Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Controlling the Situation, or, the Fantasy of US Omnipotence

Richard Cohen in the Post:
The pity of it is that, had Obama used force early on, Assad would not have dared to gas his own people. The dead and the wounded are as much a victim of U.S. weakness and vacillation as they are of Assad’s brutality — the former made the latter possible. Obama was so fixated on not being Bush, so worried about stepping into a quagmire, that he wound up losing control of the situation.
I find this baffling. What could Obama possibly have done to deter Assad from fighting against rebels trying to overthrow him? What force could he have used? A "no-fly" zone, which Cohen supported, would not have stopped Assad any more than the one we imposed on Saddam Hussein stopped him from crushing his own rebels.

The last line is particularly galling. The "situation" is a civil war in a country where we have never had any influence to speak of; what control did we ever have to lose? The US President is not God; he cannot "take control" of other countries just by waving his hand, or by launching a few hundred cruise missiles. Notice that to Cohen, the fact that most Americans oppose our getting involved is a mere distraction. Democracy, oh, who cares about that when there are High and Noble Principles in play?

And while I'm at it, Cohen is full of outrage that Assad "got away with murder" for the gassing of civilians. Ok, fine. But that thousand people is a small percentage of all the others killed in this war by bullets; is shooting people not murder? Is killing people with bombs or cruise missiles not murder? What is the difference between killing people with poison gas and blowing them up?

The right question to ask is the one Rand Paul asked in his response to Obama; how would our bombing Syria making anything better for anyone?

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