What Has Syria Ever Done To Us Americans?

[votesparks]

If one asks the question "What Has Syria Ever Done To Us Americans?", you come up a blank. While the Syrian crisis debate continues, I ask this same question. While I come up blank with an answer to that question, I can think of more than one bad thing that my country has done to other countries, as well as to its own citizens.

Please chime in with your thoughts.

[hog]

1. We Americans?

[maddiemom]

11. No, it's US Americans (ever done to US?)

[AllTooEasy]

20. That's a Royally unfair question

If I see a group of men beating a gay man, why should I help? The gay-bashers haven't done anything against me.

If I see the Klan lynching a Black Man, why should I help? The Klan has never done anything to me.

If I see kids at school mercilessly bullying a fellow schoolmate, why should I help? The bullies aren't pushing me around.

If I see unfamiliar, defenseless people being percecuted in a far away land, why should I help? The persecuters aren't hurting me.

If I see a woman being gang raped, why should I help? The rapers aren't molesting me.

If I see union rights being dissipated daily, why should I help? I'm in management, worker exploitation doesn't harm me.

If I see someone harming you, why should I help? No one is harming me.

Lack of harm to one's self is not a rational to refuse help to another person. That's Apathy, the root value of Right Wing thought. Stalin, Assad, Pol Pot, Repukes, and a long list of foreign AND DOMESTIC leaders have damaged/destroyed too many lives while being shielded by global Apathy. I refuse to be apart of that shield with regard to Assad, America, Putin, North Korea, anybody. The Percecuted, Unfortunate, and Defenseless should be helped by EVERYBODY(not just Obama/America), with all peaceful attempts being exhausted first.

I'm one of those "bleeding heart liberals" that creeps like Rush Limbaugh mock...and I'm damn proud of it.

[votesparks]

25. The problem is

is that the viewpoint of helping others assumes that you have your own shit together.

We don't have our shit together. Our country is falling apart at the seams. Been to a Midwestern City lately?

[Thinkingabout]

2. In 1925 treaty was agreed to and signed to stop chemical warfare because it is a horrible death.

I understand to this point Syria has not signed the treaty but they should be signing soon. CW
should not be occurring and should nit be tolerated. Just because the CW's are in Syria does not mean they will stay confined to Syria. If these weapons end up in the hands of the rebels they could be transported and do harm Americans or our facilities. Would you want CW's delivered to your door, I doubt you would. The CW's needs to be destroyed.

[sulphurdunn]

5. Is there nothing better

than these scare tactics, red herring and appeal to authority fallacies to justify attacking a foreign power illegally? Remember the "smoking gun that could become a mushroom cloud" BS used to justify attacking Iraq?

Not only would it be a violation of international law for the US to unilaterally attack Syria for any reason short of self-defense (Self-defense means immanent, not someday, maybe and certainly not that butcher Cheney's 1% rule, which you are advocating). This is not about chemical weapons. It's about our government using chemical weapons as a pretext to perpetrate a war crime against a government that may or may not have committed one. By the way, Saddam Hussein never attacked New York and claimed to have no WMB, which he had backed with thousands of documents, which the UN inspectors were about to confirm, and which was finally confirmed after GW Bush and his gang of war criminals blew off the UN and invaded a country that had not harmed us and did not even have the capability to harm us.

Sorry, no sale on any of this until Syrian forces are at our boarders or the UN Security Council sanctions military action against Syria.

[Thinkingabout]

9. Scare tactics, are you kidding? The mushroom cloud of sarin gas has happened, some fourteen

Hundred victims, over four hundred were children, apparently this is just fine with you. On the same line why did Assad order or allow this to happen. The US is only reacting to a terrible situation which is not acceptable.

[sulphurdunn]

17. Please stop the moral posturing.

One of the many cruise missiles you want to launch at Syrian kids costs about $1,000,000. 5000 children die every day just from drinking dirty water. Another 30,000 die from complications due to malnutrition. We could save a lot of those kids for the price of just one of those cruise missile, no kidding. Get outraged about that.

[Thinkingabout]

19. Hey, I did not gas these people but I know the killings needs to stop. I am not narrow minded

Enough to think this is a terrible deed, I also do not justify this incident with other bad deeds, there is not an off set.

[sulphurdunn]

22. My point was that

politics perpetrates endlessly horrible acts against children, so you pick your fights. You picks fights that are more likely to make things better than worse. War is absolutely guaranteed to make any bad situation much worse for a very long time.

[Thinkingabout]

23. Unfortunately war is acmeans in which to get two or more opposing parties to a negotiating a cease

Of aggressions. Up until the last few weeks Assad has been in denial even having CW's in his possession. There are times we have to take a stand in order to protect ourselves.

[totodeinhere]

7. That treaty does not authorize force as an enforcement mechanism however. n/t

[Thinkingabout]

10. How do you propose to get the CW's away from Syria?

[totodeinhere]

12. That's a job for the international community, not the USA using brute force.

President Obama in his recent address acknowledged that we are not the world's policeman. Now he needs to follow up on that.

And as far as the possibility that terrorists might get their hands on some of Assad's weapons goes, I think it's much more likely that Iran would supply them, not Assad. Or do you propose bombing Iran as well?

[Thinkingabout]

13. Do you consider the US to be a part of the International Community?

[totodeinhere]

14. Yes we are. But being a part of that community as every other country is does not

make us the world's policeman.

[Thinkingabout]

15. Then i would expect the US to be a large part in whatever action may be taken. If all of the

Members of the international community circled the target and started firing without a coordination between all it would result in some of our friends getting shot and we would not like the results.

[totodeinhere]

16. No, no larger part than anyone else. In fact we should take a smaller part.

It's time for someone else to step up. We have spent enough American lives and American treasure policing the world. Now it's someone else's turn.

[AAO]

18. You forgot Poland!!

Sorry, just remembering shrubs Iraqi invasion coalition.

[sulphurdunn]

24. That would also include Israel,

which is not a signatory of the treaty and which possesses a CW arsenal as well as nuclear weapons and is also not a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Israel also has significant power in American politics and access to our national security system. Israeli military forces committed an act of war against the US when they attacked the USS Liberty in 1967. Israel is a major contributor to instability in the region. The argument can be made that Israel is a far greater threat to us than Syria.

[Jesus Malverde]

3. Ask a man who specializes in HATE. He'll know...

“This regime in Syria serves as the main forward operating base of the Iranian regime in the heart of the Arab world. It has supported Palestinian terrorist groups and funneled arms of all kinds, including tens of thousands of rockets, to Hezbollah in Lebanon. It remains a committed enemy of Israel. It has large stockpiles of chemical weapons and materials and has sought to develop a nuclear weapons capability. It was the primary gateway for the countless foreign fighters who infiltrated into Iraq and killed our troops. Assad and his lieutenants have the blood of hundreds of Americans on their hands. Many in Washington fear that what comes after Assad might be worse. How could it be any worse than this?

“The end of the Assad regime would sever Hezbollah’s lifeline to Iran, eliminate a long-standing threat to Israel, bolster Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence, and inflict a strategic defeat on the Iranian regime. It would be a geopolitical success of the first order. More than all of the compelling moral and humanitarian reasons, this is why Assad cannot be allowed to succeed and remain in power: We have a clear national security interest in his defeat. And that alone should incline us to tolerate a large degree of risk in order to see that this goal is achieved.

http://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?ContentRecord_id=e460be36-c488-e7de-8c38-64c3751adfce&FuseAction=PressOffice.FloorStatements

[sulphurdunn]

6. Not one iota of anything

you have said, true or false, justifies starting a war with Syria without the authorization of the UN or a credible threat of immanent harm to us by the Syrian government. Using your logic, we should have attacked N. Korea long ago.

[cpwm17]

27. Hezbollah was formed to end Israel's brutal and illegal occupation of southern Lebanon

which was successful.

Our war and occupation against Iraq was highly immoral and illegal. We were the bad-guys in that conflict. I shouldn't have to remind anyone on a liberal website those facts.

[msongs]

4. let's send Henry K to damascus as a free gift :-) nt

[sulphurdunn]

8. Before doing that,

I'd like to see the old murderer swabbing toilets in a federal maximum security penitentiary for awhile.

[Waiting For Everyman]

21. We do actually have a couple of interests involved now.

One, Assad is destabilizing the region by causing more than 2 million people to become refugees. Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, even Israel are struggling to deal with the numbers they have now, and there are 5 million more displaced within Syria. This link shows the kind of thing people are going through within the country...

“No One’s Left”: Summary Executions by Syrian Forces in al-Bayda and Baniyas,
evidence documented by Human Rights Watch
http://www.hrw.org/node/118645/

Naturally, people are fleeing from that, and that has nothing to do with any action that the US has taken, that is all Assad's doing. Expect it to continue.

Second, I don't think the public will continue to feel unaffected if this internal Syrian problem starts raising the price of gasoline. That could happen anytime now, but when it does happen that will be a bit late to begin thinking what to do about it.

I don't like it either, but the fact is, we probably will have to take some kind of action before too long.

[Deep13]

26. I can't think of anything.

The Syrian state may have done things to impede American, corporate interests, but I don't care about that.