No more war. No more wasted or ruined American lives.
President Obama should not send any weapons and certainly not troops into Syria. There are only two reasons for the U.S. to take military action: when our interests are at stake, or when someone's committing genocide. Neither applies to Syria. In fact, there's a good argument that our interests are best served letting them fight each other. The rebels no doubt include some freedom and democracy lovers, who, in other circumstances, we might support. However, the remainder are either unknown or are Muslim Brotherhood-Al-Qaeda Islamists-types who don't like us, or our ally Israel. Why would we want to get in between Al-Qaeda shooting at the Assad regime? Recall Afghanistan in the 1980's. We helped train and arm the Mujahideen who were fighting our then-enemy, the Soviet Union. They beat the Soviets, turned into the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and then turned their weapons and training on us. Meanwhile we have no interest in conflict with the Russians, who have made clear they will step in and support Assad.
Assad is no Boy Scout. He's a horrible dictator who uses his military might and now chemical weapons against his own people. So did Saddam Hussein, and few think invading Iraq was a good idea. Syria is in a civil war. I can't tell you exactly where civil war ends and genocide begins, but I know what's going on in Syria isn't genocide. We cannot get involved in every bloody internal dispute.
And what of the cost? We're running trillion dollar deficits, cutting food stamps, Medicare, education, veteran's benefits, and dozens of other programs. We cannot now spend billions on a Syrian folly.
Why us? Don't the Chinese, the Saudis, the Jordanians, South Koreans, British, French, Belgians, Germans, Dutch, Indians, Pakistanis, Canadians, Mexicans, Brazilians, Argentines, Chileans, Swedes, Danes, Italians, Swiss, Irish, the U.N. or anyone else care about a bloody dictator using chemical weapons. Can't one of them handle it this time?