April 17, 2018--Fallout

I have been hearing from angry friends all morning. They are angry with me, actually most are furious with me for agreeing with the likes of Ann Coulter, criticizing the weekend missile strike in Syria.

One said, "So it's OK with you to let Assad get away with using poison gas to kill his people? Did you see those videos of children, babies gasping for their last breath as they vomited and soon died? I can't believe you wouldn't agree with using a targeted missile strike against his chemical weapons facilitates."

"The strike appeared to turn out well." I agreed, "We seem to have managed to avoid killing any Russians. If we had, who knows where this would have led."

"You're avoiding the issue," my friend pressed on, "Even in warfare there are rules and conventions. Combatants agree not to torture prisoners, engage in ethnic cleansing, or, in this case, not use chemical or biological weapons. There is the Geneva Convention that spells out a lot of this. I can't believe you would have not done anything. What Assad did was barbaric."

"I agree with that too," I tried to say. "I even agree with Trump that Assad is a monster. The last I read, he presided over the slaughter of about 600,000 of his own people. Hundreds of thousands more have been crippled and millions have become refugees."

"And, so, if it was up to you you'd stand back and watch this happen?"

"Though I wouldn't put it quite this way, I must admit I probably would. I would not get involved in what's happening on the ground in Syria, that godforsaken place, any more than I was in favor of invading Iraq or, for that matter, getting involved in Vietnam. Where more than 58,000 of our young people were killed, hundreds of thousands more wounded, and at the end of the day we lost the war. Haven't we learned anything from behaving like the world's policeman?"

"But a tyrant deploying poison gas on his own people is not only against the rules of war--what a concept, war having rules--but monstrous."

"I don't know how to put this," I said, "but what's the difference between using gas to kill babies and blowing them up with conventional weapons? Hideous barrel bombs full of shrapnel is seemingly the weapon of choice in Syria for Assad's air force. This is monstrous too so why not, using your logic, go after his air force and the factories where barrel bombs are assembled?"

"I can't believe your lack of anger or passion about this," my friend said.

"Maybe I've gotten to be too old and seen too much evil in my lifetime. That could be what has made me appear to be inured to barbaric behavior of this kind. About that, guilty as charged. But, still, I am not insensitive to this nor am I seeing your distinctions between poison gas and fragmentation bombs, and I am not convinced it's a good idea for us to try to chase down all the Assads of the world. Sadly, there are too many of them and I don't think it's our role to go after all of them."

"There's a point to what you're saying, but complete hands off when there are holocasts going is also not acceptable. I don't know how to determine where to get involved and when to ignore evil behavior, but a version of America First, or anything that smacks of that is not acceptable to me and shouldn't be to you. I know you were a young boy during the Second World War and were aware even then of Hitler's regime--including how some in your family died in concentration camps--and in later years you knew about other atrocities, but you're opting out now is not attractive or, to me, acceptable."

"I love you a lot," I said, "And respect you. I'll have to do some more thinking about this. One thing I won't concede though--all of this is very complicated and can lead to a lot of hypocritical talk and behavior."