Syria: What About No-Fly Zones?

Hillary's been bucking for a no-fly zone over Syria for a year now, and if she becomes president, I think we can expect she'll order it. Is there a problem?

When conflict rears its ugly head around the world, there is usually a call for the United States to “do something.” One option that is frequently mentioned is the no-fly zone. The United States and its allies enjoy a significant advantage over most potential adversaries in the air. No-fly zones, therefore, are attractive due to the perceived lower cost and risk when compared to other options. Despite this, setting up a no-fly zone is anything but a “no brainer.” Depending on the circumstances, there may be steep costs and unseen risks. This short primer is intended to introduce readers to the way no-fly zones really work.

  Defense One

Read on.

People have been dying in Syria for years and fleeing in great numbers for months. For all that time, no-fly zones have been urgently called for as morally necessary, yet regularly dismissed as useless, too dangerous, or too costly. Now no-fly zones are being debated in the American presidential campaign. It is time that someone spelled out what the record shows no-fly zones can and cannot do.

  Defense One

Read on.

Those are a couple of good articles on what's involved in setting up a no-fly zone and when it's effective and when it's not. They're not long. Worth the read.  Judge for yourself, but I'm with the faction that says it would be a huge waste of resources and likely only to lead to escalation of the war and worsen our precarious position vis a vis Russia.  Maybe that's what she's looking or, war hawk and Russophobe that she is.  It certainly wouldn't do anything to stop ISIS.  They don't have planes.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Hillary Is Running the NeoCon Plan to Own the World

Formerly known as Project for the New American Century.

October 2015:

In an apparent break with the Obama White House, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for the creation of a no-fly zone inside Syria Thursday, the day after Russian warplanes started bombing rebels fighting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

“I personally would be advocating now for a no-fly zone and humanitarian corridors to try to stop the carnage on the ground and from the air, to try to provide some way to take stock of what’s happening, to try to stem the flow of refugees,” Clinton said in an interview with NBC affiliate WHDH in Boston after a campaign event nearby.

  MSNBC

At a CNN/NY1 Democratic debate [...] with Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton reiterated her support for such a move.

"I do still support a no-fly zone because I think we need to put in safe havens for those poor Syrians who are fleeing both Assad and ISIS and so they have some place they can be safe," she said.

  CNN

So far, the Obama administration has resisted. But I expect President Hillary will go for it. Let's look at that No-fly Zone approach as implemented in Libya.

In this fifth anniversary week of the U.S.-led Libya intervention, it’s instructive to revisit Hillary Clinton’s curiously abridged description of that war in her 2014 memoir, Hard Choices. [...] In late March 2011, Clinton quotes herself telling NATO members, “It’s crucial we’re all on the same page on NATO’s responsibility to enforce the no-fly zone and protect civilians in Libya.”

Just two paragraphs later [...] [t]here is an abrupt and unexplained seven-month gap, during which the military mission has inexplicably, and massively, expanded beyond protecting civilians to regime change — seemingly by happenstance. The only opposition combatants even referred to are simply labeled “the rebels,” and the entire role of the NATO coalition and its attendant responsibility in assisting their advance has been completely scrubbed from the narrative.

[...]

[It is pertinent] to treat Libya as a case study for the ways that supposedly limited interventions tend to mushroom into campaigns for regime change. Five years on, it’s still not a matter of public record when exactly Western powers decided to topple Qaddafi.

  Foreign Policy

But I believe it would be safe to say it was when the Project for a New American Century was rolled out in 1997.

[PNAC] was established as a non-profit educational organization in 1997, and founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The PNAC's stated goal was "to promote American global leadership." The organization stated that "American leadership is good both for America and for the world," and sought to build support for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity."

Of the twenty-five people who signed the PNAC's founding statement of principles, ten went on to serve in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.

  Wikipedia

(For a better reading of PNAC, click on those two links at the beginning of this post.)

To more fully comprehend what actually happened in Libya five years ago, let’s briefly review what the Obama administration proclaimed and compare that with what actually happened.

[...]

Two days [after President Obama announced a no-fly zone in Libya], Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon declared, “The military mission of the United States is designed to implement the Security Council resolution, no more and no less.… I mean protecting civilians against attacks from Qaddafi’s forces and delivering humanitarian aid.” The following day, Clinton’s deputy, James Steinberg, said during a Senate hearing, “President Obama has been equally firm that our military operation has a narrowly defined mission that does not include regime change.” [ed: emphasis mine]

[...]

Given that decapitation strikes against Qaddafi were employed early and often, there almost certainly was a decision by the civilian heads of government of the NATO coalition to “take him out” from the very beginning of the intervention.

[...]

On March 20, 2011, just hours into the intervention, Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from a British submarine stationed in the Mediterranean Sea struck an administrative building in Qaddafi’s Bab al-Azizia compound, less than 50 yards away from the dictator’s residence.

[...]

Later that day, Vice Adm. William Gortney, director of the Joint Staff, was asked by the press, “Can you guarantee that coalition forces are not going to target Qaddafi?” Gortney replied, “At this particular point, I can guarantee that he’s not on a targeting list.” When it was then pointed out that it was Qaddafi’s personal residence that had been attacked, Gortney added, “Yeah. But, no, we’re not targeting his residence. We’re there to set the conditions and enforce the United Nations Security Council resolution. That’s what we’re doing right now and limiting it to that.”

[...]

During the theatrical and exhaustive Benghazi hearing in October 2015, Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) asked Clinton about a video clip that read, “‘We came, we saw, he died [meaning Qaddafi].’ Is that the Clinton doctrine?” Clinton replied, “No, that was an expression of relief that the military mission undertaken by NATO and our other partners had achieved its end.” Yet, this was never the military mission that the Obama administration repeatedly told the world it had set out to achieve.

[...]

In truth, the Libyan intervention was about regime change from the very start. The threat posed by the Libyan regime’s military and paramilitary forces to civilian-populated areas was diminished by NATO airstrikes and rebel ground movements within the first 10 days. Afterward, NATO began providing direct close-air support for advancing rebel forces by attacking government troops that were actually in retreat and had abandoned their vehicles. Fittingly, on Oct. 20, 2011, it was a U.S. Predator drone and French fighter aircraft that attacked a convoy of regime loyalists trying to flee Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte. The dictator was injured in the attack, captured alive, and then extrajudicially murdered by rebel forces.

[...]

Meanwhile, the public learned just this week — only because Staff Sgt. Louis F. Cardin was killed on Saturday — that there is a previously unannounced detachment of Marines in northern Iraq providing “force protection” for the Iraqi military and U.S. advisors. The gradual accretion of troops, capabilities, arms transfers, and expanded military missions seemingly just “happens,” because officials frame each policy step as normal and necessary. The reality is that, collectively, they represent a fundamentally larger and different intervention.

  Foreign Policy

How many of the NeoCons who created PNAC are now backing Hillary? How many will she employ in her administration?

We know Robert Kagan has endorsed her campaign, and Paul Wolfowitz recently said he'd probably vote for her. He will - not "probably". "The co-founder of the DLC is a member of PNAC: Will Marshall." [source]

Here we go again. Earlier this year, some were surprised to see Project For The New American Century (PNAC) co-founder and longtime DC fixture Robert Kagan endorse former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for president.

They shouldn’t have been. As is now clear from a policy paper [PDF] published last month, the neoconservatives are going all-in on Hillary Clinton being the best vessel for American power in the years ahead.

The paper, titled “Expanding American Power,” was published by the Center for a New American Security, a Democratic Party-friendly think tank co-founded and led by former Undersecretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy. Flournoy served in the Obama Administration under Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and is widely considered to be the frontrunner for the next secretary of defense, should Hillary Clinton become president.

[...]

Former Secretary Clinton already affirmed her belief in regime change during the campaign, but now it looks like those waiting in the wings to staff her government are anxious to wet their bayonets.

  Off-Guardian

“I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump,” leading neoconservative Robert Kagan told a group gathered around him, groupie-style, at a “foreign policy professionals for Hillary” fundraiser I attended last week. “I would say that a majority of people in my circle will vote for Hillary.”

[...]

Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland, the Obama administration’s hardline assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs. Nuland, who would likely serve in a senior position in a Clinton administration, supports shipping weapons to Ukraine despite major opposition from European countries and concerns about the neo-Nazi elements those weapons would empower.

Another thing neoconservatives and liberal hawks have in common is confidence that the foreign policy establishment is right, and the growing populist hostility to military intervention is naïve and uninformed.

Kagan complained that Americans are “so focused on the things that have gone wrong in recent years, they miss the sort of basic underlying unusual quality of the international order that we’ve been living in.

[...]

The neoconservative Weekly Standard celebrated Clinton’s 2008 appointment as secretary of state as a victory for the right, hailing her transformation from “First Feminist” to “Warrior Queen, more Margaret Thatcher than Gloria Steinem.”

[...]

“If, as I hope, Hillary Clinton is elected, she is going to immediately be confronting a country that is not where she is,” [Kagan] said. “She is a believer in this world order. But a great section of the country is not and is going to require persuasion and education.”

  The Intercept

Get ready to be persuaded and educated.

Hillary Clinton: where neo-liberalism meets neo-conservatism. "Intersectionality."

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

That's What You Get for Being Black and Muslim

Saadiq Long, the Muslim U.S. Air Force veteran who was secretly placed on the no-fly list in 2012 and then smeared by a fabricated news report last December claiming he was arrested in Turkey “as a member of an ISIS cell,” left Turkey last week and has now returned to the U.S. The U.S. government, which worked to secure Long’s release from a Turkish deportation center, gave him a waiver from the no-fly list to enable him to fly back home.

[...]

The smearing of Long as an “ISIS fighter” by the rabidly anti-Muslim website “Pajamas Media,” based on anonymous government officials, was a sham. From the start, Long and his family were held only in a deportation center after the Turkish government claimed he intended to stay in the country without the proper visa — largely due to the fact that he was on the U.S.’s no-fly list.

[...]

But consider the permanent damage done to Long’s reputation and future job prospects. The fabricated report from Pajamas Media was uncritically repeated by all sorts of news organizations (including in Long’s hometown in Oklahoma where his family lives) and was trumpeted by some of the loudest and most toxic anti-Muslim activists: Pam Geller, Ann Coulter, and Sam Harris.

Even after The Intercept presented abundant evidence that the story was fabricated [...] , and even after a local Oklahoma TV station that originally repeated the story confirmed that it was false, Pajamas Media announced that it stood by its accusations [...] . Thanks to all of that, this false report, linking Long to ISIS, will be attached to his name online forever.

  The Intercept

Not only that, but he's still on the US no-fly list "without any explanation or recourse."

That means that he is currently unable to fly from New York back to Oklahoma where his family resides, or to another country of his choosing, even if he agrees to extra searching or traveling with air marshals (both of which he’s offered previously). Underscoring the absurdity of the no-fly list, he’s free to board a crowded train or bus (or obviously enter crowded shopping malls, landmarks, and street corners), and the fact that he has now flown multiple times without incident — to the U.S. and within it — seems to have no bearing on the U.S. government’s ongoing Kafkaesque, due process-free refusal to allow him on a plane.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.