There is nothing more unifying for a nation of nationalists than the great prospect of war...

[NuclearDem]

33. I know your heart's in the right place.

But military intervention isn't going to help.

I know it hurts to see this happening, and I completely understand wanting to do anything that might make it stop, but military intervention is at best not going to help, and at worst, exacerbate the situation.

What's happening in Syria is another chapter in the long sad history of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East; European decolonization ignorantly placing groups that hate each other together and hoping for the best, the legacy of the US and USSR inserting themselves in the region during the Cold War, and tensions between the Gulf Arab states and Iran coming to a head.

We wanted Egypt to remain stable temporarily and we ended up with Hosni Mubarak's 30 year state of emergency. We wanted to stabilize the global oil market, and we ended up with the Saudi monarchy. We wanted to keep Afghanistan out of the USSR's hands, and we ended up with al-Qaeda. When we decide to intervene in the Middle East through military support, someone ends up paying dearly for it 10, 20, 30 years down the line.

What we can do is push for the president and Congress to provide humanitarian aid for the refugees fleeing Syria. Do what we actually can to keep innocent people safe. Syria isn't our fight, and if we choose to make it so thousands more innocent people will die down the line from the blowback.