US involvement in Syria is hypocritical, not moral

Editor,

We all feel morally outraged over war crimes. And dilemmas arise as to how to stop them. How do we somehow ‘punish’ just the perpetrators without perpetrating more death and destruction on innocent people ourselves?

Many politicians have facile answers for this question, falling under the irrational, hit-or-miss rubric of ‘better to do something than nothing’ — a rationale in which credibility carries much more weight than morality.

Al-Assad is a ruthless dictator. But the U.S. inflicting more deaths on the Syrian people, however limited the strike, will not end the civil war and, in fact, may only fan its flames. Syria is not Nazi Germany. Its war does not have all the non-sectarian, pro-democratic good guys on one side and all the genocidal bad guys on the other — no more than the Iraqi or Afghan wars did.

Most Americans are against any military intervention in Syria. We are tired of war and policing the world for dubious underlying motives. There would be no more interest in the Syrian civil war than in any of the many recent African civil wars, with equal atrocities, if the ‘stability’ of an oil-rich region wasn’t a factor.

So let’s not confuse interests that are ultimately economic or geopolitical, such as Iranian-Israeli tensions, with moral ones.

If the issues were truly moral, there would be more outrage at the hundreds of civilians and children killed by Obama-ordered drone strikes in the region and elsewhere, according to Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute.

A U.S. military strike will not end the Syrian civil war nor make the Middle East more stable or democratic. There will be no Arab hearts and minds won, and Israel and Iran will still be committed to each other’s destruction. It will be an ineffective, hypocritical and deadly gesture. And, in fact, that’s the way most Americans and the rest of the world see it. We just need our politicians to stand with us.

Chuck Gasparovic
Daily Lobo reader