Secretary Kerry to speak LIVE on CSpan1 at 2EDT/11PDT...

[Mass]

18. What GD says really does not matter!

And no, there is no peaceful way to solve the crisis. So, really, there are a few questions that need to be asked, and no,I do not have the answers, just the questions:

- How many dead people before the Western nations decide to intervene. Asking because, as bad as the situation in Syria is, there are areas of Africa that are a lot worse and people are not calling to do anything?
- What constitute an act worth intervening? I think the major error that Obama has made here is to draw a red line. I understand there are international laws and that these laws prohibit chemical weapons, but the truth is that these laws are largely antiquated and that we have weapons at our disposal that will now allow to kill a lot more people. With planes, we have had these tools for a very long time and we have used them again and again. Does 2000 people killed really make a difference when there were already about 100,000 killed.


-More difficult: Western governments have encouraged the Middle East to look for democracy. When it turns against them because they are opposed to brutal dictators (and let be clear, whether Al Quaeda is responsible for this latest attack or whether Assad is, Assad is a brutal dictator and responsible for many of the Syrian death), is it moral for those who pushed these revolts to sit there and do nothing?
As you can see, the ethics side pushes me to intervention.

However, there are other issues at play here, and many of them have to do with unintended consequences. It is dramatically unclear that any action short of having boots on the ground would do anything. I hear that the administration is considering limited strikes. It is unclear how it will affect Syria. Can we avoid killing more civilians? If we do nothing, on the other hand, does this mean we do not care about the Syrian people. Those are thought provoking questions and they are worth asking, rather than rehashing the same old complaints.

For the rest, WTF care. Some idiots will go back to the IWR. So what.
He did not come across as " let's bomb there". At least not in the speech. Read it. BTW, explain to me what peaceful options? I think the premise of the speech is flawed (see my previous point), but I do not see how any reasonable person would not see it as balanced, which is probably why it gets so much flack. Neither side felt comfortable with it.
No, the Syrian people have done nothing to us. This is beside the point. I guess your point is that we should let themselves kill each other. For the record, do you think Clinton should have intervened in Rwanda before he did? Did the Rwandan people do something to us?

For the rest, I do not think there are many people who criticize Kerry who think Obama is not behind Kerry. There may be a few deluded people, but they just come out as stupid.
One last point. As wisteria says, it may be just a way to try to get at the Syrian govt. The point is that diplomacy cannot work if you have no leverage and, when it comes to Syria, there is none if we take the military action off the table.

So, really, Kerry is not the problem here. Rice could have made the same speech. Powers too. Something tells me that, left to themselves, both of them would have been less restrained because they believe in humanitarian interventionism a lot more than Kerry does. It may indeed be why Kerry was chosen for the speech which clearly was not for the crowd but for some people.

The real question is whether we can reform foreign policy or whether we have to live under the premises created by the Clinton crowd and the neo-cons: preach democracy without taking care of the consequences (read Atkins downthread).