Fuck Assad, take him and his generals out.

[JoeyT]

231. I don't support intervention, but it's not due to opposition to

intervening on general principles: It's for multiple reasons.

#1a: We just got rid of a president that's a war criminal. We not only refuse to do anything about it, we actively shield him from any repercussion. His bullshit killed several orders of magnitude more than Assad's. So we don't have the moral high ground. That's not even counting the kidnappings and torture. It's our moral duty to prosecute our own war criminals, but we not only shirk it, we fight it with all our might. To the point of insisting that nothing we do could possibly be a war crime.

#1b: Also removing several points of grade from our moral high ground is our outright refusal to sign treaties that ban weapons the rest of the world considers just as bad as chemical weapons. Cluster bombs and mines, for example.

#2: We don't actually know who used chemical weapons. The only "evidence" we have is "Our super secret spy agency was told by someone else's super secret spy agency that they overheard a super secret phone conversation that proves Assad done it." I'm inherently suspicious of anyone that insists we totally trust that they know things we don't. That line didn't fly for me during Bush (Primarily because everyone knew he didn't know shit.), and it won't really work now.

#3: Making chemical weapons some magic Line That Shall Not Be Crossed implies that as long as you use bullets, knives, or explosives, you can kill as many people as you like and it's totally cool. Actually, given our refusal to intervene when bullets, knives(machetes), or explosives were being used to massacre people, it does a lot more than imply. There are very few good ways to die, and if someone that hates you is choosing your method, none of the ones they're going to pick are likely to be any better than any of the others.

We should probably be scaling back on some of that force dominance since we can't afford to provide food, healthcare, education, infrastructure, housing, or pretty much anything else to our most vulnerable citizens. Being the best in the world at projecting force is about as useful to most of our population as having a president that can light his own farts. Probably less so, since beans are relatively cheap.

If projecting force into this region costs the same amount as it would have cost to provide heating oil to 400 elderly people that otherwise might freeze to death, was projecting force really the moral thing to do?