I guess I should have said "unless." There's no reason right now to think either side can be defeated, absent a decade-long American commitment.

If Iran drops their support of Assad, it will be quick and relatively painless compared to what it could be. My title probably misled a bit. There will be conflict regardless.

A decade long American commitment wouldn't end the war. We were in Iraq for 10 years and their still blowing each other up with car bombs.

You want to change a country's ways, you need to stay long enough, and *impose* whatever order you seek, long enough for a *generation* (or more) of leaders to *die*.

Ten years is a short occupation...does nothing but piss off those you are dominating.

bo....perhaps you missed the news....for the last week...but Putin/Russia and China are kinda sitting fast behind these chumps. Iran??? Pshaaaa....sure, Iran may be supporting them, but Russia likes having access to Syria *ports*....Syria is their ally, and they have *no* desire to see the US come in and fuck up their deal there.

If ifs and ands were pots and pans there'd be no need for tinkers. Why should Iran abandon Assad now, after spending two and a half years propping him up? He is, after all, their only state ally in the Arab world.

Syrian society is broken now and cannot be fixed. It's a cross between Lebanon and Yugoslavia at this point. No amount of talks in Geneva will undo the atrocities commited by the government and now majority Islamist rebels.

Could you really go back to living next to an Allawite family if the government had shelled your home and killed your brothers? Could you go back to living next to a Sunni family if Islamist rebels had eaten your father's heart? Could you even stay in the country as a Christian if your neighborhoods and churches had been targeted for destruction? Could you, as a Kurd, give your allegiance back to what's effectively a foreign nation after a long taste of de facto independence?

A few years ago, this all could have worked out. Syria could have been Tunisia if things had been handled differently by many players both inside and outside Syria. But that is not the case and now society there has melted away. Peace will not come till one side wins, and that's many thousands of deaths away.

Krellin ... My hope is still that the US won't be going in at all. I am simply saying that someone's going to end up cleaning up the mess. By working *diplomatically* great things can happen without any fighting at all. It'd be nice to say our governments have the guts to intervene on behalf of a collective world united rather than individual entities, but that doesn't seem to work.

Iran is running a delicate balance of supporting one of its few allies and reports of chemical weapons use when it plays up its own martyrs from Iraq's chemical attack during the Iraq/Iran War. They'll keep supporting Syria by claiming the rebels and Western powers are behind the chemical attacks.

The US shouldn't commit ground troops. They should start carpet bombing Syrian military bases like they did at the start of Gulf War I. Nothing like seeing a mile stretch of land cratered by cheap gravity guided bombs using Vietnam era bomber flown from safe bases in the US. Sure Syria is dispersing weapons into civilian areas, but the civilians will flee like rats at the thought that the US isn't going to waste expensive precision guided missiles to destroy Assad.

Invictus.. you know Ahmadinejad is gone, right? Rouhani wants to cooperate with the west (at least more than his predecessor). The Iranians know exactly what chemical weapons attacks are. You think they've forgotten Iraq? I don't know how in the right mind they could possibly justify sticking next to Assad.

bo_sox48, your ignorance shines through again. Iran will stick next to Assad till the bitter end because he's the only way they have dependable access to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Keeping that organization going is a pillar of Iran's foreign policy. They will not give up until they are defeated.


"By working *diplomatically* great things can happen without any fighting at all."

Diplomacy works best after the war. Rarely is a war stopped by diplomacy while the fighting is still going on and neither side is obviously about to lose.

bo -- I agree...the US needs to stay **wayyyyyy the fuck*** far away from Syria.

Why do we want to bomb Assad? So that Al Queada backed rebels can take power? The idiots calling for war - including the US media - seem to forget that the "rebels" are not a bunch of crying women and children, but they are a bunch of cold-blooded murders no better than Assad.

There is *NO* good side in this conflict.

If our intent was to prevent future chemical attacks, our pussy of a Presidenyt already blew that by 1. announcing he was going to attack, and 2. no attacking....thus giving *whoever* launched a chem attack (and there is *no current* proof available to the general public that Assad did it...) a chance to disperse and hide the weapons.

Any attack at this point in time will serve no purpose other than to kill more people, but will change *nothing*...thus making us *as bad* as whomever launched the chemical attack.

Because I can assure you, dead by chemical weapon is no different than dead by US tomohawks...

Maimed by chemical weapons is no worse than having your legs and arms blown off by a pointless US attack so that fucktard Obama can save face for being a mouthy blowhard douchebag,

Oh....and as for a "diplomatic" solution? Ahhhhhh ha ha ha ha ha!! Give me a fucking break! Obama / The US have *zero* credibility in the Middle East in general, and more specifically with Syria....especially while Russia/China are backing them. Every time we beg for peace, Assad / everyone will point at the US and laugh at how impotent we are, afraid to fight them. And if we fight them, we can't destroy them, and eventually we stop, and they laugh and point at us and say how they survived and beat back the infidel.

We need to just get the fuck out of the middle east.

krellin, I agree we need to stay out. But there are good rebels. They just haven't been in charge for awhile since we didn't give them aid when the rebellion began. That's the saddest part about this whole enterprise. Handled competently at the beginning, there could have been an Egypt-style revolution that got rid of Assad but kept the state. Instead there's a civil war with no way of ending and no clear way for Syria to recover, which means along term instability in the Middle East at the very least.

"Get the fuck out" isn't in any White House dictionaries, is it? Obama could backtrack, but he's got Hillary's bid at stake... ladeedah dadeedoo...

If there's one thing Barack Obama does not care about, it's whether Hillary Clinton gets to be president.

That's good, isn't it?

He also doesn't care about international human rights laws. He's just trying to play the role of the big bad nice wolf.

I think he's being completely honest about his concern for human rights and the desire to defend the norm against the use of chemical weapons. It's just that he's cocked it all up so badly.

The worst part, probably, is his handling of getting authorization from Congress. It now looks almost certain he won't get the House to vote for it by absurdly huge margins. Probably not the Senate either, and even if they do eventually it'll be after another Rand Paul filibuster that will further expose how public support for this intervention hovers at right around nil. Since he's said he has the power to go without Congressional authorization he's created for himself a potential constitutional crisis for no good reason, and one that really could and should get him impeached if he keeps being as wrong footed as he's been lately. It's a stunning example of total incompetence on his and his advisers' parts.

If I were Obama I may be wishing I'd lost reelection. But then I felt like that as my fraternity's scribe, so that may just be my temperament.

INvictus...there are no good rebels in the middle east. Good god...look at history, for crying out loud. All there are are groups that don't hate us as much as the next guy...and, morons that we are, we take that for friendship, when in truth they are using the infidel US to further their cause.

How many times do we have to arm the "friendly" rebels...only to have them turn those arms back on us....how many rebels must we train, only so that the tactics can be turned back against us down the road...before we understand that nation building just isn't our strength in the middle east....it doesn't align with the culture of middle eastern people's and their religion. That's not a dig on them...it's simply a truth about a people from a different world and a different way of living.

Arming ANY rebel is just stupid at this point.

Invi...as for "Egyptian style" revolution?? WTF?!? Dude...seriously...turn on the news. The "democracy" in Egypt is just another brutal military dictatorship, and the country is falling in to revolution. We should have left the strong dictator in place that was there...HE was keeping the region stable, at least, and freindly to us. We supported his ouster and now the region is destabilizing further, and our ally is now our near-enemy.

No thank...we sure as hell do NOT need another Egyptian-styla revolution. Good lord, man, stop drinking the media kool-aide...

"The "democracy" in Egypt is just another brutal military dictatorship, and the country is falling in to revolution."

It's not falling into revolution. The military looks like it's pretty soundly beaten the Muslim Brotherhood as an organization, and the people are not rising up against the military government. Probably because they see what's going on in Syria and don't want to unleash all that.


" We should have left the strong dictator in place that was there...HE was keeping the region stable, at least, and freindly to us."

Support an octogenarian dictator who had no clear successor? We were totally right to back Mubarak's ouster when it became inevitable. There was no alternative and this way we were in a position to influence the new regime, which we still do. Not as much as we used to, but more than we would if we had propped up Mubarak for a few more years till he inevitably died and then had to deal with the chaos.


But anyway, I don't think you see my point. An Egypt-style revolution would have preserved the Syrian state. Surely even the far from optimal situation in Egypt is better than the anarchy in Syria now? If the Syrians had been able to swap out Assad without causing the state to collapse as it has then there would be real hope for the future. Since they didn't there isn't.

leaning toward krellin here, but then again trying a diplomatic solution couldn't hurt even if it is far fetched.

Have to say I don't get what the pro-interventionists think they want out of this. Well, McCain we know he wants war all the time, every time, but for normal people, I mean. It really gets me that the "human rights" pushing hawks who want bombs dropped in Syria are some of the same ppl so freaked out about drones.

Is there a pro-interventionist in this thread?

just say'n

Oh, as for rebels, just look into what the protests and rebellion against Assad was like in the very early days. They were exactly the people we always say we want to support, but they didn't get enough help and were sidelined by Islamists with Gulf oil money.

like I said, why not give diplomacy a chance, even if it is far fetched.

It's not far-fetched. It's impossible. Islamist rebels will not stop fighting because the secularists we pretend still have real influence sign a power-sharing agreement in Geneva.

Well, invict, why is it you think responsibility falls on the US at all times to take part in civil wars?

"Is there a pro-interventionist in this thread?"

you apparently

Read what I write. I'm against intervention.

You're sore that the US didn't provide military aid to the protestors in the beginning, is that what you're on about?

What about now then? This is now.