Out of 46 Major Editorials on Trump’s Syria Strikes, Only One Opposed

Our intervention created ISIS and you just want to do it again?

This is a mischaracterization. In fact, ISIS continues to exist largely because of our failure to intervene in Syria and inability to negotiate a longer Status of Forces agreement.

Instability is the precursor of radicalism, and the United States military is a hugely stabilizing force.

Literally hundreds of thousands will die and for what?

Hundreds of thousands? Even if we suppose that your hundreds of thousands figure is correct, we cannot take it in isolation. If the concern is how many lives will be lost if we intervene, then we must also ask how many will die if we do nothing? How many of his own people will Assad gas?

And after Assad has won the war, how many more men, women, and children will he subjugate? How many will he torture? How many will he kill? Let's not lose sight of the truth: this uprising began because Assad is a monster.

A newer even worse form of ISIS that forms in the vacuum?

As I've intimated in another post: what emerges into the vacuum left be Assad and ISIS will largely be determined by how committed we are to helping establish and protect a coalition government. (We being our the US and its allies, hopefully; or solely the United States, if necessary.)

It is a worthwhile pursuit, I think. Again, instability and radicalism go hand in hand.

Guess what Trump will lead it. His corporate cronies will be at the had of regime change. That alone is not worth it.

I realize— and I'm counting on the institutional knowledge and expertise of our armed forces to help navigate this conflict.

More people will die all to appease this false sense of moral superiority we have here.

Your mistake here is thinking that the moral argument is the only argument for intervention. That simply isn't the case.

The United States has a vested interest in establishing friendly states in the Middle East and reducing the recruiting capabilities of radical organizations.

This kind of intervention has only made literally every country we do it to worse.

Well, that's not exactly true. Our interventions in Far and South East Asia have produced close and productive allies.

I don't want to sacrifice tens of thousands of Americans, and probably a million Syrians just to make that bad feeling you have go away.

I've mentioned this in another post, but I can imagine a scenario in which, in the initial intervention, intel and air support will be enough to degrade both Assad's and ISIS capabilities. Additionally, we already do have boots-on-the-ground in the form of advisors; these roles will likely expand both in size and scope, during the later stages of the intervention.

Again, this is not about feelings. This is about the US's strategic interest in the Middle East.

It is not our place to effect change over there. It NEVER WORKS. People like you don't even care that all the evidence points to literally a million plus deaths overall because you don't like that he may have gassed people.

Look, I did not mean to intimate that the US should intervene to soothe my personal feelings. I'm not personally invested in the well-being of the Syrian people. I am, however, interested in retarding the rate at which ISIS is able to garner supporters, fighters, and resources. That means establishing peaceful and stable governments that respect the rights of their citizens.

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