Drone attacks

[piercehawkeye45]

You have a point. To my defense, my tone is reactionary to the more vocal anti-interventionists who tend to use "intervention" as an umbrella term and make no attempt to separate the difference between the current intervention in Syria with the intervention in Afghanistan in the 80's or the Bush wars. I find that very deceiving. While there are obvious similarities, the differences are too great to be direct analogies.


But yes, we are arming and training Syrian rebels (I actually thought it was less before you pointed that out). However, when compared to other countries who are involved, the scale is much less and it is absolutely clear that changing the balance of the civil war in not one of our objectives. This is a big difference from Afghanistan in the 80's where we were one of if not the main supplier of weapons and training and had the objective of overthrowing the Soviet regime in Kabul. It is clear that the US does not want to "own" the civil war and is making a strong attempt to minimize blowback. These two points are often ignored by anti-interventionists who want to argue against the current Syrian intervention by making it into the next Afghanistan intervention.


I understand and agree that intervening in Syria is a bad idea. The situation is too complex and we will have no control over what happens. Personally, I think we should stay out of the Syrian Civil War but still keep a close eye and be prepared for unexpected events (chemical weapons, Jordan collapsing, Israel getting involved). I am not completely against the current amount intervention because it is pretty much the minimal amount of intervention we can have. We should not be a main supplier of weapons and we should not try to change the balance of powers. That is just asking for blowback.

I am just strongly against the idea of using "intervention" as an umbrella term since it can mean so many different things. I am not accusing you are anyone on here of doing that but I see it all the time in articles I read so I tend to be jumpy against it.