The art of showing you pictures of babies killed in bombardments, so that the public will support another bombardment that will kill more babies whose pictures you won’t be shown.
I apologize for the cynicism, but I can’t think of an intervention, by the US or anyone else, since 1945 that did what it was supposedly going to do. Nor am I a fan of sitting by and watching when horrors are going on. There isn’t a good way to take the weapons away from the bullies without (a) triggering the deaths of thousands more people on both sides, and (b) rolling out a carpet for the very things the US professes to wish did not exist (civil war, djihadist governments, regional power-projection of Iran, China, you name it).
Want to support something? Support medical assistance to the population (Médecins du Monde is deeply engaged).
Representative discussion among people most of whom I would not dismiss as crazy or ignorant, here. I’d like to know how this is going down across the breakfast tables of America now.
It gets more complicated:
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/08/27/exclusive_us_spies_say_intercepted_calls_prove_syrias_army_used_nerve_gas
At least this makes responsibility more difficult to assign. Though ultimately governments have to be responsible for the weapons in their possession. I’m still no fan of boots on the ground or missiles in the air.
Thanks for the advice; providing health care services seems a little more like “humanitarian assistance” than does flinging WMDs at, say, chemical weapons storage facilities. Debate still going on here, “intelligence” services have issued a three page document purporting to “prove” Assad is the perpetrator, though the “proof” is said to be between seventy-five and eighty-five percent certain. And is based primarily on what they are calling “open” sources (i.e. anonymous and unverifiable rumor). The population is around seventy five percent against, though we know how malleable polls are.
Am about to read the link above, but the title alone reeks of attempts to justify the Universal Surveillance of Anyone arrogated to itself by the N.S.A., G.C.H.Q., U.S.A. and “U.K.”