I love Matty Yglesias and William Saletan over at Slate. I love anti-war Democrats. But it's very clear they don't think about foreign policy on a regular basis. Syria is a very small country. It's 20 million people are roughly half the population of the average UN country (it does get up to 2/3 if you include territories). It's land area is comparable to Washington state. It has basically no energy resources. If you talk about Syria solely in terms of things that are within Syria's borders you can only conclude that Syria is less important then Mozambique, Zimbabwe, or Argentina.
And that's pretty much what all these people are doing. They are looking at the Syria problem purely in terms of it being a SYRIA problem, and coming to the entirely logical conclusion that President should just ignore Assad like he's ignoring Mugabe. This is stupid.
Syria isn't a significant country. Unfortunately for us it borders many significant countries. The Turks are in NATO, the Israelis and Jordanians are "Major Non-NATO US Allies," and all three share a border with Syria. They all deserve to know we will spend a few Billion$ to protect them. That is what Ally means. Syria also shares a border with Iraq and Lebanon, two of the only countries where hundreds of US Troops have died within my lifetime. So from a simple geographical perspective Syria is probably the most important country in the world that is not a) a permanent member of the UN security council, or b) formally a US Ally.
Now lets consider the nature of the problem in Syria. It's clear somebody is using chemical weapons there because every few months thousands of people show up at the hospital with nerve gas damage. This is not something an exile with a fertile imagination can fake. If the CIA could fake it they would have done so in Iraq. Chemical weapons attacks are happening in Syria. Period. End of story. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
The questions then become:
1) Who is doing it?
2) What can we do about it?
3) What impact does this have on our allies?
4) What impact does it have on our relationship with said allies?
Originally posted here.
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