“Are There Legitimate National Security Interests At Stake?”

September 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Three exchanges follow from an Ask Me Anything at Reddit with Josh Keating, a global-news reporter for Slate.

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Question:

In your opinion, is Obama’s stance on Syria politically motivated due to his arbitrary chemical weapons line-in-the-sand or are there legitimate national security interests at stake?

Josh Keating:

I agree with my colleague John Dickerson that Obama boxed himself in with the “red line” comment,” but I do think the administration’s view of chemical weapons as beyond the pale compared to mass casualty conventional weapons attack is genuine. This isn’t to say the strike being considered will actually be an effective deterrent for Assad or other states considering chemical weapons use.

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Question:

Those who supported the Iraq war usually felt “duped” by the false evidence of WMDs. Shouldn’t the evidence that Assad conducted the CW attacks be the primary object of scrutiny? Evidence to date suggests that the primary source of intelligence is Mossad intercepts. Can we really rely on that? For that matter, can we really rely on our own intelligence community to have America’s best interests in mind? And now there is a mad scramble to find a “defector” to bolster the case. Can you blame an informed American for being skeptical?

Josh Keating:

Don’t blame you at all for being skeptical, but there are some critical differences between the two situations. In this case, we have an attack that took places just weeks ago rather than years earlier. It also certainly doesn’t seem like this administration has been desperately looking for pretexts for a war. All claims certainly warrant scrutiny but I wouldn’t dismiss compelling evidence just because of superficial similarities between the two situations.

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Question:

What do you think the most “unknown” world issue is? So, not something like Syria or Egypt that gets a lot of attention, but something important nonetheless.

Josh Keating:

As far as regions go, I’m always a little shocked by how little attention is paid in the U.S. conversation to Latin American politics. Given the geographical and cultural proximity, the stark ideological divides, the economic transformations we’ve seen in some countries, and how great an impact U.S. policy have there — the drug war in Central America for instance — it’s always a little baffling to me that the region gets short shrift compared to the Middle East and Asia. At least in the post-Cold War period.

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