Daily Archives: 16 October 2015

Wishful Thinking

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Russian President Vladimir Putin is looking for an exit strategy from Syria already? That’s what the AP thinks….

Putin certainly realizes that some 30 Russian combat jets won’t be able to change the course of the war, and allow Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces to win.

As an aside, AP is commenting, whether it understands it or not, on President Barack Obama’s “commitment” to changing the course of the war in Syria with the tepidly applied occasional potshots he’s authorized our own Air Force to take.

More to the point, though, the AP has misunderstood Putin and forgotten Russia’s long-term relationship with Syria and why that relationship exists. Russia needs Syria for a couple of reasons: seaports on the Med and to limit our influence in the Middle East. To those ends, Putin needs Bashar al Assad to stay in power in Syria; a western oriented replacement, or no replacement at all and the attendant chaos do neither of those reasons any good.

There is, too, the use to which those 30 combat jets are being put. Their combat tempo is much higher than ours, the targets much more carefully and coordinatedly selected to take out forces that are explicitly anti-Assad (and so more or less allies of us for the moment), and they’re being used in coordination with Assad’s ground forces against those anti-Assad forces.

Yeah, they can change the course of the war, especially given the fractured nature of those opposition forces.  And Putin is in Syria to stay; he has no exit strategy because he wants no exit.

The AP does have the right of it on a couple of other Putin goals:

to show all players that they will not be able to unseat Assad by force;…to foster political talks that could allow Moscow to protect its interests in the region.

Another key task for Putin is bring Moscow and Washington together in a security dialogue, which he hopes would make Russia appear as an equal….

In these, Putin also has a willing partner in Obama. Obama’s behavior in Syria can’t possibly be intended to unseat Assad, no matter Obama’s chit chat to the contrary. Obama, too, already has engaged in the beginnings of a security dialogue, initially to keep our aircraft out of Putin’s way, and after that to accede to a Putin security arrangement.

Thinking that 30 combat aircraft are insufficient to accomplish anything meaningful on the ground, though, is wishful thinking, a hope that Russia will fail and leave. The proper and determined application of airpower in coordination with ground forces will demonstrate otherwise.

“The Law Must Change”

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There are a couple of cases before the Supreme Court in this session involving questions of excessive punishment. One case involves a defendant on death row in a case where a jury rendered a majority advisory verdict applying the death penalty on the defendant’s conviction of murder, with the judge having the final say. The argument here is that this

violates a 2002 precedent that defendants are entitled to have a jury, rather than a judge, determine a death sentence.

The other case, though, is the one that interests me. In this case, a 17-year-old, a juvenile under the definitions extant at the time, was convicted in 1963 of murdering a sheriff’s deputy and given a life without parole sentence. His appeal asks the Court to make retroactive its 2012 ruling that

juveniles cannot automatically be sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

The government agrees with the defendant in this case, which may or may not be an appropriate thing to do in such matters, depending on the facts of a particular case.

What’s of critical importance here, though, is the government’s argument in supporting the defendant. Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben argued

The law must change to accommodate the compelling interests in having the characteristics of youth that mitigate culpability considered in the sentencing process[.]

That’s absolutely true. Laws passed by our elected representatives must change to accommodate society’s changing compelling interests. But the courts cannot do that. The courts’ role is strictly limited under our social compact to striking a law down if it violates our Constitution and to applying the law as it is written if the law is Constitutional. The task of making law, or of modifying existing law, is solely within the province of our legislature, our elected representatives, since making or modifying law is purely a political matter and not at all a judicial one.

The Supremes, if they’re to be true to their oaths of office, must reject the appeal. The Justices certainly can, in their published opinion(s) on the case, advise the Congress to make changes the Justices individually or collectively think appropriate, but they may not legislate from the bench.