Well, except for this one post.
The situation really worries me. We attacked Iraq because we believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, in violation of UN Resolutions that effectively formed the cease-fire agreement after they attacked Kuwait.
We attacked Serbia to get the Serbs to withdraw from Kosovo.
We bombed Libya because of some variety of humanitarian reasons.
But we're planning on attacking Syria so that Obama can save face over his "chemical weapons is a red line" comment?
And that despite the real risk that we end up replacing Assad with Al-Qaida? Or just end up more feckless than before, if we just have a couple plainly symbolic bombings?
Well, I guess Obama doesn't have to strive for a Nobel Prize if he's already got one.
[Additional irritation about the Syrian situation: a budding new blogger is supposed to comment on other blogs with links to one's own articles, but there's not much out there to link to today. National Review Online was all about Syria and I just can't do it -- I just can't get myself to try to get involved in a conversation in which, ultimately, I'm completely powerless about the outcome, and can't even imagine that I can make a difference.]
At the time (and today) I thought (still think) that we attacked Iraq because S. Hussein was not living up to terms of surrender. I vaguely remember maybe 4 points that led to war in a (Bush?) speech. Part (one part) related to WMDs, and that's unfortunately the part that resonated with the American public. That's the part that the press blew up as "The reason." One can argue about whether or not our intelligence re WMDs was faulty, one cannot argue that the terms of surrender were not honored; if you stomp on the terms under which hostilities were terminated with impunity then the war was kind of pointless. And you are encouraged to continue and escalate the original posture that caused the war, albeit more carefully.
ReplyDeleteIt is sad that the focus shifted away from Iraq's failure to honor terms of surrender to WMDs. I feel like the press won the war against Bush on the home front.
As far as I know, Libya did not surrender to anyone and does not have terms of surrender. We have no cause to initiate hostility.
Have you given any thought to revisitng Syria in light of developments?
ReplyDelete