« German Green Party Confronted with its Pedophilic Past | Main | Annals of Anti-Americanism: The Great Amikäfer Conspiracy »

August 31, 2013

Comments

John Adams DE

Go ahead, do some random bombings in Syria. Maybe you find out what you want to achieve by simply doing it. Destroy some empty shelters or so. Just enough to save your face, not enough to get rid of Assad, not enough to strengthen the Al Nusra Front. Not enough to really enrage the Russians and Chinese. Just a minor breach of international law.

The irony within: When the civil war in Syria started, Assad said he is fighting terrorism. Now it is clear, weakening Assad strengthens the Al Nusra terrorists in first place. There is no liberal middle class of considerable political strength in Syria. In deed, the majority of Syrians seems to consider the Assad regime the lesser evil. Assad, however, could interprete a limited, symbolic strike as carde blanche for any conventional military escalation, still having the wmd and the Hezbollah.

Hm... Capitol Hill could doom Obama's war plans. No sideshow for the hard times coming in congress the next weeks.

Btw, the Washington Post works on Snowdengate. Barrich Obaxon?

David

So your ideal response to Assad using poison gas to murder hundreds of children - breaking all international conventions - is ... do nothing at all?

Putin must be ecstatic! The West indeed has no spine...

John Adams DE

My ideal response would be powerful not symbolic. I wouldn't have accepted 100,000 deaths through conventional warfare and waited for the second or third use of chemical weapons. I wouldn't have drawn a 'red line' without approval of congress, but if I did so I wouldn't back out under any circumstances. And I would have protested getting the Nobel Peace Prize for nothing.

Still, it remains totally what the US wants to achieve when they are threating Assad with strikes saying "It hurts me more than you".

David

You can understand that after the Iraq debacle there is an extreme reluctance to go it alone. The response in Libya was possible because of the Arab League and NATO backing.

James

We've had our disagreements, but Obama has more justification here than Bush did in Afghanistan.

The comments to this entry are closed.

My Photo
Blog powered by Typepad