U.S. airstrikes into Syria will begin within days and involve Tomahawk cruise missiles fired by American warships in the eastern Mediterranean . They will last less than a week and target a limited number of Syrian military installations. And they will be designed to send a stern message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, not force him from power.
That's the word coming from some in the Obama administration -- the White House swears it's not them. And while Obama's aides publicly insist that the President hasn't made a final decision about whether to attack Syria, anonymous officials within his administration are leaking a strikingly large amount of detailed information about the timing, duration and scope of the potential military intervention. The flood of details raises a pair of related questions. Is the administration deliberately trying to telegraph its plans for a strike? And if so, why?
"I have no earthly idea why they're talking so much," said retired Admiral William Fallon, the former head of the military's Central Command. "It's not leaking out; it's coming out through a hose . It's just a complete head-scratcher."
David Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who commanded the no-fly zone over Iraq in the late 1990s, said that military action was most effective when a U.S. foe like Assad didn't have a clear sense of the timing and severity of a potential strike and couldn't take protective measures in advance like dispersing his troops or weapons so they'd be harder to find and destroy. The administration's public and private comments, he said, meant that Assad would have an easier time figuring out when and how to prepare for a U.S. assault.
"You don't want an adversary to know what's coming," Deptula said. "Now Assad does."
In recent days, White House spokesman Jay Carney has said that the military operations under consideration by President Obama "are not about regime change," while The New York Times and other newspapers reported that the White House was considering a limited series of strikes that would last one to two days and strike fewer than 50 targets. The paper said the U.S. would focus on hitting individual Syrian military units, headquarters compounds, air bases, and rocket sites, not chemical weapons facilities themselves. The information was attributed to unnamed administration officials.
There were signs Wednesday that the Syrian strongman has already begun reacting to the talk coming out of Washington about the potential targets of a U.S. strike. Reuters reported that Assad's forces appeared to have evacuated most of their personnel from several key army, air force, and security headquarters buildings in central Damascus. Those are precisely the kinds of military compounds U.S. cruise missiles would reportedly be sent to destroy.
The administration's willingness to share details about sensitive military operations has prompted internal consternation in the past. In the days after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates grew so angry about the amount of information leaking out about the assault that he reportedly approached then-National Security Advisor Tom Donilon to recommend "a new strategic communications approach." It was a simple one. "Shut the f--- up," Gates said.
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