A Smoldering Syrian Summer

Obama's desire to intervene in Syria's civil war, in principle, is nothing new. It is a specious artifice. Countries have often used the high road of moral principle to intervene in another country's problems. Our own civil war was a clear example. As another example, a person can perform a simple search of Greek history and  discover a mosaic of inter-country military assists. Some of us do it locally when we intervene in a neighbor's fight. The president does it globally. However, his plea for solidarity with congress is a solemn emptiness. It is not a sovereign panacea for ending a Syrian civil war.

It is a tough line to draw, red or otherwise, between moral justification and minding one's own business at home. Understandably, there is significant and genuine disagreement on a proper course of action. Intervention is an issue of biblical proportions and deals with the classic theme - at what point do we risk our life to save another. Is it acceptable to kill hundreds of innocent nearby civilians, collateral damage as they say, in a desire to punish a few people for allegedly using chemical weapons of mass destruction? I do not think so. And although I respect the description of the precision of the high tech scud missiles, the explosion does not discriminate.

The analogy for me is a situation where we are reasonably sure that some member of some group committed a criminal act, and being unable to pinpoint the actual person, we kill them all. I do not agree with punishment in a situation where the culprit can not be identified. The administration's claim that the Syrian government is responsible is the same as blaming America's government for the criminal acts of a single irate soldier. It is smug hypocrisy for Obama to do the same in Syria.

Most people, that I know and most commentators that I follow, recognize the stupidity of outlawing specific ways of killing people, inferring that other ways, not similarly outlawed, are morally and legally acceptable. It is the absurd principle of bomb them, but do not gas them. It is as if there are reasonable rules of war and reasonable ways of killing people that reasonable people would follow.

Reasonable people would not start a war.

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