No outrage at Obama's war mongering

Bugger, shame I missed this thread - looks like it was fun.
 
Assad's bombing places and so are the rebels (just the rebels don't do it from planes). The 'rebels' are also blowing up hospitals and police stations and they are trying to get their hands on the WMD to use as well (because that would get the US in there). If we cared about civilians we wouldn't be funding and arming the rebels, because Assad wasn't dropping bombs before there were rebels to drop them on.
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Not sure where you get your info from, but I couldn't find anything about rebels blowing up a hospital. Maybe they did, but it would be nice if you could back some of your claims. I do remember reading something about a police station targeted though, but that doesn't surprise me. Still, Assad is the one with real power here and he's using it to great effect. He's bombed entire neighborhoods to the ground and is even using cluster bombs in populated areas. Didn't you have some choice words for the US air force when they used those in Iraq? I think Assad wins the brutality contest.


Furthermore, war crimes are between sovereigns. We shouldn't really want a world were one nation can intervene militarily against another based on internal disputes.
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Well, that's certainly up for debate. You posed a very silly and irrelevant scenario about Canada and Sharia law. What if instead Canada went NAZI and decided to round up all the Muslims and gas them? Should the world just shrug their shoulders and ignore it? You can't compare some civil issues with mass murder Fluffy. I hope you can do better than that. And btw, technically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an internal one as well, so are you saying no war crimes have been committed there? I'm sure Mahmoud Abbas would say that there certainly were.

Calling it "humanitarian" doesn't help.
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There's a line that one crosses and it becomes obvious that helping is the right thing to do. Not sure where that line should be drawn, but I'm pretty sure that line is crossed when civilians are bombed and obliterated one street block at a time. That's why I tend to disagree with Obama's statement that the use of chemical weapons is the line. I don't see what difference the weapon makes, I'm more results oriented I guess, and mass death is mass death.

Should the countries of the Middle East be able to invade Israel on the same basis and overthrow the government of Israel?
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Ya well, they did try that, didn't they? And I wouldn't be opposed to a military solution there either, so long as the Israelis aren't in turn massacred.

Because the Arabs are badly treated in Israel and Palestinian children are imprisoned and tortured and occasionally?
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And it's funny you say that because in many ways I see many parallels between Syria and Israel/Palestine. In both nations the religious minority has the power. In Israel the boundaries are more well defined, but mostly because of the age of the conflict itself. In Syria things are a little more sketchy, but if the conflict lasts long enough you'll see a very clear division there as well. In both cases the powerful minority control the military, which are funded and armed from foreign nations, and the poor majority resort to guerilla/terrorist tactics, motivated by religious and nationalist extremism and are also supported by external powers.

You are letting the TV emotionally stampede you into supporting MORE killing. But the TV is not showing you the mosques that the rebels bomb (until they show up as mosques that "Assad's airforce bombed") and you are not seeing the rebels rounding up and massacring civilians - the rebels do it but the TV won't show it.
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Actually, the TV isn't showing me anything these days, I haven't watched TV in weeks or months, especially TV news. Irregardless, it's not just me, many human rights and peace activist groups don't seem to see it your way. Both Avaaz and Human Rights Watch have taken a far more critical view of the Syrian government than you have. So you can't just say it's the TV brainwashing the mindless masses, convenient as that may be.
 
Glaucus said:
In Syria things are a little more sketchy, but if the conflict lasts long enough you'll see a very clear division there as well. In both cases the powerful minority control the military, which are funded and armed from foreign nations, and the poor majority resort to guerilla/terrorist tactics, motivated by religious and nationalist extremism and are also supported by external powers.
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This led to a question about the future of Syria's minorities such as the Christians. Ahmed, Basah, and Hamid Hassan all agreed - Christians could only live there if they either converted, or paid the 'Jizyah' - a special tax levied on non-Muslims in previous centuries in the Middle East. If not paid, they could be killed.

Syrian rebels behead captured Assad loyalist
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Syrian rebels call for Islamic Emirate, praise Osama Bin Laden
 

U.S. blacklists al Qaeda-linked Syrian rebel group

The United States on Tuesday designated the radical Islamist Syrian rebel group Jabhat al-Nusra, an important fighting force in the opposition struggle, as a foreign terrorist organization and said it was trying to hijack the rebellion on behalf of al Qaeda in Iraq.

U.S. officials said the al-Nusra group had claimed responsibility for carrying out nearly 600 attacks in major cities that have killed numerous innocent Syrians during the 20-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

"Through these attacks, al-Nusra has sought to portray itself as part of the legitimate Syrian opposition while it is, in fact, an attempt by AQI to hijack the struggles of the Syrian people for its own malign purposes," U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, using the acronym for al Qaeda in Iraq, said in a statement.
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So it seems the US is attempting to help some of the rebels while at the same time black listing others. It'll be interesting to see how that works out. This is probably a wise move. In WW2 the British secretly trained and armed communists to fight the NAZIs but that turned out to be a disaster after the war. Looks like the US is attempting something different.
 
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