On another level, U.S. intelligence agencies are also at work. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton referred indirectly to this at her news conference Saturday with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Istanbul.
“We are providing $25 million in nonlethal aid, mostly communications, to civil society and activists,” she said. “And I don’t want to go into any further details as to how we are helping people, at the risk of endangering them at this time.”
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the fight in a moderate swath of Africa has gained urgency.
Three members of the feminist band were sentenced to two years in jail.
South African police opened fire Thursday on striking miners who had charged a line of officers.
In an analysis published Thursday on al-Jazeera’s Web site, Robert Grenier, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, gave this authoritative view of the assistance: “Such [communications] equipment would have the dual benefit not only of improving intelligence flow to, and tactical coordination among the armed rebel units, but also of facilitating the flow of information from inside Syria to the providers of this assistance.”
Grenier, who worked in the White House on Iraq and was later chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, also referred to an earlier “leaked” presidential finding that authorized the agency to assist the Syrian opposition.
Some of that activity, he wrote, reportedly takes place at a joint operations center in Adana, Turkey, 60 miles from the Syrian border. Adana is “also home to Incirlik, a U.S. airbase where U.S. military and intelligence agencies maintain a substantial presence,” Grenier noted in an earlier article.
Incirlik, an important American installation since the Cold War, serves as a forward base for NATO deployments. Most recently, it handled transports during the Iraq war and certainly would play a role in any Syrian or Iranian operations.
“Our intelligence services, our military, have very important responsibilities and roles to play,” Clinton said, “so we are going to be setting up a working group to do exactly that.”
Asked about establishing a possible no-fly zone over Syria, Clinton said: “It is one thing to talk about all kinds of potential actions. But you cannot make reasoned decisions without doing intense analysis and operational planning.”
A basic part of such planning requires that the forces to carry out agreed-upon missions be in place. Along with the units already mentioned, two U.S. Navy carriers, the USS Enterprise and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, with more than 100 aircraft plus their strike groups, are operating in the area to help in Afghanistan. But they could be used in any other regional role. They include five destroyers and two cruisers. In Bahrain, the U.S. 5th Fleet’s five minesweepers were augmented recently by the arrival of four more.
While Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are fully aware of the growing U.S. land, sea and air forces they face, White House critics refuse to recognize what’s going on.
It’s easy to speak or write about no-fly zones or surgical strikes if you cavalierly overlook the weight on President Obama. The president, acting from the safety of the White House, must consider sending more Americans — husbands and wives, sons and daughters — into another war knowing that their lives will be endangered or even lost.
It’s even easier if you have never been to war yourself.
To read previous Fine Print columns, go to washingtonpost.com/fedpage.
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