Should America get involved in Syria?
According to this article in The Economist (http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21572193-syria-disintegrates-it-threatens-entire-middle-east-outside-world-needs-act) President Barack Obama has suggested that saving lives alone is not a sufficient ground for military action, however it seems that such a superpower as America is likely to be dragged into the conflict eventually and Obama's reluctance to help and save hundreds or maybe thousands of lives infuriated local moderate non-jihadist people.
What do you think? Should Obama take control over the situation in Syria and try to gain allies there or should he just sit back and wait for Assads' capitulation while hundreds of people are being killed, arrested and starved out?
I read here
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ceskenoviny.cz/svet/zpravy/obama-a-putin-chteji-urychlit-zmenu-politickeho-rezimu-v-syrii/908432
that Obama and Putin want to change the political regime in Syria as soon as possible. Moscow and Washington seem to differ in their opinions towards Asad, but hopefully they will reach some agreement during the upcoming summits.
This is an interesting issue in terms of the political alignments in America. In general, so-called "conservatives" favor military intervention more than so-called "liberals," who prefer diplomacy and "multilateral" solutions to international problems (i.e. working with allies and the UN, as opposed to the US taking "unilateral" action on its own). But in recent years both groups have split, with some liberals favoring intervention on "humanitarian" grounds (to help the people suffering under oppression in other countries) and some conservatives returning to older "realist" and "isolationist" traditions that emphasize letting the rest of the world sort out its own problems and using the US military only where there is a clear US "national interest."
ReplyDeleteYou can see what I'm talking about here. Daniel Larison writes for "The American Conservative," a magazine that generally takes that realist-isolationist line. (This viewpoint is also sometimes called "paleoconservative," or old-style conservative, as opposed to the more aggressive and militaristic "neoconservatives" like those who supported the invasion of Iraq.) Here is Larison arguing against intervention in Syria, vs. a liberal newspaper columnist who favors it for humanitarian reasons:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/keep-ignoring-demands-for-syrian-intervention/
And here he is agreeing with a British commentator that the Syria situation is different from Rwanda, where the US was criticized for not using its military power to rescue people who were being killed in the 1994 genocide:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/syrias-conflict-is-not-like-rwanda/
Anyway, it's all really complicated. Speaking of which, here is "The American Conservative's" attempt to explain exactly what's going on in Syria and who all the different factions are:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/whos-turning-syrias-civil-war-into-a-jihad/
Of course, again, this is written from the perspective of people who DON'T want intervention and are arguing that it wouldn't' do any good. Emphasizing the complexity of the situation generally serves that purpose, although it may also just be accurate in this case.