… according to Syria Comment, this goes back to August:

Syria Commenthas been writing since August 2008 that Petraeus tried to go to Damascus in the fall of 2007, but was refused permission by the Vice President. It wasn’t the president. (That little bit of info is an SC exclusive told to me by a top intelligence officer.)

An ABC story broke on this yesterday:

Apparently Gen. David Petraeus does not agree with the Bush administration that the road to Damascus is a dead end.

ABC News has learned, Petraeus proposed visiting Syria shortly after taking over as the top U.S. commander for the Middle East.

The idea was swiftly rejected by Bush administration officials at the White House, State Department and the Pentagon.

Petraeus, who becomes the commander of U.S. Central Command(Centcom) Friday, had hoped to meet in Damascus with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Petraeus proposed the trip, and senior officials objected, before the covert U.S. strike earlier this week on a target inside Syria’s border with Iraq.

Officials familiar with Petraeus’ thinking on the subject say he wants to engage Syria in part because he believes that U.S. diplomacy can be used to drive a wedge between Syria and Iran. He plans to continue pushing the idea.

Let’s get this straight:  Petraeus wants to go to Syria, but the idea is rejected.  So rather than opening a dialogue with Syria, we send in the special ops guys to conduct a raid on their side of the border.  In and of itself, that rash change of direction doesn’t add up.

But there’s more:  Unless I’m missing something, as CENTCOM commander, shouldn’t Petraeus have knowledge of all potentially sensitive operations within his area of responsibility?  I appreciate that in the huge world of CENTCOM ops, perhaps not everything gets to his desk, but I’d like to think that the prickly things actually do.

So, was the Syria raid the work of an independent squad commander?  How high up the food chain was it approved?  Did it occur in contrast to orders?  Did one of Petraeus’ superiors overrule him and order the raid? 

I have no idea what the answers are, except to bet that there’s been a lot of cussin’ and phone slammin’ on this one ’round the office. 

Josh Landis’ blog Syria Comment has some good reporting on the fall-out from the US strike inside Syria:

Thousands of Syrians have taken to the streets of the capital Damascus to protest against a US raid which killed eight people near the border with Iraq. Riot police were deployed outside the US embassy as the demonstrators, mostly civil servants and students, gathered for the government-backed protest a few kilometres away. The embassy, which was pelted with stones during a protest against US-led air raids on Iraq in 1998, was closed on Thursday due to security concerns. But the situation remained peaceful as the protesters filled the Youssef al-Azmi square and surrounding streets in the al-Maliki neighbourhood, with some Syrians forming circles and performing traditional dances.

[Landis Comment]It is worth remarking that this demonstration was held at Youssef al-Azmi Square and not at Rawda in front of the US Embassy. It is a few kilometers away. The Syrian government is taking no risks that the crowd will get out of control and attack the residence or embassy, as happened in 1998, when Ryan Crocker’s wife was alone in the residence when protesters came over the top of the wall and pelted the residence with rocks. Crocker, now the US ambassador in Iraq, has held a grudge against Syria ever since, according to members of the embassy who know him.

Note that Landis’ source is ultimately al-Jazeera - so take it with a bit of a grain of salt - but that doesn’t mean that a) Syrians aren’t ticked off and b) it wasn’t a dumb move on the part of the US administration.

Here’s the real tragedy of the situation (and one I didn’t highlight in my post from yesterday):  Syria was trying to improve relations with the West, even starting indirect diplomacy with Israel (via Turkish intermediaries) to discuss the return of the Golan Heights and a possible Syrian-Israeli peace deal. 

Not any more.

Some have argued (in the piece I linked to above) that American action was trying to lull Syria out of complacency in these negotiations - in essence, the sides were talking, but not accomplishing much.  Perhaps the attack was trying to force them off the fence.

But how does an attack get them to fall off it onto your side?

My Lords, Ladies, and Serfs -

Sorry for the infrequent postings this week.  I’m out of the office and have had only sporadic access to my computer.

Everything around here shall return to normal next week… ironically, I suppose, as life in general ramps up to anything but.

Spencer Ackerman comments on the SOFA agreement over at FireDogLake, saying Gen. Odierno - the top US commander in Iraq - has threatened to completely pull American forces out of Iraq if they don’t pass it, citing the McClatchy news service:

Army Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, informed Iraqi officials last week that if their country doesn’t agree to a new agreement governing American forces in Iraq, it would lose $6.3 billion in aid for construction, security forces and economic activity and another $10 billion a year in foreign military sales.

The warning was spelled out in a three-page list that was shown to McClatchy on Monday. Iraqi officials consider the threat serious and worry that the impasse over the so-called status of forces agreement could lead to a crisis in Iraq. Without a new agreement or a renewed United Nations mandate, the U.S. military presence would become an illegal occupation under international law.

Ackerman concludes by asking, “is this how superpowers behave?”  Obviously, the answer is a resounding “no.”  But here’s another point Ackerman shies away from - Odierno has issued a completely empty threat.  Not only is it a poor negotiating tactic, it’s an empty threat.  The Iraqis know we’re going to stay and supply billions upon billions more in reconstruction and military aid because it’s in our national interest. 

Our inability to get the Iraqi parliament to support SOFA is a hole we’ve been digging ourselves into for years.  By giving, giving, and giving a corrupt government without demanding serious political accommodation in the past, we have been negotiating from a position of weakness from the start. 

Odierno’s brinksmanism will be laughed off and we’ll probably end up with a new UN mandate.  The US might exact some financial penalty on the Iraqi government, but both sides know our vested interests are in a rebuilt Iraq.

Congrats to PPI author Phillip Carter, who was featured in today’s New York Times for his work with the Obama campaign’s veterans’ organization.

I was talking to a pollster recently who sung the praises of campaigning vets — not only do vets serve as good surrogates on military issues, but the general populace views as honest interpreters of the issues.

And with two wars to resolve and a pressing foreign policy agenda, veterans are an extraordinarily necessary component of Barack Obama’s message about the new direction of national security.  So congrats to Phil and thanks for all the important work!

Iraqi PM al-Maliki is from a tiny political party called Dawa - they only have 15 seats out of a 275-seat parliament.  He was essentially a compromise candidate when the various warring parties were trying to decide on a prime minister.

In power, al-Maliki has gone from sheepish to bellicose, a transformation that culminated in a decision to launch a series of raids across Iraq’s south this past spring.  On the surface, he wanted to use his position to root-out the influence of lawless militias.  If you dig a little deeper, al-Maliki was trying to blunt the political influence of Moqtada al-Sadr - the highly influential anti-American Shi’ite cleric with great sway over the militias. 

Al-Maliki essentially decided to consolidate power and try to improve on his party’s share in government.  The Status of Forces Agreement - the document needed to legitimize American troop presence in Iraq when the UN-sponsored mandate expires this December 31 - has become al-Maliki’s political punching bag. 

He’s trying to scrape together support in the south - as he did in the Basra spring raids - but:

If Maliki pushes the U.S.-Iraq security agreement through parliament without support from his Shiite partners, “the Iranians will turn his life into hell. He will have no chance of winning in the south,” Attiyah, the political analyst, said.

While there’s no doubt that the US prefers to extend the troop mandate via a SOFA, it’s looking likely that they’ll turn to the UN. 

The SOFA is badly needed, and it’s failure is potentially detrimental to both American and Iraqi security, should the UN mandate not bring the same hard-fought - but relatively reasonable - terms.  However, it’s a bit of delicious irony that the Bush administration would be stung in its last days by Iraq subverting national security concerns to their domestic politics…

US special forces dipped into Syria on an operation to capture or kill Abu Ghadiya, an alleged foreign fighter facilitator.  Apparently, it was successful. 

As far as I can tell, the Bush administration is launching these attacks under the guise of “if you don’t, we will” – trying to cajole the Syrians into solving the problem themselves or risk American involvement in their affairs.  We’ve been essentially operating under the same mindset in Pakistan.

But here’s why these raids are actually counter-productive:

1. These types of actions violate about 37 international laws regarding other nations’ sovereign territory.  Where there might be room to cooperate on narrowly-defined strategic objectives, the Bush administration is continuing to soil its reputation as an international partner with friend and foe alike.  If there was an opening to start dialogue on this - or any other - topic with Syria, there isn’t any more. 

2. The mission isn’t always completed.  While our intel would have to be pretty solid to risk invading another country’s sovereign territory, funny things still happen on special operations on unknown turf.  This mission was apparently a technical success, but they all aren’t.

3. Even so, raids against the civilian population often create collateral damage.  This betrays basic counter-insurgency strategy by orienting the local population against you.  (While you may argue that this population is in Syria, and we’re in Iraq, it doesn’t matter much - there’s plenty of travel across the porous border.) 

4. Prominent insurgent organizers (like Abu Ghadiya) don’t get to where they are alone.  Unless their entire operation is fully destroyed, their lieutenents will simply move up the ladder and (sooner-or-later) restore the network.  In light of points 1, 2, and 3, it seems highly irresponsible to risk a special ops team invading sovereign territory just to have the same human smuggling ring pop up again in a few weeks.

Just look at Gen Petraeus.  He knows we can’t “kill or capture our way out of a large insurgency.”  So why did we do this again?