经济学人 Death from the skies

The war in Syria Death from the skies The growing horror of the Syrian civil war has put military intervention back on the agenda Sep 15th 2012 IDLEB PROVINCE AND LONDON from the print edition THE rebel fighters lolling sleepily in a former police station are suddenly interrupted by a rocket that crashes into the roof over an unoccupied room Although the Syrian regime has ceded direct control over this and much of the rest of Idleb a rural province in the north west shelling and other attacks from a distance are a frequent annoyance and worse As night falls behind closed doors a woman sits guessing which village the distant thud of falling shells is coming from tonight Her children meanwhile are busy describing in detail how the mother of a friend had her limbs torn off by a rocket For all their risks such villages look like positive havens to the Syrians fleeing Aleppo the country s second city and now its primary battleground The government and the rebels have been trading turf back and forth along the front line since the grinding battle started in July One day the rebels take an army barracks the next the regime claims to have grabbed it back Meanwhile in the suburbs around Damascus corpses of young men with their hands tied behind their backs are piling up Shelling continues from Deir ez Zor in the east to the southern plains of Deraa as do air raids Fighting rages in every province In this section Death from the skies Meddling at their peril Entropy increasing Reprints Related topics International law Law Crime and law Israel Turkey As the civilian death toll rises the question of whether other countries should intervene with armed force is becoming acute Opposition groups estimate that August was by far the bloodiest month since the uprising began in March last year accounting for a fifth of the estimated 25 000 to have died so far see chart Michael Clarke the director of the Royal United Services Institute a think tank in London believes that the preference Europe and America have shown for staying out of the conflict at least in terms of military action is being worn down by both the scale of the suffering and the threat it now poses to the stability of fragile neighbouring countries We are not moving towards intervention he says But intervention is certainly moving towards us There are several reasons for the escalation of brutality over the summer Opposition fighters in the Free Syrian Army were over confident in attempting to hold parts of Damascus and Aleppo before they had the means of doing so counter attacks concentrated the violence in places where there were lots of civilians to get hurt And the regime of Bashar Assad appears to have discarded any form of restraint That is partly because of its own increasing desperation but also because in the past it was not sure how far the international community would let it go Now it has crossed more or less all the red lines that Western politicians had hoped it would respect The use of chemical weapons seems the only thing that would be certain to trigger a military response from outside The clearest indication that Syria no longer cares about calibrating its use of violence has been the growing use of air power first with helicopter gunships then with fighter jets The air campaign allows the regime to terrorise and punish areas where it has lost control and to conserve its ground forces especially its tanks which have become more vulnerable as the rebels have grown in experience Aerial attacks also have the advantage of depending on a part of the armed forces which is almost entirely controlled by Alawites the sect to which the Assad family adheres Mr Assad s father Hafez ran the air force before he launched the coup that brought him to power in 1970 It is reasonably well equipped with perhaps 325 aeroplanes that can be used for ground attack and 33 helicopter gunships and its personnel are thought less prone to defection than army officers have proved The legal questions If nothing happens to limit Mr Assad s deployment of air power the rebels will struggle to make further gains and may themselves become more savage in their frustration The civilian death toll will continue to mount The flow of refugees into neighbouring countries 4 000 a day are trying to cross into Turkey will grow But what limits on the regime s violence might the West and the uprising s Sunni Arab supporters such as Saudi Arabia the United Arab Emirates and Qatar impose and to what purpose The options include providing the rebels with more anti aircraft weapons establishing a humanitarian corridor from north of Aleppo to the border with Turkey under the protection of outside forces a call made by France s president Fran ois Hollande and Turkey s foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu in the first week of September enforcing a no fly zone over the entire country and actively seeking to end the regime Each of these options looks likely to have unwanted consequences and they are anyway all likely to merge into each other They are also probably illegal The 1945 UN charter prohibits all use of force against other countries unless in legitimate self defence or with authorisation by the UN Security Council The doctrine of the responsibility to protect R2P allowing states to intervene to protect civilians from atrocities where their own government is failing to do so does not create a new exception to this rule The Security Council must give its approval Some argue that in an international emergency when the Security Council is blocked by the veto or threat of veto of one of its permanent members as now by Russia and China the General Assembly can bypass the Security Council and authorise the use of force itself This first happened in 1950 at the height of the Korean war when Russia was blocking international intervention But this ruse if ever legitimate has now fallen into disrepute NATO s action in Kosovo at the end of the 1990s is often cited as an example of compelling political and moral considerations leaving no choice but to act outside international law But the whole universal system of collective security could be undermined if it were invoked so soon again particularly after the highly questionable invasion of Iraq in 2003 and would leave those involved liable to prosecution for war crimes before the International Criminal Court in The Hague In the absence of a Security Council resolution America would at a minimum require an active coalition of the willing that included the endorsement of NATO and the Arab League There would have to be a political end beyond reducing the regime s capacity for violence against its own people but what that might be remains far from clear Perhaps the most superficially appealing choice would be to establish a limited no fly zone around a protected area an idea that was briefly discussed as a possibility in Libya NATO if it agreed to be the guarantor of such a safe zone would declare that any attack would be met with a vigorous response The hope would be that its bluff would not be called But a single safe haven might have little effect in a conflict now so widely dispersed if one were guaranteed there would soon be calls for others General Martin Dempsey the chairman of America s joint chiefs of staff says that the establishment of a humanitarian zone would mean an obligation to protect it not only from Syrian aircraft but also from missile attack and artillery requiring the option of attacks on ground forces as well as aircraft Going in To threaten force means being ready to follow through which would be a big commitment General Dempsey stresses that any comparison between the no fly zone established in Libya last year and the forcible imposition of something similar in Syria is spurious He says that Syria s integrated air defence system is many times more capable than Libya s while covering a smaller area making it a much more challenging obstacle Unlike the air defences of Serbia which NATO took on with relative ease during the 1999 Kosovo campaign Syria s are designed to deal with a sophisticated adversary Israel The Syrian regime has spent billions trying to get them up to scratch They include modern Russian systems which Western experts expect to be highly capable There is the SA 22 Greyhound a mobile system with both surface to air SAM missiles and anti aircraft guns the SA 17 Grizzly a medium range missile capable of handling many different targets simultaneously and the long range SA 5 Gammon which poses a threat to command and control aircraft and aerial tankers Syria also has about 4 000 rockets which like American Stingers can be carried around without vehicles and hoisted onto a shoulder for use man portable air defence systems or MANPADS Such forces are not insurmountable as General Dempsey says without braggadocio his forces can do just about anything But unlike the intervention in Libya where France and Britain took point and America led from behind an intervention in Syria would have to be a mostly American affair and as such it would be done with massive force from the outset Douglas Barrie an air power expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London says America would insist on quickly destroying Syria s air defences to reduce the risk to its forces as far as possible General Dempsey claims that no contingency planning for such a campaign has been ordered beyond what he calls the commander s estimate level of detail A sense of what it might require though comes from a detailed open source analysis by Brian Haggerty of MIT s Security Studies Programme which looked at a campaign to suppress Syrian air defences and establish safe zones in the north west of the country Mr Haggerty reckons this would require for openers striking around 450 targets including more than 20 command control and early warning radar centres 150 SAM sites 205 aircraft shelters 32 additional air base targets 27 surface to surface SS missile batteries and 12 anti ship cruise missile batteries As Mr Barrie points out such a long list means a lot of work to identify and find targets Western special forces are probably already on the ground in Syria compiling such a list as well as identifying where Syria s many chemical and biological weapons production and storage sites are Mr Clarke says that some harm may already have been done to Syria s air defence systems by Western cyber attacks Syria is more vulnerable than Libya was to such tactics because of its greater reliance on computers for integration and control It has been reported that when the Israeli air force attacked a nuclear site in Syria in 2007 it used such tricks to crash the country s air defences at the right moment but such claims should be treated with some scepticism The Israelis would probably like the world to believe that they have dark cyber arts at their disposal rather than that they simply caught the Syrians napping Readying an F 15 Mr Haggerty calculates that the opening phase of the campaign would require nearly 200 strike aircraft and over 100 support aircraft several times the number used in the opening phase of the action in Libya On top of the sorties by strike aircraft there would also be a lot more sorties by heavy bombers than Libya saw and a lot more cruise missile salvoes The strike aircraft would probably not include America s latest stealth fighter the F 22 which despite its costly radar proofing is not well suited to such attacks Mr Haggerty thinks 600 700 cruise missiles might be necessary compared with 221 used against Libya in 2011 and 802 used in the 2003 invasion of Iraq Thereafter round the clock fighter sorties would have to be flown in a hunt for Syria s mobile missile launchers which would be visible only when they turned their radars on or were spotted by special forces on the ground and to deter what was left of its air force from flying Any attempt by the regime to bring its long range artillery near the safe zones would also have to be stopped In terms of logistics cruise missiles could be launched from American submarines in the Mediterranean and possibly from ships in the Gulf although the shipswould be at the limit of their range More probably a second carrier battle group would have to join the US Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean But if the carrier group was one of the two now patrolling in or near the Gulf with the Fifth Fleet that would diminish America s ability to deter an aggressive response from Iran if Israel were to attack its nuclear facilities The need for such deterrence is a strategic concern which outweighs Syria in Washington s estimation at least for the time being Other strike fighters and support aircraft could fly from Incirlik a NATO airbase in southern Turkey and from the British base at Akrotiri in Cyprus Both bases would be within range of Syrian Scud B missiles However if Syria were to start using its Scud arsenal the campaign to destroy its air defences would rapidly switch to one of explicit regime change The other option America and its allies could do all this if the order were given but not without committing substantial resources and accepting some losses It is also inevitable that many more civilians would be killed by American and Western bombs than in Libya where 72 were admitted to have been killed by NATO air strikes Many air defence installations especially around Damascus are ringed by buildings in which civilians live and work