Bomb Syria.

Today, with the self-righteous blinders on our hindsight, we condemn Neville Chamberlin for his policy of "peace in our time" appeasement of Hitler.

This is unfair to Chamberlain, to a degree--because he was expressing the will of the English people at that time. World War I had exhausted the English and killed a generation of young men in the trenches of Europe. The last thing they wanted was another war. So they demanded peace at any price, at any sacrifice of anyone who wasn't English.

They paid an enormous price for their shortsightedness.

Now Assad isn't Hitler. Syria is a patch on the 3rd Reich powerhouse. The price of our standing aside will be lower than the price England paid, and Assad at his worst will murder far fewer people than Hitler did.

At the same time, however, the price of our involvement would also be a patch on the price England paid when it was eventually forced into WWII, kicking and screaming. At least they didn't roll over like puppy dogs, like the French did.

The real point of the comparison is that the English were dead wrong in 1938 and didn't realize it.

America's doves-on-Syria are equally wrong. Their efforts to minimize what Assad is doing, to claim we can't tell whether the other side didn't really do it, to say it's none of our business, are all--for the most part--efforts to rationalize an unwillingness to expend any of our treasure to save the lives of people-who-are-not-us.

The far Right are at once hawkish and isolationist. This isn't a paradox, because both are consistent with being tribal. And Syrian women and children aren't included in what they see as our tribe. As good tribalists they're unable to empathize with innocent civilians who aren't part of our tribe, and we haven't been attacked, so their hawkishness isn't triggered.

Plus many of them are sufficiently racist that they're inflamed with a permanent, seething rage at that Uppity Negro in the White House. If he's for it they're against it--almost without regard to anything else.

The far Right are pacifistic. It's amazing to see their moralistic posturing against the American government for thinking of attacking one of the worst governments on Earth--while letting that Worst Government off the hook--is truly amazing. These people are not isolationist. In fact they tend to downplay the importance of national sovereignty--they believe we should give Mexican citizens American citizenship practically for the asking, because the Mexicans are poor and suffering.

Well the Syrians are poorer and suffering vastly more. But it will take acts of war to save those suffering Syrians.

Which means that for the Far Left, others' suffering doesn't matter if it would require action by our armed forces to right the wrongs involved.

This is simply cowardice.

The people who oppose hammering the Syrian government say the President hasn't thought through the potential consequences, which are unpredictable. But they aren't fully unpredictable. Russia isn't going to go to war with us over this because they possess a grossly inferior military establishment relative to ours. We would do to them what they did to Georgia. Syria isn't going to declare war on us, any more than they declared war on Israel when Israel took out missle shipments headed for Hezbollah.

We can't predict who will win this three-way civil war in Syria. But we can predict what will happen if we do nothing, given that Syria is being actively supported by Russia and Iran and the rebels don't have what they'd need to shoot down the government's choppers and jets or take out its tanks.

Right now the Russians are running their mouths about America's weakness. That isn't reason enough to start shooting, but it is a factor that will come into play in other situations. The notion that we're a paper tiger tends to make other governments misunderstand what America can do when sufficiently roused. But you have to use your warmaking power least when others are most convinced you will use it where you say it's important to you.

Both action on Syria and inaction over Syria have long-term consequences. The pity is that we're now suffering the long-term consequence of the previous Republican administration's military recklessness and arrogance. That consequence will go on for decades. This is not, however, an excuse for America withdrawing to our borders and telling the world to go hang itself. Which it will without the moral and physical force of the world's most powerful country continuing its thankless but necessary--for US--role of World's Cop.

As for Syria, America is the world's Shabbas Goy

Around the world, nobody civilized wants Syria's dictator to be allowed to murder over 100,000 innocent civilians--thousands with nerve gas.

And around the world, nobody civilized wants their government to go to war with Syria to stop the dictator and his allies.

And around the world, nobody civilized wants to ask America to stop this mass murder of civilians.

They want America to stop the mass murder without the world's permission.

It's a win-win. You get to demonstrate against the hated Big Bully of the World while America does the unpleasant, deadly work without which Syria's dictator will never stop--not as long as anyone is left alive in Syria who opposes him.

Meaning that America is the world's Shabbas Goy.

In strict Orthodox Judaism, from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday, you aren't allowed to do secular things like turning on the AC or the radio or getting takeout from the Chinese-To-Go place on the corner. But you can let a Goy (non-Jew) do it for you. But only if you don't ask him. He has to guess what you want, because asking him would break the rule.

That's us. War is so horrible. And Europeans know this from millennia of wars fought on every square foot of European soil, over and over and over. The last war fought on American soil (apart from Oahu and the Aleutians) was 150 years ago, and it's still being refought on the downlow by the revanchist Southerners who are now the hard core of the Tea Party and hence of the GOP--in part because it was on their soil that the war was fought. No real wars have ever been fought in the state I live in, not since the dawn of history. So for me the Civil War is a history book thing--especially since I don't see blacks as The Other.

Imagine what it's like for the Euros. Practically every sizeable plot of arable land could have a plaque commemorating some battle or other--maybe a bunch.

And of course Syria is a very tricky situation with more than two sides. You've got the Sunni majority pitted against everyone else (mostly Shiites and related sects). You've got the educated and the middle class and probably a solid majority of Syrians who want a secular democracy--at least as secular as Turkey's. You've also got Islamist militants who want a theocracy couple with exterminating Christianity and the Shiite branch of Islam in Syria. You've got the Christian minority who are terrified of a post-dictator Syria treating them like post-Saddan Iraq has.

You've also got the bad reputation the Republicans gave America with their trillion dollar (over time) invasion and occupation of the country that hadn't attacked us, based on trumped-up charges and an activist but incurious President telling the world "Trust us." In addition you've got the same administration's incompetent, attention-deficit mishandling of Afghanistan. All within the last decade or so.

And the world has mass murder and mayhem going on elsewhere as well--the Eastern Congo, Sudan, China's stealthy ethnicide of the nation of Tibet. Though weapons of mass destruction aren't being used anywhere else to my knowledge.

At any rate anyone around the world who opposes American intervention in Syria can give a lot of reasons for waving placards and denouncing those Warmonger Americans.

I'm sure Dr. Assad the Ophthalmologist is touched by all the support he's getting. If you look at the demonstrations around the world you'd think it was the Americans who were dropping nerve gas on thousands of noncombatants including small children. This is eased by the fact that the murdered civilians aren't Europeans, aren't Anglo Whites. They're Muslim, so they're part of the vast Other whose lives and deaths appear not to be very meaningful to most Rich World inhabitants.

But in the last analysis I think a majority of the rich world's populations want us to stop Assad from using WMDs and then blame us for whatever we do to accomplish that--even if killing a hundred civilians saved 10,000 lives that would otherwise have been lost.

Best quote from the Sunday talk shows today

About the Republicans clamoring for President Obama to go to Congress about whether we should strike Syria over its use of WMDs:

"The dog has caught the car."
        --David Axelrod

However, that said, I worry that President Obama may not be familiar with the principles of war as laid out by Von Clausewitz, the 19th century Prussian officer who's still the most-quoted military scientist in the war colleges.

And I think Von Clausewitz would say that "proportionate" strikes are useless. What's useful is DISproportionate strikes. If our strike hammered every major fixed installation Syria's government has got--took out its air defense system, cratered every one of its airfields, took out every chopper and airplane they've got that's findable, and much more. The nice thing about attacking a country instead of a nongovernment operator like Al Qaeda is that every national government has lots of fixed assets that are much easier to target.

That said, politically speaking, however the Republicans construe President Obama going to Congress as him blinking, him being weak yada yada--if they don't OK this strike they're going to be the ones who are American fries-eating surrender monkeys--contrary to the Republican Party's self image as the swaggering, macho tough guys.

And if they do OK this strike they can't blame him for the results afterwards, because they'll share in those results for better or for worse. Not to mention the fact the Republicans used WMDs as the pretext for invading another country and socking America with the trillion-dollar tab--and that little boo-boo is doubtless why the Brits refused to side with us this time around. A Republican administration made a mockery of America's credibility with the world, and we'll be playing the diplomatic price for that for decades.

Looks both the Republicans and Democrats are ignoring Von Clausewitz when they talk about Syria

GOP leaders are faulting the President for not being bold and decisive about Syria. I guess their model is Bush with Irag. Some model. Meanwhile the President is talking about a "measured response" to the Syrian dictatorship's ethnicidal efforts using war gases.

Republicans should remember that Von Clausewitz said never go to war until you get the people behind you. And the American people don't want us to get involved in Syria. I'm not saying they're right or wrong--just that if you do want to go to war, first you have to make sure of popular support. You don't have to make the argument after a Pearl Harbor or 9/11. You do when we haven't been attacked.

Democrats should remember that Von Clausewitz said if you do go to war, your first blow should be hard enough to flatten the enemy. War isn't a slap fight. That's why Bush's effort in Afghanistan was such a failure--he went in light, failed to get Bin Ladin, and while he decapitated the enemy regime in the capital, it had plenty of fight left, as the ensuing decade has shown.

I'm not saying a blow hard enough to impress Von Clausewitz would require a full invasion of Syria. But it would have to create "shock and awe" in the enemy.

Oh, and never make public threats you aren't willing to follow up on. Don't say something is unacceptable unless you mean it and act on that. Otherwise say something else.