Syria, chemicals, Israel: the fast and slow of it
[ by Charles Cameron — always we need the rapid response, always we need the slow, thoughtful understanding ]
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It’s almost axiomatic, isn’t it, we need two brain speeds, two types of intelligence, two modes of analysis, to handle the moment and the times we live in. Both.
Chevra Hatzolah Israel has the immediacy of Twitter, Cheryl Rofer and Aaron Stein the longer view from the Globe and Mail. Both.
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Cheryl Rofer, a good friend of this blog, “supervised a team developing supercritical water oxidation for destruction of hazardous wastes, including chemical warfare agents, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory” — bio from the Globe and Mail article. I don’t want to pick and choose excerpts from her piece, I’m certainly no expert on her topic — but as things heat up in Syria, the considerations she describes offer us significant background.
Read her insights as posted two days ago in Syria’s chemical weapons pose a decade-long problem for the world.
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[ edited 45 mins later to add: ]
Blake Hounshell’s post a few minutes ago for FP, That awkward moment when … Israel launches airstrikes in Syria, begins to bring the two strands of thinking together — Israel attacks, but cautiously…
Syrian state TV is claiming that Israel hit a “research center,” while opposition Facebook pages are saying that several elite units on Mt. Qassioun, overlooking Damascus, were the targets.
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Because it’s so difficult, not to mention risky, to destroy chemical-weapons stocks from the air, the next-best thing is to take out Assad’s means of delivering them. And Mt. Qassioun is reportedly where many of the Syrian regime’s best missiles are kept.
That’s a lot less worrisome.
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As the “fog of war” slowly clears, the longer and slower insights will prove to be the more reliable and enduring.
May 5th, 2013 at 5:26 pm
Good observations, Charles. The trick is to try to see through the fog of war, which it seems like far too many reporters aren’t even trying to do.
May 5th, 2013 at 8:20 pm
Thanks, Cheryl. At least some of the informed on Twitter are getting it right, as my follow-up post indicates!