If you thought that the reasons the Obama administration is contemplating attacking Syria was because they used chemical weapons to attack their own people and we as the moral guardians of the world could not allow that to happen, well, yeah, okay.
But there’s another reason, and it’s far more important.
A U.S. official briefed on the military options being considered by President Obama told the Los Angeles Times that the White House is seeking a strike on Syria “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”
“They are looking at what is just enough to mean something, just enough to be more than symbolic,” the official told the paper, giving credence to similar reports describing a limited military strike in the aftermath of last week’s alleged chemical weapons attack.
NBC News reported earlier this week that the administration would launch three days of missile strikes, while CNN cited a senior administration official saying that the White House wanted to conclude any action before the president departs for the G-20 summit next week.
It’s always about that. Forget the possibility of killing more civilians, forget intervening in a civil war, forget recruiting more kids for al-Qaeda, and forget uniting the various in-fighting factions in the Middle East against a common outside enemy. It’s all about looking butch on the playground.
http://youtu.be/rtrX9rZl-j4
Actually, I think he and his advisers painted themselves into a corner with the game-changer comments. And, to give Obama credit, I think this isn’t so much about how it looks to the John McCains at this time in his presidency as having the conviction that if something isn’t done to warn others about breaking the sacred pledge dating back to post-WW1 about the use of chemical weapons the dam will break. Having nuclear weapons stockpiled all over the world is scarier enough, but easily transported poison gas must be forbidden – still and forever. So a dab of bombing might just do it.
I realize I am only 65 🙂 but I have yet to see an occasion in my lifetime in which “a dab of bombing,” by itself, accomplished any legitimate military goal.* The targeted nation hunkers down, clears away the civilian dead and goes back to business as usual. You have to back bombing with forces on the ground. That’s not merely theoretical; that’s what has happened to the US every time our nation has tried just “a dab of bombing.”
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*This includes the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Everything I’ve read indicates that Japan was already prepared to surrender before those awful events.
Not even a teensy tiny little direct hit?