The reasoning for the bombing is to discourage the use of chemical weapons, not “save the children”.
“US leaders” isn’t a single entity, it’s hundreds of people with their own drives and opinions. The US goes to war as a result of a debate and typically as part of a compromise (unless the cause is extremely clear-cut).
To show hypocrisy here, you need to catalog every US leader who currently supports action against Syria and determine their history of supporting combat action. And also you need to keep in mind that sometimes people change their minds over time, that’s not hypocrisy.
It’s the UN Security Council’s job. The problem is that currently Russia, a permanent member, will not support any action against Syria for various reasons, and so that’s a non-starter. Since the UN Security Council’s involvement is a non-starter, the US is considering action independent of it.
The other reality is that the US has the most capable and, for lack of a better word, civilized military in the world currently. When we get ourselves involved in actions like this, you can guarantee we’ll do everything we can to minimize casualties, we won’t break the established international rules of war, we’ll feed and take care of the civilians as much as possible, and we won’t annex the country afterward. None of those are true of Saudi Arabia.
The statement “the US is a world policeman” is a morally neutral one-it does not imply that the United States has always done the right thing in this role. And it is also apparent that the United States is morally speaking far better than any previous world superpower.
For the record I wouldn’t have supported most of the CIA-backed coups in the Cold War or the Vietnam and Iraq Wars.
Maybe the gas is the pretext, but they are all weeping and gnashing their teeth on tv because the gas killed a few hundred children, ignoring all the thousands of people killed by convential means in Syria means and the thousands of children killed in Darfur etc etc.
Leaders aren’t just politicians. Many of the talking heads on tv justifying the use of US military in Syria were around during the Rawanda genocide etc etc.
No US politician that I know of is calling for intervention in the Darfur situation ( or any of the African crises ), which continues to this day.
< we won’t break the established international rules of war, > Hmmmm. Isn’t a certain soldier incarcerated for 35 years for exposing US war crimes in Iraq ( not to get into Vietnam war- Pentagon Papers, My Lai etc ).
Perhaps it is time for the US government to have a referendum as to it’s role in the world.
Never heard of Pax Britannica. They didn’t do too badly ( notwithstanding that they also did some terrible things ). Banned slavery long before The USA for instance.
Gassing the Kurds wasn’t used as a pretext to invade Iraq.
If the US bombs Syria and kills Russians the potential for a much larger conflict exists.
Also, if Syria does retaliate against Israel the unintended consequences could be far more severe than doing nothing.
There are other ways to punish Assad ( if it can even be proven that he is responsible ) without starting WW3. Why doesn’t Obama use a drone strike to assassinate Assad if they are so great?
Yes, and we’d still be ignoring Syria if those children had been killed by conventional means instead. We’d still be gearing up for airstrikes if half as many Syrian kids had been gassed – and we’d still be Not Giving A Crap if double or triple or quadruple the number of Syrian kids had died on the right side of the red line.
Admittedly it makes the Nobel Peace Prize Committee look a little foolish but that’s not Obama’s fault. And given the winddown in Iraq and Afghanistan and the limited intervention in Libya, he could have done worse.
But I admit I’m stymied on the right course of action for the US with regard to Syria.
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Gassing the Kurds wasn’t used as a pretext to invade Iraq.
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Nope, it wasn’t. We sat back and did nothing while Saddam used WMD on his people.
:dubious: Any Russians who are hanging about the chemical weapons caches would be idiots if they didn’t understand the risk. And Russia isn’t going to deliberately provoke a conflict with the US. This is a ridiculous scenario.
If Syria retaliates against Israel for a US air strike then it will be on their head. It would also be extremely stupid for them to attack Israel for something we did.
Probably because Obama, or at a minimum Obama’s advisers are smarter than that. They know that in the current situation killing Assad (that is us killing Assad) won’t solve anything and will actually make the short term situation worse. The goal isn’t for us to kill Assad (we could do that with regular air or missile strikes, no drones needed), but instead to punish his use of chemical weapons against his own people. From what I’ve been reading the administration is planning a limited series of strikes to do this. We don’t WANT to shift the balance of power in this struggle, we simply want to punish Assad et al for their use of chemical weapons and make it clear that further such uses will not go unpunished.