The US Doesn’t Have Any Good Military Options In Syria
Business Insider Australia
By Michael Kelley
April 29, 2013
There is evidence that troops loyal to Syrian Bashar al-Assad have used chemical weapons, and U.S. lawmakers are urging President Obama to respond.
But it’s not that simple.
The military options range from one-off missile strikes on infrastructure linked to chemical weapons, to carving out no-fly zones, and even as far as putting 20,000 U.S. troops in Jordan for a ground invasion.
All carry risks. Invasion has it’s obvious drawbacks (which the U.S. learned in Iraq), and establishing a humanitarian area in the north by destroying Syrian air defenses and artillery may have the same effect.
“Once you set up a military no-fly zone or safe zone, you’re on a slippery slope, mission creep and before you know it, you have boots on the ground,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, told Reuters. “Or you end up like Libya where you don’t really have a control mechanism for the end-game, should you end up with chaos.” …
Read on: http://au.businessinsider.com/us-military-options-in-syria-2013-4
