The Obama administration says there is no doubt that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was responsible for a recent chemical weapons attack near Damascus, which Syrian opposition forces and human rights groups allege killed hundreds of civilians.

Secretary of State John Kerry called the attack a “moral obscenity” and the White House has vowed to respond – though the question of how is still under debate.

The Syrian government denies using nerve agents on its own people and has allowed U.N. weapons inspectors into the country to investigate.

As the U.S. weighs its options and rallies its allies for a possible military strike, Stanford scholars examine the intelligence and discuss the implications of military action against Syria. Those scholars are:

• Martha Crenshaw, one of the nation’s leading experts on terrorist organizations and a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
• Thomas Fingar, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council and currently the Oksenberg-Rohlen distinguished fellow at FSI
• Thomas Henriksen, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution specializing in U.S. foreign policy and author of the book, “America and the Rogue States”
• Anja Manuel a CISAC affiliate, co-founder and principal at RiceHadleyGates LLC, a strategic consulting firm, and lecturer in Stanford's International Policy Studies
• Allen S. Weiner, a CISAC affiliated faculty member and co-director of the Stanford Program in International Law at the Stanford Law School
• Amy Zegart, an intelligence specialist who is the CISAC co-director and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution

Does a military strike on Damascus risk further inflaming terrorists operating in Syria who hate the United States?

Crenshaw: I doubt that an American military response to the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons will make al-Qaida and affiliates hate us any more than they already do. The effect on wider public opinion in the Arab and Muslim worlds is what we should be thinking about. As the U.N. noted in a recent report, al-Qaida has a strong presence in Syria and is attracting outside recruits. The Al Nusrah Front in Syria is affiliated with the Iraqi al-Qaida branch. And Hezbollah's involvement has only intensified sectarian violence.

The three-year civil war has claimed some 100,000 lives and forced an estimated 1.9 million Syrians to flee their country, according to the U.N. Why is it taking President Obama so long to take a more assertive policy in Syria?

Manuel: There are no great policy options in Syria. The administration said several times that “stability” in Syria — even if that means a continuing, limited civil war — is more important than a decisive victory over President Bashar al-Assad.  The administration also believes that U.S. military intervention short of using ground troops is unlikely to lead to the creation of a new post-Assad regime that will be friendly to the United States.  Finally, the Obama administration is understandably hesitant to side with the rebel groups, which — in part due to U.S. unwillingness to actively assist moderate Syrian elements for the past two years — have become increasingly radicalized. Al Qaida-allied extremists now make up a growing segment of the rebel movement and some groups are reportedly creating “safe havens” within Syria and Iraq.

Listen to Manuel on public radio KQED Forum about whether U.S. should intervene. 

CISAC's Anja Manuel talks to Al Jazeera America about Syria: 

Have past U.S. intelligence failures made Obama skittish about taking a tougher stance against Syria?

Zegart: Iraq's shadow looms large over Syria. The intelligence community got the crucial WMD estimate wrong before the Iraq war and they absolutely don't want to get it wrong now. People often don't realize just how rare it is to find a smoking gun in intelligence. Information is almost always incomplete, contradictory and murky. Intentions – among governments, rebel groups, individuals – are often not known to the participants themselves and everyone is trying to deceive someone.

What is the intelligence gathering that goes into making the determination that nerve agents were used?

Fingar: The first challenge for the U.S. government is to determine whether and what kind of chemical agents were used. Chain-of-custody issues must be addressed to ensure that samples obtained are what they are claimed to be, and once samples have been obtained, what they are can be established with reasonably high confidence using standard laboratory and pathology techniques.

If it is determined that specific chemical agents were used in a specific place and time, then the next step is to determine who used the agents. Analysts would then search previously collected information to discover what is known about the agents in question, which groups were operating in the area, and whether we might have information germane to the specific incident. Policymakers must be informed about any analytical disagreements if they’re to make informed decisions about what to do in response to the incident.

Pressure on decision-makers to “do something” about Syria may influence their decisions, but it should not influence the judgments of intelligence analysts. If they are suspected of cherry-picking the facts and skewing judgments to fit pre-determined outcomes – they are worse than useless.

See Fingar's comments in The New York Times about the echoes of Iraq.

How do we know the Syrian opposition did not use nerve gas in an effort to provoke military intervention and aid their efforts to topple Assad?

Henriksen: Tracing the precise origin of gas weapons is not an exact forensic science.  It is conceivable that a rebel group staged a "black flag" operation of releasing a deadly gas to provoke a U.S. attack on the Assad regime.  But in this case, both Israeli and Jordanian intelligence reports appear to confirm U.S. identification of Assad as the perpetrator of the chemical attacks. 

If it's confirmed that Syria did use chemical weapons against it own people, is this a violation of the Geneva or Chemical Weapons Conventions?

Weiner:  A chemical weapons attack of the kind that's been described in the media certainly violates the laws of war. Syria, as it happens, is one of only a few countries in the world that is not a party to the Chemical Weapons Convention. Nevertheless, the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons in warfare is a longstanding rule. It is reflected in both the 1907 Hague Convention regulating the conduct of war and the 1925 Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare. (Syria is a party to the 1925 Convention.) The use of a weapon like this also violates the prohibition in the 1977 Geneva Protocols and customary international law on indiscriminate attacks that are incapable of distinguishing between permissible military targets, on the one hand, and the prohibited targeting of civilians and civilian objects, on the other.

If Damascus has violated the conventions, are there non-military actions that can be taken?

Weiner: The illegal use of chemical weapons is a violation of a jus cogens norm, i.e., a duty owed to all states, which means states would have the right to respond to the breach. Such an attack would presumably be a basis for the unilateral imposition of sanctions or severance of relations with Syria. There's an open question under international law whether states not directly injured by Syria's actions could take "countermeasures" that would otherwise be illegal as a way of responding to Syria's illegal action. Under a traditional reading of international law, a violation like this does not give rise to the right by other states to use force against Syria absent an authorization under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter by the Security Council.

Are there legal means for Washington to bypass the Security Council, knowing that Russia and China would veto any call to action against Syria? 

Weiner: Under the U.N. Charter, a state may use force against another state without Security Council authorization only if it is the victim of an armed attack. Most commentators believe this has been expanded to include the right to use force against an imminent threat of attack. But under the prevailing reading of the U.N. Charter, a mere "threat" to U.S. national security would not provide a justification for the use of force.

But the Obama administration is arguing that Assad's actions pose a direct threat to U.S. national security?

Weiner: Some international lawyers – but not very many – argue that there is a right of humanitarian intervention under international law that would permit states to use force even without Security Council approval to stop widespread atrocities against its own population. But this remains a contested position, and most states, including the United States, have not to date embraced a legal right of humanitarian intervention.

What are some recent precedents in which the U.S. intervened militarily?

Weiner: The situation in Syria is not unlike the one faced in Kosovo in 1999, when a U.S.-led coalition did use force to stop atrocities that the Milosevic regime was committing against Kosovar Albanians. As part of its justification for the use of force, the United States cited the ongoing humanitarian crisis and the growing security threat to the region. What's interesting is that the U.S. was careful to characterize its use of force in Kosovo as "legitimate," rather than "legal."  I am among those observers who think that choice of words was intentional, and that the U.S. during the Kosovo campaign advanced a moral and political justification for a use of force that it recognized was technically unlawful.

How does one know when diplomacy has reached a dead-end and military intervention remains the only course of action?

Henriksen: It has become nearly reflexive in U.S. diplomacy that force is the last resort after painstaking applications of diplomacy. The Obama administration followed that arc dutifully with appeals and hoped that U.N. envoys could persuade Assad to step aside. In retrospect, it seems that U.S. intervention soon after the outbreak of widespread violence in the spring of 2011 would have been a better course of action. Now, Russia, China and Iran have entrenched their support of Damascus. And, importantly, Hezbollah has joined the fight.

Now, with Washington's "red line" crossed by Syria's use of chemical arms, America almost has to strike or lose all credibility in the Middle East and beyond.

Should we be concerned about getting pulled into another long and costly war? Or is there a way to get in, make our point, and get out?

Henriksen: The worry about stepping on a slippery slope into another war in the Middle East is of genuine concern.  Obama's intervention into Libya in early 2011 does provide a model for the use of limited American power. President Bill Clinton's handling of the 77-day air campaign during the Kosovo crisis in early 1999 provides an example of limited interventions. Both these interventions can be analyzed for their pluses and minuses to aid the White House in striking a balance.  But no two conflicts are ever exactly the same.

What is the endgame here?

Henriksen: American interest in the Syrian imbroglio are to check Iran, the most threatening power in the Middle East, and to curtail the conditions lending themselves to spawning further jihadists who will prey on Americans and their allies. At this juncture, it appears that the fragmentation of Syria will become permanent. It's fracturing like that of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and will result in several small states. One or more of these mini-states might possibly align with the United States; others could become Sunni countries with Salafist governments, and the rump state of Assad will stay tight with Iran. The fighting could subside, leaving a cold peace or the tiny countries could continue to destabilize the region. Any efforts that undercut al-Qaida franchises or aspirants are in American interests.

HIROSHIMA, Japan – Keijiro Matsushima was in eighth grade, sitting at his school desk next to a window facing the sea. He recalled looking out at the sky the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, drawn to the sound of American B-29 bombers flying over his island.

Much of the Japanese population was starving. “They were so beautiful and I was so hungry that they looked like silver pancakes to me,” he said of the bombers overhead.

Matsushima figured it was a routine reconnaissance mission and turned back to his books.

Second later, he was hit by the blast. He felt the shockwave, then the wave of heat. He was forced to close his eyes when hit by a surge of blinding, orange light.

“The whole world turned into a sunset world,” he said. He covered his ears and jumped under his desk. Though his school was destroyed, a standing stairwell protected his desk.

Today, the 84-year-old retired schoolteacher is one of the storied hibakusha, the Japanese word for “explosion-affected person,” or survivors of the atomic bombs dropped by the B-29 bombers 68 years ago this week. Their average age is 78 and they have spent decades enduring discrimination and prejudice on top of their heartache 

Matsushima was addressing two dozen international scholars and policymakers at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, including a delegation from Stanford University collaborating with the city in its efforts to become an international symbol of peace.

“Seeing the Hiroshima museum and meeting with a hibakusha was a moving reminder of the importance of moving as far and as fast as we safely can toward a world without nuclear weapons,” said Scott Sagan, a Stanford political science professor and a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and its umbrella organization, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Matsushima sat in a classroom in the basement of the museum, seated before a map that laid out the hypocenter of the explosion. He was stoic in his narrative about events that day and often referred to himself as a “lucky boy.”

“It was a very bad war,” he said. “We didn’t know that at the time, and it continued on, a very long war. It just got worse and worse.”

Born in Hiroshima in 1929, Matsushima saw the militarization of his native city as he grew up. He remembers hearing optimistic statements about the grand Japanese success at Pearl Harbor, the surprise attack on the U.S. naval base in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941, which resulted in the U.S. declaration of war on the Empire of Japan.

The pressure on Japanese civilians mounted as the war prolonged; rationing of food, water and electricity took its toll on morale. By 1944, the U.S. had conquered several strategic Pacific islands, built airbases and began bombing Japanese cities.

As the Manhattan Project progressed, meetings of the Military Targeting Committee in 1945 designated certain Japanese cities as likely targets to test the new atomic device, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Enola Gay dropped the 4-ton atomic bomb on Hiroshima and half the city vanished, along with 70,000 to 80,000 lives, or a third of the populace.

Though Matsushima was in a classroom of 70 middle-school pupils, he remembers absolute silence after the “big noise.” He was relatively lucky; his school was on the outskirts of the blast radius, several kilometers from the hypocenter.

Though lacerated by glass and rubble, his bones were unbroken and he was able to walk. He helped a wounded classmate to a rescue truck – a young boy whom he would later learn had also survived.

“I think I should have tried rescuing others, but I was a 16-year-old, selfish young boy and I just wanted to leave the city as soon as possible,” Matsushima said with regret.

His mother had left Hiroshima a few months earlier to stay with her in-laws in the surrounding hills. Matsushima walked across the burning city, where tens of thousands of people lay wounded and pleading for help, for water, or for their gods. He walked all night until he arrived at his grandparents’ home.

The atomic bombings in Hiroshima and three days later in Nagasaki claimed between 150,000 and 240,000 lives. The bombs – dubbed Little Boy and Fat Man – would leave thousands more suffering from severe burns, radiation sickness and cancer.

Few cities in history are as closely associated with single, punctuating event than Hiroshima is with the bomb. The metropolis of 1.7 million people has been rebuilt in the last 68 years, its homes refurbished and its port revitalized.

Yet for generations, the city has been known as ground zero. Local leaders are trying to reinvent the city’s image as a beacon for global zero – the elimination of nuclear weapons.

“Policymakers of the world, how long will you remain imprisoned by distrust and animosity?”  Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui, himself the son of a hibakusha, asked in his annual peace declaration on Tuesday. “Do you honestly believe you can continue to maintain national security by rattling your sabers? Please come to Hiroshima. Encounter the spirit of the hibakusha. Look squarely at the future of the human family without being trapped in the past, and make the decision to shift to a system of security based on trust and dialogue.”

Sagan, one of the nation’s leading scholars on nuclear proliferation and safety, advocates for global nuclear disarmament as a member of the Hiroshima for Global Peace Task Force. He has worked closely for years with Hiroshima Prefecture Gov. Hidehiko Yuzaki in an effort to reach global zero.

“Our hope is that by hosting international conferences and research workshops, Hiroshima can turn from being the memorial site of the deadly ground zero to being the catalyst for moving to a world without nuclear weapons,” Sagan said.

In this photo on August 10, 1945, a mother and her son received a boiled rice ball from an emergency relief party. One mile southeast of Ground Zero, Nagasaki, August 10, 1945. Photo Credit: National Archives and Records Administration

 The visit to Hiroshima in late June by the Stanford delegation also included Francesca Giovannini, a MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC; Michael May, a CISAC faculty member and director emeritus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and Edward Blandford, an assistant professor of nuclear engineering at the University of New Mexico and a former nuclear fellow at CISAC.

They were attending the conference, Learning from Fukushima, sponsored by the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, CISAC, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Hiroshima for Global Peace Project.

It brought together American and Japanese nuclear power and nonproliferation specialists as well as nuclear experts from Southeast Asia. They examined the regional implications of nuclear safety and regional security after the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster.

A devastating earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in March 2011, prompting a nuclear meltdown and the release of radioactive materials from the plant.

Conference delegates listened to Matsushima’s story and met with Mayor Matsui and other city officials to discuss the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Global Nuclear Future Initiative, which Sagan co-chairs with Steven Miller from Harvard. It offers technical and safety advice to countries that are developing nuclear power programs, while examining the regional and global implications.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the region’s most binding economic and political force, has long been proud of Southeast Asia’s status as a nuclear weapons-free zone. Vietnam, however, is changing that dynamic as it has commissioned several reactors from Russia, the first of which is expected to go online in 2020.

Scholars from Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia attended a panel to discuss proliferation, security and competition in the region and whether a nuclear-powered Vietnam would change the delicate balance of ASEAN.

Giovannini, who is also the program coordinator of the Global Nuclear Future Initiative, said her first visit to Hiroshima was spellbinding. The contrast between the vibrant, modern city and the heavy sorrow of its history was palpable. She said the narrative by Matsushima brought the 30-member delegation to silence.

“He was able to bring to life his memory, his past, and the history of the bombing through personal details that allowed us to picture vividly that little boy as he moved through what he called a ghost town,” Giovannini said.

She recalled someone asked Matsushima if he harbored enmity toward the United States.

“No,” he replied, and then smiled. “To move forward – one must forgive.”

Reed Jobs is a Stanford senior majoring in history and a CISAC honors student who traveled with the Stanford delegation to Hiroshima. His honors thesis will focus on the historical study of preventive warfare.

Many resource dependent states have to varying degrees, failed to provide for the welfare of their own populations, could threaten global energy markets, and could pose security risks for the United States and other countries.  Many are in Africa, but also Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan), Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Burma, East Timor), and South America (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador) Some have only recently become – or are about to become – significant resource exporters.  Many have histories of conflict and poor governance.  The recent boom and decline in commodity prices – the largest price shock since the 1970s – will almost certainly cause them special difficulties.  The growing role of India and China, as commodity importers and investors, makes the policy landscape even more challenging.

We believe there is much the new administration can learn from both academic research, and recent global initiatives, about how to address the challenge of poorly governed states that are dependent on oil, gas, and mineral exports.  Over the last eight years there has been a wealth of new research on the special problems that resource dependence can cause in low-income countries – including violent conflict, authoritarian rule, economic volatility, and disappointing growth.  The better we understand the causes of these problems, the more we can learn about how to mitigate them.

There has also been a new set of policy initiatives to address these issues: the Kimberley Process, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the World Bank’s new “EITI plus plus,” Norway’s Oil for Development initiative, and the incipient Resource Charter.  NGOs have played an important role in most of these initiatives; key players include Global Witness, the Publish What You Pay campaign, the Revenue Watch Institute, Oxfam America, and an extensive network of civil society organizations in the resource-rich countries themselves.

Some of these initiatives have been remarkably successful.  The campaign against ‘blood diamonds,’ through the Kimberley Process, has reduced the trade in illicit diamonds to a fraction of its former level, and may have helped curtail conflicts in Angola, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.  Many other initiatives are so new they have not been have not been carefully evaluated.

This workshop is designed to bring together people in the academic and policy worlds to identify lessons from this research, and from these policy initiatives, that can inform US policy towards resource-dependent poorly states in the new administration.

Why have militarized crackdowns on drug cartels had wildly divergent outcomes, sometimes exacerbating cartel-state conflict, as in Mexico and, for decades, in Brazil, but sometimes reducing violence, as with Rio de Janeiro's new 'Pacification' (UPP) strategy?  CDDRL-CISAC Post Doctoral Fellow Benjamin Lessing will distinguish key logics of violence, focusing on violent corruption--cartels' use of coercive force in the negotiation of bribes. Through this channel, crackdowns can lead to increased fighting unless the intensity of state repression is made conditional on cartels' use of violence--a key difference between Mexico and Brazil.