The Goat Pen

heh.

heh-heh.

Little clown cars, Perrier through a straw, speedos at the beach...sure I dig all that shit, but I'm all for attacking Syria too. So your little snark bite is a fail.

You may have the European taste for tiny cars, tiny houses, high taxes, the green party, and speedo's at the beach. But if you have the urge to grab your gun and go shoot a bad guy in another neighborhood that is no threat to you (dare I say it? "George Zimmerman-style"?) then you're still a red blooded Murkan after all.

Btw, if you look harder at those polls you will find the term "war weary Americans." Consider it a clue.

Europeans have been war weary and anti-interventionist since WWII (actually WWI).

War weary Americans? I doubt that. I think if there is a noble cause Americans would be in for the fight. I think the population is just wiser more than weary. To be honest, people will give lip service to how horrible they feel about the atrocities in Syria, but deep down they have learned that all factions of Arabs in the Middle East are nefarious and have no one to blame but themselves for any bad thing that happens to them. They have learned from the last ten years that there isn't any amount of military intervention short of total annihilation that will change anything. THey have also learned that there are many in Washington that are not out for the best interests of the country and that they can't believe what they say.

"Europeans have been war weary and anti-interventionist since WWII (actually WWI)."

I guess the 100 Years War wasn't enough for them...

They have learned from the last ten years that there isn't any amount of military intervention short of total annihilation that will change anything.

Thin the herd!

Well I for one support the president in attacking whoever used the gas. I say whoever because I think there is just as good a chance that the rebels did it as Assad. Whoever it is, I agree he should do something about it.

Why? Because he has already made the threat and we can't make empty threats and that was a brutal attack.

I don't agree with him getting congress involved because I see that as just a way to blame someone else when it goes bad. That's his MO.

I do think we should get the right ones and I hope we have some people honest enough to do the right thing instead of the thing that helps the emperor the most.

hedge wrote:"Europeans have been war weary and anti-interventionist since WWII (actually WWI)."

I guess the 100 Years War wasn't enough for them...

100 Years War, WWI, WWII, the Defenestration of Prague - the result is Europeans are now extremely anti-interventionist. They even had a full-blown genocide going on in their own back yard (Bosnia), and didn't do anything to stop it except issue tersely worded press releases.

There wouldn't be any Bosnians left on earth today if Clinton hadn't gotten all Murkan on the Serbs.

Well I for one support the president in attacking whoever used the gas. I say whoever because I think there is just as good a chance that the rebels did it as Assad. Whoever it is, I agree he should do something about it.

Why? Because he has already made the threat and we can't make empty threats and that was a brutal attack.

I completely understand the emotional impulse. But should we attack every brutal dictatorship in the world every time they kill 1,000 of their own citizens? If so, we'll need air traffic control satellites just to keep the swarms of American cruise missiles criss-crossing the globe from running into each other.

Darfur?

Professor Tiger wrote:

Well I for one support the president in attacking whoever used the gas. I say whoever because I think there is just as good a chance that the rebels did it as Assad. Whoever it is, I agree he should do something about it.

Why? Because he has already made the threat and we can't make empty threats and that was a brutal attack.

I completely understand the emotional impulse. But should we attack every brutal dictatorship in the world every time they kill 1,000 of their own citizens? If so, we'll need air traffic control satellites just to keep the swarms of American cruise missiles criss-crossing the globe from running into each other.

No but when the president speaks it should mean something, regardless if I agree with him or not. He made a threat, he needs to follow through with it otherwise our other enemies will know he won't follow through.

Now he needs to get the right people, and I'm not convinced the rebels aren't the ones that used the chemical weapons. They had the most to gain by doing so, and they wouldn't blink an eye killing children, it's what they do.

No but when the president speaks it should mean something, regardless if I agree with him or not. He made a threat, he needs to follow through with it otherwise our other enemies will know he won't follow through.

Peggy Noonan (who should have been Mrs. George Will) comments on this line of reasoning in

Why America Is Saying 'No'

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... on_LEADTop

There is the issue of U.S. credibility. We speak of this constantly and in public, which has the effect of reducing its power. If we bomb Syria, will the world say, "Oh, how credible America is!" or will they say, "They just bombed people because they think they have to prove they're credible"?

We are, and everyone knows we are, the most militarily powerful and technologically able nation on earth. And at the end of the day America is America. We don't have to bow to the claim that if we don't attack Syria we are over as a great power.

Are North Korea and Iran watching? Sure. They'll always be watching. And no, they won't say, "Huh, that settles it, if America didn't move against Syria they'll never move against us. All our worries are over." In fact their worries, and ours, will continue.

Any attack on Syria may have unforeseen and/or adverse consequences. Here are a couple:

1. If we don't kill Assad (and we already said we won't even try that), we will make him a hero in the Middle East and in the world's dictator club. Rather than deterring another chemical attack, a half-hearted US attack may make other thugs want to use their WMD's and survive the wimpy American response so that they too can wear the "Honk if you survived am American drone attack" t-shirt.

2. If we attack Assad, that will not end the matter. Assad and his surrogates will certainly retaliate on us and our allies. How will we respond to, say. a chemical attack on Riyadh by Hezbollah? Probably another cruise missile attack, followed by another Syrian retaliation. Maybe supertankers in the Straits of Hormuz start running into mines. The tit-for-tat between us and them will become precisely the new, long war in the Middle East that nobody wants.

Big Orange Junky wrote:Well I for one support the president in attacking whoever used the gas. I say whoever because I think there is just as good a chance that the rebels did it as Assad. Whoever it is, I agree he should do something about it.

Why? Because he has already made the threat and we can't make empty threats and that was a brutal attack.

I don't agree with him getting congress involved because I see that as just a way to blame someone else when it goes bad. That's his MO.

I do think we should get the right ones and I hope we have some people honest enough to do the right thing instead of the thing that helps the emperor the most.

I guess not all Americans have become wiser...

America loves war. Keeps the economy moving.

[youtube]xuUBCF3KKxc[/youtube]

AlabamAlum wrote:Darfur?

Throw in Rwanda. And the sort-of-ongoing Congo War that's killed more people than any other war since WWII. Total amount of US intervention there: next to nothing

I know, and it's shocking. Yet this admin and the ones previous won't even give it a mention. If we want to be policemen, we have some much better targets than the ones we have chosen over the last 20 years.

You want to see pics of dead kids, Darfur makes the Syria stuff look amateurish.

What's also bizarre and hypocritical is that if Assad had simply lined up 1,000 people and shot them execution style, we would have had no problem with that and there'd be no call to intervene, just like the previous 2 years.

This country was founded on genocide, I can't see why people are getting upset now when other countries are doing it, unless it's some kind of national guilty conscience trying to appease itself...