That's pretty much what we're seeing today in regards to the continuing massacres of civilians in Syria. What's happening there is an outrage and affront to humanity's very dignity. And yes, Bashar al-Assad should be stuffed into an aluminium tube and dropped directly into Hell. I felt that way about his father when he bombed the city of Hama into rubble and paved it over.Those feelings are perfectly normal and, to be honest, I share them. The deliberate, wholesale slaughter of children by their own government is something not to be tolerated.
However, our being swept away by our emotions doesn't answer some fairly important questions, such as "Will foreign intervention make matters better or worse?" People as diverse as John McCain and everyone who opposed the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq are unified in not even asking that question, let alone answering it.
Those who suggest that our (and that raises the important question of who "we" are) intervention will makes things better are generally silent about precisely how that will happen. No one is suggesting a ground invasion and a march to Damascus to topple the human monument to cruelty that is the Assad regime. They're just saying that we should bomb the shit out of them and arm the insurgency. After all, it worked in Libya, right?
Actually, that remains to be seen. I'm almost certain that the overthrow last year of Gaddafi regime is going to have unanticipated blowback over the next generation or so.
First, we still - a year after the fact - have no idea who the new government of Libya is or what they represent. We still know very little about their commitment to democracy, human rights, or where their sympathies lie in regards to the struggle against Islamist extremism. It remains entirely possible that NATO created a monster worse than the one that we had.
Second, while Muammar Gaddafi was a son-of-a-bitch, he was increasingly our son-of-a-bitch. Like Assad, Gaddafi was willing to play ball when it came to sharing intelligence and torturing America's terror suspects through the rendition process.
And exactly where did that get Gaddafi? Well, it got him bombed, deposed and ultimately murdered. Co-operating with the United States didn't stop Omar al-Bashir of Sudan from getting indicted by the International Criminal Court, did it? At some point, despots are going to understand that getting along with the West isn't good for their health.
All things being equal, I'm fine with that. The United States would be far better off today if they didn't get into bed with these monsters in the first place. The fact that it did is one of the primary reasons that Islamist militants are presently at war with America.
If, however, you get into bed with monsters and don't follow your word to the letter, everybody is going to be less inclined to trust you. A singular argument by Republicans against Jimmy Carter was that he damaged U.S foreign policy by not giving safe haven to the Shah of Iran after he was such a faithful ally for so many years.
More importantly, we have a pretty good idea of what a U.S or NATO intervention in Syria would look like. As Fareed Zakaria points out, Syria is too small a country with too many people for the insurgents to retreat. Nor is there a single leadership faction behind it, which means even if they did manage to topple Assad, there's a better than even chance that they'd immediately go to war with one another, just as happened in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. And that, one can assume, will kill more children than it saves.
Before I go further, I should point out that Syria is not unlike Iraq. A religious minority, the Alawites (an offshoot of the Shia), control the government and oppress the majority Sunnis. Remember what happened in Iraq when a domineering minority was overthrown? Who killed more kids, the American bombing or the sectarian war that followed?
What is now a low-level civil war in Syria is likely to explode if we get involved, and there will be no shortage of outsiders taking sides. If NATO acts to intervene on the side of the Sunni rebels, Russia, Iran and Iraq will do everything they can to support their Alawite ally short of introducing their own ground forces, while Hezbollah will likely fight directly for them on the ground. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and the United States will support the Sunni insurgency. The Chinese will likely arm the highest bidder, which one should expect to be Assad. And then there's the question of if intervention would create an al-Qaeda in Syria, paradoxically fighting on our side.
Absent NATO (and let's be serious about this, massive numbers of American) ground troops, an all-out civil war will ensue in Syria, dwarfing anything that we've seen in Iraq thus far. As Mr. Zakaria points out, Syria would rapidly look like Lebanon did in the 1980s. And always remember, Syria intervened in Lebanon for a reason. You might not like that reason, but there was a logic behind it.
Henry Kissinger wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post this past Friday which makes other prescient points. There is a decided absence of consensus, both in the United States and the international community, about yet another war in a Muslim country. And after the adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, it isn't clear that the American military has the resources to bring a Syrian conflict to a conclusion that isn't far worse than it is now.
A full-scale civil war might not necessarily result in more babies being shot in the head at point-blank range, but it almost certainly will result in mass starvation of those babies and a refugee nightmare for the countries surrounding Syria. Where will those people flee to? Iraq? Lebanon? Turkey? Israel? Can they all go to the summer cottages of those calling for intervention in the first place? They might like being near a cool lake. But only on the weekends that you're not there, of course.
I don't want to minimize the horror of what happened in Houla. But I also refuse pretend that it's as simple as "confront (ing) the meanness in this world", which is a simplistic and silly view of the world. And to suggest that anyone who prefers to think long and hard before making things worse is trafficking in "chronic misanthropic indifference" is nothing more than cheap propaganda, counter-productive, and likely to kill more innocent Syrian babies if it's even halfway successful, rather than less.
What some people on both sides of the political spectrum don't get is that war shouldn't be about talking points, particularly on the left, which spent the last decade decrying exactly that.
But if you have a head for selective war, may I suggest the following: Start campaigning for a military draft in all of the NATO countries. Asking American volunteers to get dead over the last line of a Bruce Springsteen song is pretty easy when you and your kids have no skin in the game. When you're willing to sacrifice the lives of your children in a mission that will almost certainly kill more Syrian children than it saves, you might be worthy of being taken seriously on foreign and military affairs.
If fighting universal evil in the world is the new raison d'etre of the Left and the Neocon Right, then maybe it's time you start dressing up your kids and teach them to march because there all kinds of it out there. If and when you're prepared to do that, I also expect you to stop the constant fucking whining about tax increases and domestic spending cuts that war demands.
War is a serious fucking business. And it if you ultimately want less of it, it should start being treated as such. If you want to go to war, Iraq and Afghanistan should have taught you one thing. You need need to expect to spend a lot more in blood and treasure than the "experts" say you will and you need to sacrifice something,
Nothing was more frustrating to me - and I've spent eight years saying this - than Republicans proclaiming that Islamic terrorism was a threat to the American way of life and that all that 99.5% of the population had to do to support "freedom" was enjoy their tax cuts and go shopping.
If progressives start picking up this mantra, we're all doomed as a society. Between them, there will be no end to wars that accomplish their stated ends, and no end to the debt they accumulate.
Unless war starts meaning something other than a partisan talking point, we're fucked.
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