>
> On Sep 5, 2013, at 2:25 PM, Marv Gandall wrote:
>
>> On 2013-09-05, at 11:44 AM, Dennis Redmond wrote:
>>
>>> The world can and should take out Assad's aircraft and Scud
>>> missiles…
>>>
>> "The world"???
>>
>
> DR's world is entirely populated by videogame players (wannabe drone
> pilots), avatars, and icons.
>
No fantasy here, just years of research, fact-checking and tracking citizen journalism. The fact is that the Assad regime -- a brutal Alawite dictatorship -- has killed 100,000 of its own citizens, blasted Homs, Aleppo, Daraa, suburban Damascus, and hundreds of smaller cities and towns into smithereens, turned 2 million Syrians into refugees, and murdered hundreds of women and children with chemical weapons:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPC0Udeof3T4NORTjYmPoNCHn2vCByvYG That qualifies for measured UN intervention in my book (not occupation, but airstrikes to take out regime aircraft and missiles).
As far as endgames go, some history: (1) Syria is not Afghanistan. It is heavily urbanized, majority literate, and has a well-developed sense of national identity. This is totally unlike Afghanistan, which was largely rural and split by language and ethnicity. (2) The Assad regime has been losing the war to the Free Syrian Army (FSA), and currently controls less than half the country. (3) The regime would have fallen this summer, except for the fact that Nasrallah deployed Hezbollah's militia to support the Assad regime six months ago, in what historians of the Middle East will undoubtedly record as the single most unwise decision by any Arab leader, ever. Hezbollah did manage to occupy a small Sunni town, al-Qusair, in May, but paid a frightful price in cadres and material.
One last point: post-revolutionary Libya has its troubles, but it is making progress. It is not sliding into chaos and civil war. It has the low-level violence and endemic corruption typical of numerous industrializing societies, e.g. urban Brazil. But many of the young people who defeated Qaddafi have become civil society activists. Unions are taking root, strikes are now legal and occur frequently, and the independent media is flourishing.
-- DRR