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Main Paineframe posted:Here's the thing. I'm not defending Obama at all. My perspective is that if he wanted to conduct effective foreign policy, he should have pretended the Syrian Civil War never happened, rather than repeatedly sticking his finger in and then yanking it out again as his common sense wrestled with his personal desire to get involved. If he wanted to be a moral and humanitarian president who did good by Arab civilians, he probably shouldn't have spent most of his term bombing Arab civilians and spreading chaos throughout the Middle East. His Syria policy was poor, with many mistakes that his advisers often had to talk him down from. However, his mistake was that he got involved at all. I see no way an American intervention in Syria in 2012 could have resulted in lasting peace. The US is simply politically incapable of taking the steps that would have been necessary for a lasting Syrian peace, and Obama could have done little to change that even if he were inclined to. This is my position. You guys are basically admitting that the best-case scenario of direct US intervention to remove Assad is a bloody, protracted civil war that ends up killing a lot of people, but likely far fewer people than what we ended up doing. I don't even buy that it would be that successful, but let's roll with it. Well, in that alternate history, you don't have a comparison point to say "even more people would have died if the US didn't get involved." The worldwide interpretation is that Obama's intervention in Syria led to greater destabilization of the region, an extended civil war, a lot of death, and a power vacuum filled by Islamist militants. Sounds familiar. For both domestic and international perceptions of the US, the correct choice was always to stay away from loving with the government. That includes not leading the FSA/etc. on and leaving them hanging. Even if US intervention saved thousands of Syrian lives, the blame for the lives still lost would be increasingly directed back to the US.
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Mar 12, 2016 21:12
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Squalid posted:icantfindaname, you have 1) said in this thread that Obama did not intervene in 2012, and that Obama's Syria policy has been one of complete "inaction"(I'm paraphrasing your third post itt) I don't agree with them either, but this is a strawman, even if "complete inaction" was hyperbolic.
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Mar 13, 2016 19:44
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"Responsibility to protect" is not an obscure idea in foreign policy. Take some time. http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/adviser/responsibility.shtml If you're interested in the most ethical solution, strict isolationism definitely isn't that. It is rather clear that the US trips on this in both directions — obvious cases where the US ignores crimes against humanity, and obvious cases where the US interferes with the sovereignty of with legitimate governments — but international intervention in either Libya or Syria is not and was not at all difficult to justify. US foreign policy has sucked in many different ways; when overthrowing oppressive governments universally condemned by the international community happens to align with US interests, that's one of the few times you shouldn't be making GBS threads on US military action.
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Mar 14, 2016 02:00
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