Mr. Obama ignores Syria’s
renewed chemical attacks"There are, of course, many actions Mr. Obama could take to punish Syria for its use of chemical weapons and to prevent their further deployment. He could begin by granting the opposition’s request for antiaircraft missiles to use against the helicopters that are dropping chlorine bombs. He could revive his plan to launch U.S. military strikes against Syrian infrastructure that supports those attacks."
I used to think we should balance the answer between yes for option A (arming the rebels), and no for option B (airstrikes). But largely the arguments against B have been to prevent any option being discussed, which allows Assad's only airstrikes to continue. And I never seemed to get a straight answer about what would be wrong with strikes against Assad's airforce, just a mélange of possible consequences: it would put Syria's destiny in imperialist hands (untrue, and it is not as if Syria wasn't in destructive imperialist hands already), that you couldn't predict what the airstrikes would escalate to (untrue, as they were going to be no more than token anyway, because the Americans weren't interested in changing Syria, they weren't going to escalate to shit, a belief confirmed by there being no airstrikes at all, disproving the belief that anyone was dragging us into a war), that it would exacerbate sectarian tensions across the Middle East (it is the continuation of the régime that has done so). And so while I still don't tend to think that option B is the answer, I don't think it is the problem. The problem is that waiting for the US to take action of its own may wait until that action can do no real good. But what is most important in the argument about Syria is whether people support the right of the Syrian people to defend themselves. Millions of Syrians have risen in revolt, it isn't a tiny minority of revolutionaries whose desires need to be related to, but a people and a country whose immediate need is to be able to stop the rain of terror from the skies. Whether you are helping the Syrian situation depends on whether you are arguing for such empowerment, other differences are secondary.