A wary, weary West is leaving Syria in the butchers’ hands

[Ad Orientem]

It is Syria’s misfortune that its torment at the hands of Bashar al-Assad and his murderous cronies had to come after the West’s ordeals in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the wake of a global financial crisis that has left accountants in charge of foreign policy. Wearied and broke, we have no appetite for another military adventure.

Our impotence in the face of daily horrors from Damascus, Homs, Deraa, Aleppo and countless other places martyred in the savagery of this civil war is obvious to the world. The interventionist idealism Tony Blair mapped out in Chicago more than a decade ago never recovered from its humiliations in Basra and Helmand. Now we are reduced to wringing our hands on the sidelines, incapable even of addressing the war’s humanitarian consequences. Images claiming to depict the victims of a chemical attack on civilians by the regime’s forces have provoked lamentations of despair and little else. Barack Obama said last year that the use of such weapons was the red line that, once crossed, would change everything. So far, it hasn’t.

Read the rest here...
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/bened ... um=twitter

See my posted reply here...
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/bened ... -879887526

[Reub]

Screw the rest of the world. We don't need them.

[Ad Orientem]

Screw the rest of the world. We don't need them.

From your keyboard to God's inbox.

[Pointedstick]

Great comment, Ad Orientem. It's tragic what's going over there, but it's no more our business than it would be Syria's business if we decided to revolt against our government and it turned into a bloody civil war. Would we really be comfortable with giving Syria geopolitical leverage over the outcome of that conflict? I don't think so.

[Reub]

But wouldn't it be wise for Syria to try and gain that leverage?

[clacy]

We simply don't have enough blood & treasure to fix all the word's problems.  It's a messed up world and we cannot save it single handedly.  Especially when you consider the US will not have the will to fight to win.

It makes no sense to fight someone else's fight with one hand tied behind your back.

Surely no one can argue that even if we go in to Syria, that will will actually do what it takes to wipe the enemy off the face of the map. 

[Ad Orientem]

But wouldn't it be wise for Syria to try and gain that leverage?

What leverage could they gain that would not be outweighed by pissing off a hundred million or more Americans?

[Pointedstick]

But wouldn't it be wise for Syria to try and gain that leverage?

Only if they fancied themselves a bully, and we fancied ourselves a bunch of dopes.

[MachineGhost]

That makes too much sense...  and sense and politics are like blood and water.

[Reub]

There are things called allies. And alliances. And friends. And enemies. And potential enemies. These really do exist.

[Pointedstick]

There are things called allies. And alliances. And friends. And enemies. And potential enemies. These really do exist.

Is Syria our ally? Are the rebels our allies? How would we know who to support? And, more importantly from my perspective, how do we know whether our allies today will become the terrorists or enemies of tomorrow (examples: Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden).

I don't disagree with you that geopolitical realities exist. But acknowledging that does not require our intervening in other countries' affairs whenever we can simply to gain leverage over someone. The last century of our history doing this has been pretty ugly if you really look at it with an unbiased eye. I mean, we armed and trained Osama bin Laden, for heaven's sake.

[rocketdog]

"Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none."

~ Thomas Jefferson

[Ad Orientem]

There are things called allies. And alliances. And friends. And enemies. And potential enemies. These really do exist.

"Nations do not have friends or allies. They have interests."
-Otto Von Bismark

[annieB]

And we would know how to fix SyriaThat's funny.

[notsheigetz]

"Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none."

~ Thomas Jefferson

I like that quote but my favorite is from my great, great, great something grandfather John Quincy Adams (and he would roll over in his grave if he could see how untrue to his principles we have been).....

"[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom."

[cnh]

Presuming that John Quincy Adams, or any of the other Founding Fathers, would hold the same views -- clearly products of their time -- in our time strikes me as ludicrous.  They might, they might not.  One thing is certain:  World War II followed by the Cold War changed things considerably.  The U.S. has global interests.  Aggressive interventionism is unwise, but so is isolationism.

[RuralEngineer]

What is our interest in Syria?  The idea that we have global interests and enforce them militarily was commonly viewed as Imperialism and no, I don't think the founders would have viewed WWII as an adequate excuse for this kind if behavior.

[MachineGhost]

WWII was a special cause.  We were "attacked" even if that was a quasi-false flag operation.  Besides, Hitler was the Anti-Christ and had to be stopped.  Nostradamus said so!

I would have been in Morroco with Rick, though.

Seriously, its not like things just came to a head in 1942 and then we launched D-Day.  No, the Gestapo was sniffing down Jewish owners of Swiss bank accounts indirectly, sending the owner to a concentration camp once revealed, forcing the owner to wire all the money back home then and only then torturing and executing the owner just for the hell of it long before 1934.  At what point do we as human beings say enough is enough?  I don't agree with NeoCon Imperialism at all, but the ideology is not without a basis.

[cnh]

The cognitive dissonance of small-government imperialists is a sight to behold.

"Cognitive dissonance"...not really.  More like pragmatism.

[RuralEngineer]

For every Syrian rebel that wants foreign support there's an Assad backer that wants us out.

[catacomb]

More Arabs were killed 2012 alone by Assad than in the entire 120 years old Arab-Zionist conflict.

Yet the world still screams "boycott Israel" as the Syrians are butchered... 

I hope some day an Arab enemy country will have the decency to do things like these for my countrymen.

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/02/17/world ... rael-syriaf

[RuralEngineer]

More Arabs were killed 2012 alone by Assad than in the entire 120 years old Arab-Zionist conflict.

Yet the world still screams "boycott Israel" as the Syrians are butchered... 

I hope some day an Arab enemy country will have the decency to do things like these for my countrymen.

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/02/17/world ... rael-syriaf

Yes, but Israel is the "Other" in the Middle East...it doesn't have to make sense.  The "Other" and our distrust of him as well as the way we discriminate in our response to the same action when it's "our group" vs the "Other" is so old that I'm convinced it's genetic.

Note that when you drill down and get inside some of these countries the "Other" is suddenly a member of a different sect of the same religion (Shia vs Sunni for example).

On another note, I think the Muslim beef with Israel has more to do with the territory, refugee status, and the sheer psychology of the situation than the actual death toll at this point.  I don't think there have actually been all that many deaths, but there have been quite a few people displaced and this has been a splinter in the minds of a billion people for 50 years.

[Pointedstick]

If you ask me, the guff that Israel gets from the west is because Israel is actually not "othered"; we see Israel as like us modern advanced civilized westerners, so their actions shock us because we don't want to believe that people like us could be capable doing what Israel does to survive.

Witness the nonchalance with which we ignore the exact same stuff--and far, far worse--when it's committed by Africans, South Americans, and Asians. They're the others. We can tell ourselves, "oh, that's just a bunch of barbarians being barbaric." Israel forces us to confront our illusions regarding our own degree of civilization.

[Reub]

"If you ask me, the guff that Israel gets from the west is because Israel is actually not "othered"; we see Israel as like us modern advanced civilized westerners, so their actions shock us because we don't want to believe that people like us could be capable doing what Israel does to survive."

PS, you are living in a dream world.

[notsheigetz]

Presuming that John Quincy Adams, or any of the other Founding Fathers, would hold the same views -- clearly products of their time -- in our time strikes me as ludicrous.  They might, they might not.  One thing is certain:  World War II followed by the Cold War changed things considerably.  The U.S. has global interests.  Aggressive interventionism is unwise, but so is isolationism.

"Ludicrous"

Adjective
So foolish, unreasonable, or out of place as to be amusing.

Strong choice of words.

I'm prone to using them myself more often than I should.