[ed. See also: Your Labor Day Syria Reader, Part 2 with William R. Polk.]
I’m paid to have opinions, and I can’t figure out what my opinion is. On one hand, Bashar Assad is a mass murderer who, it seems plain, would be happy to kill half the population of his country if it would keep him in power. On the other hand, if he was taken out in a strike tomorrow the result would probably be a whole new civil war, this time not between the government and rebels but among competing rebel groups. On one hand, there’s value in enforcing international norms against certain kinds of despicable war crimes; on the other hand, Assad killed 100,000 Syrians quite adequately with guns and bombs before everybody got really mad about the 1,400 he killed with poison gas. On one hand, a round of missile strikes isn’t going to have much beyond a symbolic effect without changing the outcome of the civil war; on the other hand, the last thing we want is to get into another protracted engagement like Iraq.
In short, we’re confronted with nothing but bad options, and anyone who thinks there’s an unambiguously right course of action is a fool. So it’s a lot easier to talk about the politics.I honestly don't find this quite that difficult although I am sympathetic to the emotional need to "do something." For the second time today, I'll offer my maxim: "If it's not obvious that violence is the only answer then it's not the answer."
And in this case, it's actually pretty clear to me. Violence is being proposed as a symbolic gesture that virtually no one expects will change a thing for the Syrian people and which could make things worse. That's just not good enough.
by Digby, Hullabaloo | Read more:
