First of all, the
best thing I have read about Syria was this article:
I strongly
recommend reading it. It gives a great, high-level overview of the various
factors in play. What I want to talk about though is the information in section
8, on why lines are drawn over chemical weapons, and if it makes sense.
I'm going to also
link to the Wikipedia article on the Geneva Conventions, which also links to the Hague Conventions and
the Geneva Protocol, which is actually where the bio-chemical issue came up:
There is a paradox
here that is hard to work around. Part of how you get world wars is alliances
between other countries; if one gets into trouble, it pulls the others in.
These alliances can also be agreements to not attack each other, and to treat
each other well.
So, it is entirely
understandable that people who had been horrified by what the chlorine gas did
at Ypres, and seeing that these weapons did more to terrorize
civilians than it did to move the conflict closer to resolution one way or the
other, would decide that it is reasonable to ban these weapons. It is
reasonable, except then when you have someone violating it, then everyone who
agreed it was bad is supposed to go to war.
That sounds bad,
but you were already in a world of paradox when you set rules for humane war.
My soldiers will kill your soldiers if we can, but then if they surrender we
have to take good care of them. Being cruel to prisoners is evil, so that's
valid, but it's still not exactly satisfying.
We probably feel
best about World War II. The Holocaust needed to be stopped. However, if Hitler
had only been killing his own people, instead of moving into other countries,
would anyone have acted? Even with that, the US only joined in
after a personal attack. Therefore genocide happened in Darfur, and Cambodia, and Rwanda, and large scale
murder that might not technically be classified as genocide happens in China and Indonesia. You might see
prosecution in the Hague eventually, but
people don't really want to go to war for it.
And honestly,
killing to stop death sounds like a losing proposition. It can be that they
will kill more people than we will in order to stop it, or they are killing for
worse reasons than we would have, and that's not completely invalid, but still,
then we our losing our people to save theirs.
The problem when
you get into discussions like this is suddenly everything sounds ugly. That we
might care more about our soldiers than your civilians sounds petty, but
there's something to it. If the side that was starting it cared about the lives
on their side, that could really shrink the problem.
Sometimes we are
actually really effective. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, that crossed a
line, and it was resolved fairly quickly and easily, but much of the credit for
the international cooperation there goes to Kuwaiti oil fields, making that
matter more serious than chemical weapons being used on Kurds. There's some
ugliness there, and some ugliness in how responsible the Western world is for
the troubles in the Middle East and Africa based on
colonialism.
Another interesting
article I had read was from Laurie Penny, an English writer, after Cameron had
failed to gather the votes for intervention in Syria.
Her article focused
on the concern of an image problem, but that it's a false problem. They don't
have the moral high ground, and people are becoming too aware of that. That is
ultimately a good thing, but then what do you do? That for this specific
instance Assad appears to be willing to surrender his chemical weapons is a
miracle, and we should just be grateful for it.
On the question of
do we need to punish the use of chemical weapons so that other people know not
to use chemical weapons, I believe the answer is no. Anyone that you need to
worry about for that is operating on a level where they are not going to care
about what happened to the previous guy. Even if they do care, there are enough
examples of people getting away with it that the one that does face censure is
probably not going to make too much of an impression. That's the easiest
question; it all gets worse from there.
After that it
becomes "Do we care that terrible things are happening? Do we care enough
to put resources into it? Is it our job? Can we intervene without making things
worse? Can we get humanitarian aid distributed to the right people? And the
answers are often discouraging.
So, I guess that
makes this post really discouraging, and I feel bad about that, and about the
lack of answers for what to do about these things. North Korea's Kim Jong Un
starves his people and may have just executed a slew because his wife was
jealous of his ex-girlfriend. Anyone want to go in?
I think there is an
important point here, and I hope that will be the saving grace of this long and
meandering post. The fact that there are no easy answers gives me sympathy for
pretty much everyone, except for those who only criticize. There is that
partisan thing going on, and that Fox News thing, but John Stewart addressed
that pretty well, though I am not sure he gave John Kerry enough credit.
The other thing
though is that when you have so many conflicting valid points, it requires a
fairly sophisticated level of thinking. Anyone who is confident they know
exactly what is right is probably ignoring multiple things. We need to get less
comfortable with criticizing and more comfortable with critical thinking. We
need to be able to put aside our own egos, both to be willing to put other
needs above our own, but also to be able to accept that many things are beyond
our power. That's true for individuals, for nations, and for groups of nations
working together.
And, it requires
good information. So, just as a reminder...
" I get that Fox
opposes the Syria peace plan because its modus operandi is to foment dissent in
the form of a relentless, irrational contrarianism to Barack Obama and all
things Democratic to advance its ultimate objective of creating a deliberately
misinformed body politic whose fear, anger, mistrust and discontent is the
manna upon which it sustains its parasitic, succubus like existence, BUT... sorry,
I blacked out for a second I was saying something?"
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