Do you support military action against Syria?

On a side note, if the US does get involved in military action in Syria, it is interesting that the closest ally in such action is very likely to be France. I wonder what that situation would do to all those who like to pretend that the French are so incompetent militarily?

Since it is those claiming the former who support an attack, the burden is firmly with them to prove that it was Assad.

Let's have a look at what the Syrian rebels are up to.

NSFW!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si21ZpFKUPA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f509S69K2h4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1BgOJqtZVA

Execution Truck? If I remember that was the B side to the Cat Steven's single Peace Train!

This kind of thing is why, even though I deplore the Assad regime and understand the potentially extreme danger of just letting chemical weapons sit around and even be used, I think it most unwise to do something that "takes sides", even tacitly, in the conflict. I do not believe the rebels are any better than the current government.

As for an international force (say, under the control of the UN) taking over the country and running it, all that would do is end up with two factions (the pro-Assad people and the pro-rebel people) attacking them constantly.

This is a classic example of a lose-lose scenario, and it isn't even very easy, at this point, to say which way to lose is the worst.

Plus if you do nothing there is condemnation for letting innocents die en masse. All of the options lead to bad consequences. For this reason I reluctantly think that we should not intervene, by virtue of the very slim additional argument that it is their business, not ours.

Which is what we're doing already. Those killed by chemical weapons probably represent at most 1% of those killed so far in the conflict. And yet, what could we have done about it? (By "we" I mean any combination of Western nations.)

Agreed.

We should invade all countries wig chemical weapons then. The Bush Doctrine agrees.

Why do people seem to be obsessed with the idea that military action should be all or nothing?

Agreed, we need something quite a bit more devastating than a pin prick, though certainly not something involving major land operations.

But is Assad "waging war on his own people"? Who are these rebels? And do the majority of Syrians support Assad, or the rebels?

If the Rebels win, the Syrian people will live under an Islamic state, with beheadings for apostasy, stoning for blasphemy, flogging etc. etc, police-enforced Islamic dress codes, the whole Islamic State package.

If that is what most Syrians want, then maybe they do support the rebels. But if that is not what most Syrians want, then I'd wager Syrians in general are more likely to support Assad than the rebels.

Why not, we bought it without question when it was Saddam.

And Saddam had rape rooms.
Don't forget the rape rooms.

The media sure did.

One of the Bradley Manning leaks revealed the rape rooms haven't stopped.

But he's a traitor!

How DARE he blab about the rape rooms!?

America needs those rape rooms for...freedom!

It appeases the Cabin In The Woods gods,..or something.

It's been reported that German intelligence believes that it was Assad's forces based on what was used but that it was a mistake. They only wanted to irritate the civilian population and someone screwed up and put too much chemicals in the nix and ended up killing people.

http://www.spiegel.de/international...act-finding-on-syria-gas-attack-a-920123.html

Hmmm. Well, in evaluating the morality of an action, intentions matter.

We'd all agree that blowing up a school or a hospital with a bomb would be a pretty serious crime, right?

What if it the school or hospital were hit by a malfunctioning guided bomb, intended to hit militants, dropped from a U.S. warplane in Iraq or Afghanistan?

This morning I watched the video of the rebels executing captured soldiers. Absolutely barbaric. I know that these rebels aren't the whole story--that there are decent people in Syria who just want something better--but if Assad goes down, these assholes are the ones who will be in charge.

A pox on both their houses. There's no compelling interest for us to intervene in Syria. The "war crimes" basis loses traction when the possibility that it was inadvertent emerges, and when you see that the other side is, if anything, even more ruthless. There's nothing to be gained. We should never have committed ourselves to action.

It's a hit to our credibility, but I'm voting NO on any military intervention on Syria.

Saddam was like Tupperware. Assad is like an angry monkey.

Think about it.

I'm thinking.

Are you the dumbest fuck on this board or what?

You claimed that Al-Qaeda were the rebels. Now you say "the rebels" as if they are a singular entity when it's been shown to you that it's nowhere near the case.

Leave this board and go have fun on the Daily Mail talkback you embarrassing filth of humanity.

This.

Put yourself in their situation, though. You're a rag-tag group of rebels, with relatively little outside support, and what little support you do get, can't be relied upon to show up on a routine basis. You've captured a group of Assad's soldiers, what do you do with them? Do you have the necessary support structure to be able to keep them as POWs? If you disarm and release them, how likely are they to go back to Assad's bases, re-arm, and come back to your area? Can you pack up, and relocate to an area where you'll be safe and not lose a strategic advantage, since anyone with any brains knows that there's a chance at least one of the released prisoners will get to a place where they can alert Assad's forces to your location? If you offer them the chance to join you, can you trust them to not take the weapons you give them and use them against you?

War is barbaric, and when you've got a group of irregular forces fighting, its even more barbaric. IIRC, there was a scene in the original Red Dawn where the kids had to decide to kill a group of soldiers, because they had no way of keeping them prisoner, and couldn't run the risk of them going back to the main forces. Certainly, in Saving Private Ryan, they showed Tom Hanks' team letting a captured German soldier go, only to have him come back and kill people later.

These are the kinds of things that the guys who scream joyfully at the thought of the US dissolving in civil war, don't think about. Let's put this incident in terms that might be a little closer to home. The CSA is reborn in the US and decides to split from the rest of the country. After two years of brutal fighting, wherein much of the infrastructure is destroyed, Maud's unit captures a National Guard unit from a Northern state. What do you think he's likely to do? Let them go? Or execute them, while proclaiming "justice" for some event that happened during the First Civil War? (We'll ignore the overall unlikelihood of any of this happening to begin with, or the odds of Maud being capable of military command, for the sake of discussion.) The same kind of thing could be happening here.

None of which means that we necessarily need to go sticking our dick into it, but the rules of war were drawn up nation states that have considerably more resources than do a motley group of individuals, who may not have any military training, other than what they've picked up on the battlefield. I'm certain that if all of us were in a situation where they felt that they had the choice between letting someone go, and running the risk of that person killing a member of our family at a later date, or killing that person now, and keeping our family safe, at least for a little while longer, we'd not hesitate to whack the guy, and not feel too bad about it.

Perhaps this kind of thing would have still happened had the Syrian rebels been well supported by outside nations. Certainly, the Libyans had no trouble whacking Qaddafi when they captured him, even though he posed no threat to them. We don't know, but we should know, that this kind of thing is what you can expect in a civil war, regardless of the beliefs of the rebels.

I get that they're trying to be funny, but this just doesn't fit. Paul's one of the strongest voices against intervening. It's like they couldn't accept that some republican/libertarian kook might be on the right side of the issue, so they took a big dump in the middle of their joke.

Or maybe they just figured that Rand Paul was a name people would recognize, rather than say, Sen. Sherrod Brown or Sen. Michael Dean Crapo (two guys I googled at random, with no idea of how they'd vote on the matter).

^
They didn't mention McCain, and he's easily more recognizable.

I've stated quite a few times that the French are either tied with Britian or just behind them when it comes to power projection (US is obviously first) and are either first or tied with the US for first when it comes to willingness to use it.

And when they use it, they are quite effective about it. The way they cleaned out Mali a few months ago is a good example of this.

Ironically, the real doves in Europe are the Germans. The "better red than dead" mentality that the communists fostered there during the Cold War has become a way of life for them now. There are exceptions, of course, but most Germans today would be extremely adverse to German military intervention anywhere. Oddly enough, so would the rest of Europe. The idea of seeing a powerful, effective Germany army fighting in foreign countries the way the British and the French do would unsettle most Europeans quite a bit, even if they fully supported the cause. Even though two whole generations have passed, the world has not forgotten the last time German armies marched abroad.

But that couldn't happen, because the Germans don't have a very powerful military force compared to France and Great Britain, and wouldn't be willing to use it if they did. Yet no one sees the Germans as sissies.

I guess people are just stuck in 1939, for both France and Germany, even though the roles are pretty much reversed today.

The German people were subject to a secret postwar plan in which all aggressive tendencies were bred out of them, giving them no will to fight and win when it matters.

[?=Proof] [/?]

Case closed.

Most humans have the attention span of a gnat. Its entirely possible that the writer saw something with Rand Paul in it just before he started the piece, had he seen something with McCain right before, he might have used McCain.