Why Attacking Syria is a Really Bad Idea

Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a country full of goldfish cleverly disguised as humans. "Oh, the President is insisting weapons of mass destruction were used by some foreign, evil nation? Never heard that before!" "The media insists that war is the only solution to human rights violations? Must be true!" A goldfish does, after all, have a memory that only lasts three seconds. 

My evidence that I'm surrounded by goldfish is slightly stronger than the evidence that we should go to war with Syria because at least I can point to some variety of concrete evidence. The evidence in favor of war with Syria seems to boil down to little more than a claim that the President would never, ever lie to the American people about chemical weapons and intelligence agencies would never -- willfully or accidentally -- get their intelligence wrong. So I think I'm going to start taking my cues from the media, the government, and hundreds of Facebook postings and begin rabidly insisting that I am indeed surrounded by goldfish and screaming that anyone who disagrees is unpatriotic or blind to the overwhelming evidence. Before I completely detour into crazyland, however, let's take a look at something unfamiliar to most people who watch cable news -- facts, evidence, and basic reasoning skills:

We Know Assad Used Chemical Weapons

Actually, we don't know this at all. Secretary of State John Kerry asserted recently that the CIA has "high confidence" that Assad used chemical weapons against his own people. Sounds compelling, right? Don't get too excited. The CIA also had "high confidence" that Iraq had a weapons of mass destruction program.  When the inevitable march toward that war began, I was screaming that we couldn't trust the CIA, and I was right. 

I wasn't the only one screaming, though. Back in 2002, Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector, insisted that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction. The media's reaction was to openly mock him and treat him like a crazed conspiracy theorist.  They're doing the same now with congressional representatives who insist we need more evidence. I listened in horror as NPR treated a representative with utter contempt because he wanted to wait on the evidence.

This is all too familiar. I've heard people argue that 1,500 people died in one attack and that this necessarily means Assad used chemical weapons. That's only the case if you are also willing to argue that the U.S. routinely uses chemical weapons, because we regularly killed this number of people in single attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan. 

The UN inspectors have not yet completed their investigation into the use of chemical weapons in Syria, and several of our allies have specifically disavowed an attack as a viable option. Again, this is all too familiar. Have we literally learned nothing? 

But wait, you say. This administration is different. This administration can be trusted. It carefully monitors intelligence and is well-informed about the world. I've seen no evidence of this fact. Moreover, the Iraq quagmire was not an unfortunate accident. The CIA and the administration knew there were no WMDs in Iraq. 

But If There Were Chemical Weapons Used In Syria, We Need to Go to War

Pause for a second and ask yourself why Assad might be attacking his own people. Take a second to detach yourself from the media's obsession with driving us to war and abandon any unquestioning allegiance you have to what the government is telling you and really think. Why are there attacks in Syria? Because there is a war going on. 

War does not have a very good history of protecting people against violence. Whenever the media begins to point out human rights abuses in another country, it is a glaring sign that they are lobbying for a war. The citizens of this country have accepted the bizarre argument that human rights abuses necessarily require war and that war is the only way to restore human rights. The reality is that war is the cause of human rights violations. Does anyone really think that fewer Syrian civilians will die if the US attacks that country? 

The US Has a Moral Obligation to Defend Human Rights

This argument, of course, has a hidden premise: that Assad used chemical weapons. This claim has not yet been proven. But let's take a little trip into reality-land, where the U.S. hasn't had a marginally decent record on human rights in decades. Our country is a "rape prone" society. The U.S. is one of only a handful of countries that routinely executes prisoners, and is the only first-world nation to do so.  The few remaining countries that use the death penalty generally avoid execution of the mentally ill and intellectually disabled, but not the U.S. We have the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world, and our incarceration rate is not related to our overall crime rate. It seems our schools aren't so good either. Perhaps the fact that we don't see the irony in pointing the finger at other countries and calling them police states or human rights violators is the ultimate evidence of this fact. 

When we go on misadventures abroad, the story gets even grimmer. Highlights of our country's war crimes include raping Okinawan women during the Battle of Okinawa, the rape of 14,000 European women during World War II, the No Run Gi Massacre, the My Lai Massacre, deliberately targeted civilian buildings during bombing campaigns in Yugoslavia, using agent orange in Vietnam, torturing prisoners in every war in which we have been involved, and killing over 100,000 civilians in Iraq.

If this were the record of any other country in the world, we would be gunning to bomb the shit out of them to teach them to love freedom or something.

This country cannot be trusted to wage war in a way that dos not violate human rights. There is no reason to think this war will be any different. If you have any doubt, note that the President has said nothing about plans to protect human rights. He has also failed to show any regard for human rights by declining to prosecute war crimes by previous administrations, going so far as to grant them immunity. 

There are currently human rights violations in Syria -- whether they're due to chemical weapons usage or not. We will commit human rights violations there, as we have in every other country we've ever battled, and thus we will make life in Syria worse.

But This Will Be a Short Campaign Without Boots On the Ground

Excuse me while I contemptuously laugh at you. 

Ok, I'm back now. No one has asserted that a series of bombing strikes will stop human rights violations or end the use of chemical weapons, and Syria will likely escalate its campaign against civilians if we do attack. 

So what then? Do we abandon the campaign? Of course we don't, because we never abandon campaigns. We're still fighting in Iraq ten years later, even though the ostensible reason for that war was to get Hussein to give up his weapons of mass destruction. He's been dead for years and there never were any weapons of mass destruction. 

We don't quit fighting even when the mission has been accomplished. And we're certainly not going to quit fighting when it hasn't. No, we'll escalate that war. We'll bomb some more. That will cost more money and it won't work. So then we'll conclude that we need to send in a few soldiers. The number will gradually escalate, and this will end up exactly like Iraq.

The US Has to Keep its Word

I've heard a lot of people offer variations on the "fuck brown people" argument. They emphasize that it doesn't matter if hundreds of thousands of civilians die. The real goal is to prove that the U.S. is willing to back up its threats. These people are sociopaths who fail to recognize that murdered civilians' lives are just as valuable as yours and mine. They fail to recognize that right now there is a father reading to his child and putting that child to bed in Syria. And that father is going to be killed by us soon. Maybe his child will die, too. Or maybe his child will grow up. Wonder how he'll feel about the U.S.

"Keeping its word" has not historically served the U.S. well. It's the reason there are hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who hate us. Our willingness to kill with impunity is the reason we have been victimized by terrorist attacks. I know it might come as a shock that people aren't willing to suicide bomb buildings because they "hate our freedom." But in reality-land, people commit terrorist attacks for a reason. And if some foreign nation came to my city, killed my whole family, destroyed my future, and then called this "liberation," I'd probably be ready to become a terrorist, too. 

The war is looking more and more inevitable. There's a predictable pattern to these things that goes something like this: 

0: Neutral stage, during which the media does not discuss conflicts in foreign countries and does not discuss any current military actions.

1: A politician, usually the president, mentions a foreign country with a mysterious culture. At this stage, war is already inevitable because the president has begun mentioning the evildoing country specifically because he wants to go to war. Media begins covering the ghastly nature of life in the foreign country.

2: Media waits a few weeks, then reports that things in the foreign country have gotten worse. Begins suggesting it might be good to bomb the country, but presents arguments both for and against. President increases his rhetoric about the country.

3: Media begins treating military action as a foregone conclusion. At this point, war is imminent.

This trajectory can only be stopped when people are willing to display critical thinking skills. War becomes imminent when the media treats it as such because people refuse to learn from the lessons of history or weigh evidence without emotion. I hope that this time it will be different and the citizens of this country will show how smart, how humane, how aware they can really be and aggressively and vocally oppose this war.