To this day, many Jews continue to decry an evident lack of interest in saving Jewish lives either at the start of Hitler’s genocidal campaign or toward the end when rail lines may have been bombed to slow the feed to the ovens.

Well, here we are again, but it’s not the Jews who are suffering.

In fact, many in the path of Assad’s brutality would seem to hate America and Jews and “the west” at the very least out of language habit, although with the large and loose assembly of Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda-type forces displaying their own brutality in the field, more than and other than talk must be shaping defense and political policy between the White House and the Pentagon.

This business of discerning who to save continues to have a “no good dog in the fight” feel to it, this despite assurances from Qatar and the rallying presence of General Salim Idris, who may be the commander in the western suit but not the supreme disciplining force across his own battle space.

* * *

Syria may also remind how for all the philosophical and political talk, the business of war remains intensely geographical (spatial) and physical in nature.

For one thing, Syria has become the most isolated and transparent hot conflict and political laboratory on the planet.  Not only do the primary antagonists rate among the least sympathetic of human figures — again: the forces of a brutal dictatorship would seem to share the field, in part, with those of the most absurd religious extremism — but they’re doing “their thang” across a landscape broad and remote enough (and, damaged and emptying enough) to afford, from the talk to the walk, their own display.

Approach it with a toolkit — a few ships, say — or roll it into the operatory known as the UN, but give it a good look because, at the moment, the Syrian Civil War is its own machine with the broken and working parts fairly well lit up for viewing.

* * *

No one really wants to bring peace to that sandbox of a nation, no more than the local constabulary wants to knock on the door behind which a vicious domestic has broken out with flying furnishings, which one hears through the walls, and perhaps broken bottles, knives, and guns, which, alas, one must open the door to see.

At least on a “domestic” the scale is small and the police a force larger than it.

A civil war across a landscape awash in criminal and gambler’s money, arms, blood, death, and suffering and steeped in obsessive cruel and vengeful thinking — that’s a whole other threshold for crossing, one for which the confirmed use of chemical weapons takes the absurdity and inhumanity of it beyond the capacity of conscience for either bearing or controlling.

* * *

In another way, more abstract, one now has a kind of “rogues on display” in Syria with Putin’s implicit cooperation with the Assad regime even though perhaps he has done some things to adjust the flames in the oven (e.g., Russia Delays Arms Supplies to Syria over Money – Paper | World | RIA Novosti 8/30/2013) and the rate at which it burns.  Add on the other side the appearance and influx of Islamists in the battle space (e.g., and three hours old at the moment, Syria Islamist rebels take control of Christian town of Maaloula – CNN.com).

Truly, a whole world is watching Syria, and I should think that it must be thinking about what it is actually seeing and doing so in ways apart from immediate self-interest, for in the theater we may now call “Syria On Display” what would seem to be on display would seem to comprise also the worst of the worst behavior in humanity.

* * *

Just a moment for fiction here:

“I kill you and cut out your heart and eat it!”

______

“I make you and your people — infants, children, mothers, old men — die in agony without warning.  And I do it with impunity!”

* * *

Which world do you want to live in: the one that intervenes — or the one that let’s it go on?

Syria has serious problems, but it appears no one has yet figured out to whom those problems belong.

Then too while the world believes it watches such a spectacle from the outside, that would seem true only until it discovers itself inside of it after all.

Indeed, in the First Age of the Internet (or is it “Internet 2.0” or “3.0”) and an era filled with agressive Islamism and related violence, we all may have to ask whether state boundaries serve to isolate cultural and political systems in necessary ways while also guiding and defining a practical global politics in ways that may have been more helpful as little as 15 years ago.

Fast Reference

Moran: America Has Moral Obligation in Syria | ARLnow.com 9/4/2013:

The congressman, who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the military surge in Afghanistan, strongly supports a “surgical strike” against Syria’s chemical weapons capabilities.

On Syria, Words Have Consequences | TIME.com 9/4/2013:

From the start of the Syrian ­conflict, President Obama has wanted to take two very different approaches to it. On the one hand, he has been disciplined about the definition of American interests and the use of force. On the other hand, he has sought a way to respond to Bashar Assad’s ­human-­rights atrocities.

Should the US involve itself in the Syrian conflict? | Daily Trojan 9/5/2013:

The United States must intervene in Syria for humanitarian reasons.In 1994, the world watched as Hutu soldiers, armed with machetes, hacked apart the Rwandan countryside. Despite clear evidence of genocide from the United Nations observers and human rights watch groups, the U.S. decided it had no permanent interests in the region and sending a small deployment of soldiers would have been too risky. By the time the civil war ended three months later, 900,000 Rwandans had been slaughtered.

U.S. military planners don’t support war with Syria – The Washington Post 9/5/2013:

They are embarrassed to be associated with the amateurism of the Obama administration’s attempts to craft a plan that makes strategic sense. None of the White House staff has any experience in war or understands it. So far, at least, this path to war violates every principle of war, including the element of surprise, achieving mass and having a clearly defined and obtainable objective.

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