of a "battlefield" seems a bit passe. It seems like the closest we get to that is street-by-street city fighting. Anyways, I just wanted to call out my own sloppy language before someone else did.

What? That's exactly the opposite of what was argued.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bomber_will_always_get_through
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giulio_Douhet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing#Interbellum

Again, it's my contention that the external indicators of their conduct show a Syrian chain of command in a perpetual state of one-upmanship in terms of who can best assert dominance through ruthlessness. When/if the call comes, it will probably be driven by near-certainty that their only shot (as it has been for a while) is to win. Assad would likely love asylum at this point, but he probably has not had that choice for a while and it's somewhat understandable since it's not like his supporters, allies, and allies of convenience are going to be offered a similar deal. There are only so many Venezuelan bungalows on the table.

He means specifically what Mark M was saying (and has now changed) and perhaps Kalle's "but explosives are a bad way to die too" tangent, denying (it would seem) even if the terror component of chemical weapon.

While I'll agree that in the current conflict in Syria chemical weapons could be extremely useful the main argument against the effectiveness of chemical weapons for me has always been WW2, not WW1. When neither Germany nor the USSR deployed chemical weapons against opposing forces the obvious answer must be that chemical weapons were not cost-effective.

But assymetrical warfare is a game-changer and the concerns of WW2 generals are not those of modern-day Syrian generals.

Lizard_King, I'm not denying the terror component of chemical weapons. The psychological impact is immense. I just wonder how much of the impact is because we are accustomed to the horror of bombs and guns while chemical warfare is an unknown horror.

I don't think that's an obvious answer. It tells you that, possibly for different reasons, neither the German or USSR command *thought* it was cost effective towards their strategic goals. These could have been direct practical issues with deployment, limits of effectiveness, or propaganda questions, but either way we don't have a measurable case of actual cost-benefits for either of those two sides.

The Soviets had an emphasis on typhus as a biological agent, and blister/asphyxiation agents like lewisite. Germans were likely focused on nerve agents. In both cases, the weapons were stockpiled (in accordance with the Geneva protocol) as a deterrent, with the additional variable of Hitler himself having been mustard gassed. I would suggest that this tells you what it looks like when the cost-benefit includes the possibility of equivalent retaliation.

I agree, and I think the asymmetry of NBC (or at least BC) weapon access is the key part of that. I just don't agree that WWII says what you think it does about the actual effectiveness of them as a weapon.

Well, depending on which "we" you are referring to, in many cases you are looking at increasingly abstracted arguments that move further and further away from the strategic and tactical possibilities of deployment. This really comes down to how credible (and comparatively fearsome) NATO's red lines on this issue are relative to, say, imminent knife sodomy of entire groups (ie NWS Gaddafi finale). I think the question of the origin of terror relative to a type of weapon (for outside observers and those directly involved) is an interesting but separate question.

Link.

Part of the decision making concerning gas use during WWII was due entirely to erroneous assumptions: the properties of organophosphates had been featured in scientific literature for quite a while, so Germany assumed that the British had some form of nerve gas and were merely being coy about it. The Germans knew that the Russians had nerve gas, because IG Farben sold it to them. As Lizard_King pointed out, Hitler was sitting in a hospital bed blinded by mustard gas when the First World War ended, so there is the human angle to consider as well. Reputedly he was absolutely terrified of the stuff and would lose his shit at anyone who suggested using it. In general, all of them were concerned about the use of nerve gas: masks are insufficient to protect against it, and Germany even lost about a dozen factory workers in full rubberized suits and respirators to accidents, therefore any escalating retaliatory attacks necessarily meant a casualty rate more grim than the black death.

Which, by the way, the Japanese used on China. Not shitting you.

Depending on what you mean by black death: the Japanese used bubonic plague in addition to anthrax, cholera and typhus in their air drop tests. Bubonic plague or Y Pestis variants are what a preponderance of experts across fields believe was the key agent in the medieval black death, but there are some important things that aren't understood in terms of why it was so much more lethal (50-70% kill rate) and hard to contain versus the tragic but comparatively (comparatively!) mild effects of bubonic plague, which is common in recent Asian history, for instance, and nowhere near as lethal (5-20%) or hard to contain. The textual record for Black Death has a lot of holes relative to bubonic plague despite being relatively broad; in contrast, geneticists are well within reasonable bounds to argue that y pestis and its ilk were definitely present, but no field to my limited understanding seems really close to figuring out what it is that made it such a killer, and cyclically to boot.

Which is a long way of saying that while it's in some ways correct that the Japanese were using Black Death, it's not something that should necessarily have connotations stronger than weaponized typhus or cholera. Like, they were a type of military grade crazy widely recognizable worldwide, but not Bond villain crazy.

Ehh, when the black death hit Europe they wouldn't have had much in the way of herd immunity or treatment, which raises mortality rate considerably. Though I guess it's moot, because even rural China in the early 1940's was probably better in both regards than late medieval Europe. I guess the takeaway is that MAD often and inexplicably works to reign in the more common forms of lunacy, so you need to be careful drawing conclusions when and where such a state exists as to what would happen in an asymmetric situation.

Also, you're wrong about the evenness of their keel. Completely Bond villain crazy. Human piloted torpedoes.

That's the thing, it's a much bigger set of problems than you might expect. For one, the rates of contagion do not accord with what we know of bubonic plague, which is relatively easy to quarantine. The descriptions of the buboes, which are the key connection, vary widely and in general do not match the locations that fleas favor in rat-flea borne disease. The cycles of disease relative to seasons and the lack of any significant documentation of rats, even in accounts otherwise detailed as to affected animals. And so on. The definitive skeptical case from a historical perspective is The Black Death Transformed by Cohn, and I added some reviews and an article on retrospective diagnosis under the BF Zotero (Evolution and Biohistory/Black Death). As always, anyone who wants access need only pm me a valid email.

As I mentioned in passing, geneticists are having a field day digging up plague cemeteries and testing for yersinia pestis, and while (like an inverse of Cohn) they sometimes overstate the certainty that finding a trace of bubonic plague really means in terms of what was actually going on with the black death, at the rate their technology and methods are improving I expect they will continue to refine the scope of their answers.

The prevailing opinion is that bubonic plague was the primary culprit. But there is enough unknown about the case even by the standards of historical diagnosis (ie, as compared to what has been fitted to historical outbreaks of smallpox, typhus, tb, etc) that it seems clear that modern bubonic plague is at the very least significantly different in how it manifests, spreads and its ability to headshot populations. That may be a result of factors outside of the disease, and indeed the latest scientific arguments I've seen seem to lean heavily in that direction; it's also really difficult to go after a diagnosis that involves pathocenosis, or a confluence of diseases and conditions that work off each other, and that's always possible.

Point is that in terms of NBC, modern bubonic plague is not necessarily a game-changer in the way that something having medieval Black Death's properties would have been.

Well, I meant within the constraints of people who do NBC work, especially on wartime footing. The relative sanity of war efforts is a complicated thing to measure, and I just wanted to clarify that one aspect because I happened to have recently gone over some Black Death stuff, and it's not every day you get to bring it up in conversation.

Damn you Lizard_King for your awesome history posts containing information I've never explored in great detail!

By the by, what are the odds that practices such as bloodletting allowed cross-contamination between lymphoid and circulatory systems, turning bubonic plague into septicemic plague, and vice versa? Which, because of the interface between the circulatory system proper and the respiratory system, could then also become airborne if the lung tissue was sufficiently chewed up (by, say, a case of pneumonia).

Also, yeah, I'm aware that wartime standards of sanity are different. This is just me being an irreverent bastard, I do that frequently. I hope this has left you with mental images of the Emperor Hirohito stroking a white cat while watching Chinese James Bond getting cut in half by a laser though.

I really don't know with a useful degree of certainty, as the more nuts and bolts you get into it the more you move into specific medical and scientific fields (for laughs, consider the problems in having teams of geneticists only working on these problems, refuting in one line in their paper the works by specialists in altogether different fields with different standards of evidence). It's one of the reasons why an MD/historian/scientist with a passion for archeology like Mirko Grmek was able to move the field of retrospective diagnosis so far forward in his work, but absent renaissance persons having strokes of genius you're looking at something that requires a lot more interdisciplinary cooperation than is currently common.

I would say that both of those scenarios you suggest are as likely to have a systemic effect as a factor we simply don't know about. I always think of this story about why scurvy returned as a disease when I think of how difficult it is to reconstruct these things after the fact, and how easy it is to miss key variables. Modern scholars can talk about specific medical practices, but then it's also important to try to model the different hygienic and dietary and climate etc environments across which Black Plague kicked everyone's ass, and it only gets harder from there.

And now I know why they were called limeys.

EDIT: Probably should save watching this for when you're at home. Most of us are probably on enough watch lists already.

Follow-up:

The dig at Himmler is priceless.

Is there a link or a citation for that? Is that from the postwar Speer interviews where he comes off as oddly sane?

Makes perfect sense to me. Frankly, I wonder if had the war started to swing the other way whether the Allies wouldn't have switched from fire bombing to gas bombing.

Expanded, because Speer gets pretty detailed with why he thought this was a really, really bad idea and how he was sabotaging it behind Hitler's back because it was utter madness.

The full text is here, page 525ish.

EDIT: Naturally, he's saving his own ass too. But at some point prior to the fall Speer did indeed start taking a pretty active role in the whole "No, Hitler, I won't burn Germany around you like a Viking burial ship" thing.

EDIT2: 1946, so it's probably as much honesty as you're going to get out of a Nazi while talking about state secrets; since too much bullshit probably would have gotten him a hemp necktie.

Isn't it the main lesson from Nazi Germany that perfectly sane people can act in crazy ways, under the appropriate circumstances? Speer was (or at least, from his writings came off as) clearly sane, and afaik that isn't even in question.

The Eichmann trial is a good example of that (Hannah Arendt used the term 'banality of evil' after seeing the trial) as he doesn't come across as particularly evil, in the proactive sense of pursuing the misfortune of others, much less insane.

I'm on my phone, so you'll have to find your own link, but Wired is reporting that Syrian rebels just got hit with a chemical attack--possibly Sarin.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/12/did-syria-just-use-nerve-gas/ us officials doubting the rebel claims

Hey, I think these guys are legit.

The best part of that article was the link to this: http://blogs.aljazeera.com/topic/sy...-commit-political-suicide-using-chemical-arms

Which seems a not so thinly veiled and very Russian threat to me, leading me to think:
- The Russians actually think there is a real chance of Assad using such weapons, or they would not tip their hand so directly.
- Putin is effectively saying he'll hang Assad entirely out to dry if he does, as the odds of Lavrov speaking off the cuff personally on this approach zero.