Et in terra pax redux

I might be for it if I thought we knew what we were doing.

The videos that came out of Syria following the chemical attack are horrifying, and yes—I think it’s more likely than not that it was the Syrian army, and not the rebels, who launched the attack. Why? Well, all three strikes were in rebel strongholds. As well, it’s apparently not so easy to carry out a chemical attack—either to make the agents or fire them.

And the Syrian government has, as Kerry pointed out, been reluctant to let the areas affected be inspected, which you would assume it would if they had nothing to hide.

So why am I not all for bombing the hell out Syria?

Well, apparently Syria has the third largest amount of chemical weapons in the world. And where is all that stuff? And even if we knew two weeks ago exactly where everything was, what happens if somebody moved it? And then we bombed it?

That said—what are we going to do? Fire a few missiles at army installations? Bomb the presidential palace? Take out infrastructure?

And when is enough enough? What’s our exit strategy—or are we going to improvise again, as we did / are doing in Afghanistan and Iraq?

And if we do a regime change—what will replace it? One commentator from an Al Jazeera program pointed out that none of the rebel groups are particularly friendly to the West—so is there any reason to get involved?

We may think that we can’t be more despised in the region than we already are, but guess what? We can, and will be. Go on YouTube and enter “Syria chemical attacks” and what you’ll see is chilling. About half are legitimate news clips—the other half (and by no means the least watched) are home-made affairs with titles like “Leaked Documents—U.S. Framed Syria in Chemical Weapons Attack.”

Then there’s the interesting question—over 100,000 people have been killed, and last week’s atrocity? The highest estimate I read was over 3,000. Yes, it is heinous for a government to gas its people. But the West has sat around and watched Syrians kill each other for two long years, now. If we had a moral obligation to act, shouldn’t we have done so a long time ago?

It’s true that using chemical weapons is a particularly barbaric way of killing—it’s indiscriminate, for one thing, which is why so many women and children were victims. But the same might be true with bombs—and especially in civilian areas.

And it might be the case that the world needs to do something—just as we needed to do something in Kosovo. What saddens me is that a response may be justified, but the American people, to say nothing of the rest of the world, have seen enough posturing about chemical weapons—remember that vial of white powder (supposedly anthrax) in Colin Power’s hands? Now, when there really is a chemical attack, the world is too suspicious, and too weary, to respond.

“Why in the world would anybody bother to fight over that land,” my mother used to wonder, looking at some godforsaken desert on television and comparing it to her lush Wisconsin woods.

Why indeed?