I'm kind of extremely pissed off that no one anywhere seems to give a shit when scores brown people are dying as of late.
For the record I am notnotnot advocating an Iraq-style intervention. That is the last thing our national wallet (or our valued troops) needs, and I would prefer to keep that as a nukulur option as opposed to the first bullet in our international relations chamber. Nonetheless, I find myself unable to pull the geopolitical equivalent of a Lady Macbeth and simply wash my hands of this matter. Seeing and hearing the racism and invective behind people's unilateral opposition to humanitarian intervention of any variety makes me sick to my stomach. Let "them" sort it out. It's "their" problem. "We" don't need to do anything.
Maybe it's just the shock of being back in suburban Texas after spending four years in an ivory tower in New York. But spending my afternoon gauging people's responses in the media and around the web has given me the sinking feeling that this disregard for human life is far from a local phenomena.
The NATO mission in Kosovo was as follows: "Serbs out, peacekeepers in, refugees back." There was some bungled shit in that process, absolutely. The "unintentionally" exploded Chinese embassy comes to mind. But that in and of itself was hardly a deterrent against actions that ultimately played a massive role significantly curtailing the mass suffering and deaths by exposure of hundreds and thousands of international citizens (yes, I give a shit about the plight of inhabitants of other countries, I am not an absolute isolationist because I'm not fucking 12).
I know that Syria is a precarious situation, and we do not want to embroil ourselves in another decade-long conflict. I am fully aware that the media is ginning up the old War Machine like Don Cheadle in Iron Man 3. I am not so naïve as to think that the Syrian civil war will be resolved anytime soon, or that it will be resolved without further death and atrocity, or that things in that country will not get much much worse before they even entertain the notion of getting better.
However, as a student of history, I also understand that indecision is necessarily a decision in and of itself; and the unwillingness of a nation or nations to make a tough decision between unpalatable options in the present often leads to the making of an impossible decision between unconscionable options in the future. This is a concept that seems to evade most libertarians to a very significant extent, and it is terribly frustrating to convince them that America does not exist in a "freedom" bubble, but rather a "liberty" hypercube - that is to say; the extent to which we as American citizens are capable of expressing and enjoying our Constitutionally-insured pursuits is influenced significantly by the w-axis fluctuations of international events (apologies for the somewhat abstruse metaphor; I just finished playing my brother's copy of Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward).
I also understand the skepticism toward the US government in wake of the PRISM/NSA scandal and the like. Growing up during the misinformation climate of the Iraq War has (properly) conditioned our generation not to take everything at face value.
But some people - on both the right and left, might I add - are taking this to an absolutely ridiculous extent. There is a difference between understanding that most everything the United States government does is motivated by something (that's just basic understanding of historical government) and subscribing to the tinfoil notion that literally every single incident that takes place in the world is a false flag planted by the US government to create another war, or that symptoms of nerve gas poisoning independently confirmed from multiple neutral sources are all the manufacture of a singular omnipotent hand. I personally don't know whether Assad used the gas or whether some faction within the rebels used it. I'm not making a John Kerry leap of faith here.
At the same time it humors me (in that I am laughing to prevent from crying) to see these same people attempting to deconstruct the psyche of a brutally repressive dictator that has demonstrated himself to have no qualms whatsoever about massacring his own people. If you are going to be paranoid about the United (or perhaps "Untied" is better for this context) States' status as a logical actor, you would do well to at the very least not instantaneously bestow said status upon Assad. The United States is not the only government capable of manipulating public opinion.
Assad is correct in saying "would any state use chemical or any other weapons of mass destruction in a place where its own forces are concentrated? That would go against elementary logic." This alone does not absolve him of the capacity to use nerve gas unless you believe an interview of a staunch Russian ally with a pro-Kremlin news outlet is sufficient enough evidence for you to 100% clear someone of wrongdoing beyond reasonable doubt. The impossibility of Assad's agency in this attack could not be farther from ironclad. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle must be spinning in his grave to hear some of the torturous conspiratorial logic being bandied about as of late.
It is fine to be conspiratorial - I have my own thoughts about the origin of crack cocaine and the effort of Nixon and Reagan to systematically erode the black community from the inside-out - but not to the point of being an idiot. That's a fine line that most people simply do not have the historical credentials to properly walk.
At the end of this rant I want to leave you with one thought.
This war is not going away, and this war is not going to resolve itself.
Someone will tip the scales. If you are a unilateral noninterventionist, the necessary consequence of your philosophy is a quiet reconciliation to whomever that someone may be as well as an acceptance of the aftermath of the fashion in which said scales are tipped.
To think otherwise - or, worse yet, to accept such premises as unconditionally superior to any and all capacities of intervention - is as willfully naïve as believing that the NSA is only scanning "metadata" from your personal information.
Thank you for your time.