Syria under Bashir Assad (closed end 2014)

[Dayuhan]

No one sold intervention in Libya. The American public doesn't care as much as you think.

I'd say Obama made some effort to sell the intervention, ably assisted by media: for a while it seemed like you couldn't look at a TV without seeing a reporter on the ground in Benghazi reporting on the imminent sack of the city and interviewing people who were about to be slaughtered. The lack of a similar media-safe threatened zone is, I suspect, a major reason for the lack of enthusiasm for intervention in Syria. The Anglo/French willingness to take at least a nominal lead role was also critical in the sale.

Any action (or inaction) we take present risks AND by its very nature, constitute an attempt to direct an outcome (or at least prevent other outcomes).

Is the current strategy an attempt to direct an outcome or an acknowledgement that our capacity to direct outcomes is limited?

The question is more how much are we willing to risk for which desired outcome.

I'd also ask whether we have or at any point had an available move that had any meaningful chance of providing our desired outcome. I've yet to see any suggestion that we did, and in the absence of one I'm not inclined to be very critical of the course adopted, which seems to me not unreasonable.

A regional war that we would get sucked into.

That would be an adverse outcome, but what available course would have prevented it? Diving into a mess out of fear that one might in the future get sucked into it seems a course of questionable wisdom.

I don't think it is that clear that he could not have kept a lid on things. He probably had the ability prior to other interested parties providing support. Remember, this has been going on for some time and Assad has only recently resorted to real military might like air strikes. Had Turkey and the Saudis not gotten involved he might have little problem keeping a lid on things.

I'm not sure that fits the chronology very well... seems to me the lid was well and truly off well before any outside parties got involved in any meaningful way, nor is it clear that outside involvement has at any point been a major driver of the conflict... not that the US could at any point have prevented outside parties from getting involved.

This is no longer a civil war, it is a proxy war.

Based on what evidence? Certainly outside parties are involved, on both sides, but I've seen no evidence or suggestion that outside involvement has reached the point where either Assad or those who oppose him could reasonably be said to be anyone's proxy. What's the actual extent of the outside support? Could either side not survive without it? All I've seen suggests that accelerated defections from the armed forces account for more of the rebel's gains than outside assistance. Of course we don't have inside information, but is there any evidence to suggest that outside assistance is a make-or-break factor for either side?