The Permanent War Moves to Syria

It's an addict celebrating rehab with an overdose. And this one's likely to be fatal.

Kevin Drum:

All the evidence suggests that Obama is considering the worst possible option in Syria: a very limited air campaign with no real goal and no real chance of influencing the course of the war. You can make a defensible argument for staying out of the fight entirely, and you can make a defensible argument for a large-scale action that actually accomplishes something (wiping out Assad's air force, for example), but what's the argument for the middle course? I simply don't see one.

It's the act of a president who's under pressure to "do something" from the know-nothings and settles on a bit of fireworks to buy them off and show that he has indeed done something. But it's useless. The strike itself won't damage Assad much and it won't satisfy the yahoos, who will continue to bray for ever more escalation.

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

Interventions may be needed on rare occasions to prevent brutal repression and bloodshed, particularly when the victimized side is far too weak to defend itself. But civil wars are a different problem altogether, and even the best planned and best intentions interventions can go horribly wrong.

Iraq is a divided, sectarian mess right now. Syria is far, far worse. It's hard to see what, beyond a massive and global campaign to literally stop the fighting and extradite the leaders of both sides for trials at the Hague, will work to stop it. Dropping bombs on Assad's forces in order to help the religious fundamentalist revolutionaries doesn't seem like a good plan. It seems likelier to lead to more deaths, not fewer, and heightened anger against the West in the bargain.

If ever there was a time to intervene in Syria--and I'm not sure there ever was--but it would have been before now. It would have been back when Assad was the clear perpetrator, back when secular liberals in Syria hadn't fled or been killed, back before the bloodshed on both sides was so awful that forgiveness and reconciliation seemed impossible. If there was ever a time to act, it would have needed to be credible, global and overwhelming, with an absolute minimum of missile or gunfire.

But, of course, the world wasn't prepared to do that because everyone was and still is jockeying over oil and shipping interests. Very few people in power around the world care two whits for the plight of the Syrian people being killed. They're just pawns on a chessboard. The Saudis and much of Europe would like to see Assad gone, but they would rather watch the U.S. do it and then blame us for what they encouraged us to do afterward.

And, of course, the military industrial complex in the United States rarely saw a war it didn't like. It cares little for the lives of Syrians or for the opinion of the world.

So here we go again, mindlessly and futilely. The governments of China, Russia and United States don't care about saving Syrian lives any more than they care about stopping climate change. Each nation's security and bureaucratic apparatus is so invested in doing whatever is in the national interest (read: the interest wealthiest power brokers in each country) that they never stopped to consider that very phrase "national interest" is becoming an antiquated archaism of a dying Westphalian world.

And if you still wonder why it's a guaranteed dead-bang loser:

The Middle East’s Big Knot of Enemies and Allies, Visualized In one chart, By Chris Kirk