The Scandal of Syria

[unhappycamper]

http://fpif.org/scandal-syria/



Will the Responsibility to Protect doctrine — which is an international consensus and not a unilateral U.S. foreign policy — be one of the many casualties of the conflict in Syria? Can something be done to help the people of that benighted country?

The Scandal of Syria
By John Feffer, February 19, 2014.

Olivia Pope wears the white hat. Or, as fans of the TV show Scandal know, she desperately wants to believe that she wears the white hat. Olivia Pope is a Washington fixer. She has assembled a team of “gladiators” who do whatever necessary — bending the law, breaking the law, tearing the law into tiny little shreds — to defend the “good guys.” But Olivia Pope, despite her name, is not infallible. Her original sin was complicity in a vote-rigging scandal to get her presidential candidate (and secret lover) elected. The Garden of Eden of the Founding Fathers is long gone. Pope and her fiercely loyal disciples live in a fallen world where even the racial politics are not black and white.

Scandal is all about the perennial American desire to right the wrongs of the world and claim the mantle of savior. Combine American pragmatism with American messianic zeal and you get America the Fixer. But if power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, then you can imagine what happens in the new Rome of Washington, DC when the gladiators set out to fight the good fight: not much good comes of it. But unlike House of Cards, a world of murk lit only the Nietzschean will to power, the characters on Scandal believe that they are enacting a fundamentally religious drama of good versus evil. At the end of nearly every episode, they cling to the few battles they’ve won as evidence that their hats somehow remain unbesmirched in the mud fight of the DC power game.

Today we confront the fallen world of Syria. Is this House of Cards territory where ambition and revenge battle for supremacy and there is nothing to do but watch the horrors unfold before our eyes? Or do we believe that, despite our own original sins, we Americans can don the white hat and fix things in Syria?

Few dispute the horrors taking place in Syria. The numbers are staggering. The death toll has climbed above 140,000. Just consider what’s happened to the children of Syria. “More than one million children are now refugees,” writes Annie Sparrow in The New York Review of Books. “At least 11,500 have been killed because of the armed conflict, well over half of these because of the direct bombing of schools, homes, and health centers, and roughly 1,500 have been executed, shot by snipers or tortured to death.”

[customerserviceguy]

1. Our getting involved militarily in Syria

Would be as senseless as China getting involved in Europe 500 years ago, when Protestants and Catholics were killing and torturing each other. The Sunni-Shia fight most closely resembles that situation, in my opinion.