Wow! The new slur against the anti-war faction on DU is "peace purists"

[Kelvin Mace]

58. *sigh*

Some people always seem to think that their little burst of violence is "justified" and certainly when you have a dictator using chemical weapons against his own people, it seems more than justified.

Here's the problem:

We are hardly in a position to make moral judgments in situations like this, especially since OUR hands are dirty.

1) We illegally waged wars of aggression based on laughable justification.

2) We have committed war crimes against civilian populations (torture, murder, kidnapping, false imprisonment). Currently we are STILL illegally detaining innocent people (cleared by law enforcement agencies and the military of any wrong doing) in the Guantanamo concentration camp

3) We have backed various dictators, including Syria's current regime, when it suited our political purposes (see also Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Vietnam, Panama, etc).

4) We are selling/supplying weapons to various factions around the world, including material that can be used for chemical/biological weapons.

5) We have been doing this for over a century.

We cannot spend decades causing problems, then solve them in a six week military campaign

Syria's problems are complex and cannot be unraveled by simple air strikes and giving guns to the rebels. In fact "simple" solutions will make the problem worse, and possibly bring us back into a confrontation with Russia.