Morality Games
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2009
- Messages
- 3,733
- Reaction score
- 1,156
- Location
- Iowa
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Centrist
And yet, you continue with the blind partisanship, because that's apparently more important than things like sovereignty and human life.
I don't think it was right for the United States to get up to its eyeballs in the Middle East, but that was before my time and isn't something I exert a great deal of control over.
To the extent we ARE involved in the Middle East and we do DEPEND on stability in that region: any action that sets the precedent that using chemical weapons is acceptable runs contrary to long established goals of stability in that region for the sake of expanding the regions' economic relations with the rest of the world. That's because cultural and tribal rivalries stretching across countries (the kind that fed into the Iran-Iraq War) provide a pretext to use chemical weapons to radically alter the balance of power in the region. For example, Saudi Arabia tried to bribe Russia to stay out of it because a weakened Syria makes them more powerful, Iran is jockeying with the United States for influence in Iraq because that makes them more powerful, etc.
Each country in the Middle East wants a hegemony over the rest the same as Germany desired in Europe at the onset of WWII. It's why Saddam attacked Kuwait. He thought the West would accept his invasion, but the West decided that such invasions pose far too much of a threat to the power and economic structues of the Middle East, because then Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc, would start gobbling up territories to expand their own influence.
Obama essentially has continued an ancient, fifty-year old policy of promoting stability in the Middle East that demonstrating any use of a nation of power balance-altering chemical weapons, no matter how many backers or supporters that nation might have among the Western powers, cannot be permitted because it runs the chance that EVERY country in the Middle East will begin using chemical weapons to alter the balance of power. If such escalation occurs, the relations of various political factions in the West will be put in an extremely awkward and dangerous position. That's where the "WWIII" talk is coming from.
Ordinarily, Russia would agree. If it was anyone else's boy on the line. It just so happens that Syria is in their in camp, so they want everybody in the West to make an exception to the rule of "no chemical weapons" that all nations collectively agreed violated the common interests of all.
Ordinarily, Republicans would agree as well. But the right-wing media makes it living out of undermining Obama as a leader, and the Republicans find undermining Obama as a leader comes in handy.
Particularly when continuing wars in the Middle East are extremely unpopular with the American people, as the Republicans are in the awkward position of being unpopular.
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