Syria: the case for action

[Dayuhan]

Inaction is no less uncertain.

It certainly keeps us out of the picture, and that's something. The demon you know, and all that... while things are ugly now, we're proposing a substantial escalation that has little chance of making anything better and a very substantial chance of making them worse.

The motivation for action here is not to prevent regional spillover.

I don't see how the goals of this operation can be separated from overall policy goals re Syria.

There's a point at which general principles regarding chemical weapons are in conflict with the real-world calculus of costs and benefits presented by Syrian intervention. Overall, the prospect of intervening in Syria is no more attractive than it was before the use of chemical weapons. There's still no credible ally on the ground. There's still no clear, practical, achievable goal. There's still a huge raft of probable unintended consequences. So do we go out and stick our collective schlong in the meat grinder purely to deter future use of chemical weapons?

There may have been a time when we (as in the World, and in particular, the Arab World) could have gotten involved to limit the destruction. That time has passed.

There may or may not have been such a time. Of course there will be no shortage of claims that at any given juncture we could have done x and "they" would have done y. That's pure speculation. We do not know where the road not taken would have led, and we do know that there were good reasons for not taking that road.

This has to do with the use of chemical weapons. The ramifications of inaction are not limited to the boarders of Syria.

So what happens if you fire off your punitive strike and they turn around and use chemical weapons again, maybe on a larger scale? What's the next step up on the punitive escalator? Have we got a next step up that we can actually use without head-butting the tar baby?

We're not in a position to get on the high horse and claim that the use of chemical weapons must be punished in any circumstances, because we and everyone else know that we've let the use of chemical weapons pass before, when it suited us to do so. At some point our interests have to come into the calculation.