Meanwhile, in the Refugee Crisis (Not posting this as a call for intervention)

[Mass]

It is just that, in fiery discussions about policies, too often the humans who are the subjects of these discussions are summarily dismissed if they do not help the arguments.

So,

http://prospect.org/article/meanwhile-refugee-crisis

Two million refugees from Syria. The figure was announced last week and easily missed amid headlines about the Tomahawks that would or would not be fired at targets dear to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Refugees are less dramatic than cruise missiles, less dramatic even than wrangling about a Security Council resolution on Syria's poison-gas arsenal.

Yet the exodus from the civil war-torn country represents a humanitarian crisis no less stark, a moral demand no less pressing, than the use of chemical weapons. It is a crisis which has policy responses that do not involve bombs, that do not require a debate about America and Europe re-entering the Middle East's wars. They do, however, demand spending money and a willingness to take in refugees on a new and much larger scale. In the end, these costs pale in comparison to the costs of war.

Two million refugees, in truth, is a careful understatement. It's the number of Syrians who have registered as refugees with the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR), or whom the UNHCR has counted as "awaiting registration." The agency only uses the term refugee for people who left their country. It acknowledges its tally may be low. For instance, UNHCR lists 730,00 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. The Lebanese government's estimate is 1 million. And then, to the refugee figures, add 4.25 million Syrians described by the United Nations as "displaced"—people who have fled their homes but are still inside Syria. Let's make this simpler: Think of a country, your own country perhaps, and then think about more than a quarter of its people uprooted by civil war to another town or another country.

...

None of this will make much difference to those Americans who see America's interests and moral obligations as stopping at the shore. Those with a more progressive view of the world could pause in the debate about military invention in Syria. If you oppose the use of arms, surely providing aid and refugee visas on a new scale are a necessary alternative. If you support the use of force, surely much larger humanitarian intervention must complement it.

[Daniel537]

1. Not our problem.

At least that's what some so-called progressives like Alan Grayson and Dennis Kucinich say. If people really believe this is not our problem and we have no business interfering, then they should hold steady to those views and oppose any kind of humanitarian aid as well.

[Bluenorthwest]

2. We should have been assisting the refugees all along, and that's where

all of our efforts should go. The United States should be the World's EMS not the world's Police. We should proactively assist anywhere we can, in anyway that the local people ask. The bulk of our defense budget should go toward that, because making friends is the best defense against making enemies.
Help the displaced people. Help the people who are not displaced. Kill no one.
Save many. Become popular as hell.