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Can you fill this in? The U.S. should intervene in Syria Pro ... Con ... What makes it complicated? If you're unsure of the truth of pro/con arg

Can you fill this in? The U.S. should intervene in Syria Pro ... Con ... What makes it complicated? If you're unsure of the truth of pro/con arguments or need to dissect them, you can use https://en.howtruthful.com/o/ https://en.howtruthful.com/o/ to make a hypertext representation of the tree of arguments. I made HowTruthful, so this is self-promotion. But I'm going to keep self-promoting because it's important to let people know that dissecting arguments doesn't have to be as arduous as they think.

sykick 7y ago
What makes it complicated? Unintended consequences. Exit conditions. Will it inflame passions in neighboring areas and cause greater harm? Suppose we overthrow Assad and Syrian Kurds breakaway from a weakened Syria and establish a nation. Are we prepared to thwart the inevitable Turkish invasion? Suppose a worse tyrant ends up in power after Assad. Suppose enmity against the United States greatly increases as a result of our intervention and this unleashes attacks we aren't really prepared to deal with. At a higher level how do we distinguish as a people from the mass killings we disapprove of versus the ones we approve of or perpetrate ourselves? How do we know that the intervention will be done with good intentions or that there is not an ulterior motive at play? How bad does a person have to be to warrant American military intervention? What about the cases where we actively support the genocidal maniac? For example in Cambodia. How do we know our intervention won't lead to a worse outcome? Is our leadership competent enough to justify a belief that our intervention will be good? Are we prepared to properly care for our soldiers who get wounded there? Do we have the money and will to properly care for them? Does it matter? Is the military capable of winning the conflict? Is there a winnable strategy that we are willing to engage in? Is our leadership sufficiently knowledgable and well informed to make good decisions? We famously intervened in Lebanon in the 1980s. After one terrorist attack on Marine barracks we left. Do we have the political will to see the intervention to the end? Do the American people have the attention span/desire to see the thing through to its end? Do the American people care enough?
keenmaster 7y ago
The world (not the U.S. alone) should engage in a large peacekeeping mission in Syria. Why? Because Syrians aren't subhumans. I'm actually being completely serious when I say that. 500k+ Syrians Arabs have been slaughtered. Tens of thousands are being tortured and raped in ways that would make Satan blush. We're talking about a government that removed the genitals of the 12 year old kid (Hamza Al Khatib) that started the revolution and mailed them to his parents with a warning letter, followed by his bruised and cigarette burn-laden corpse. (see the Syria thread further below for links) If that isn't the worst-case scenario, then the implication is really grim: that Syrians are subhumans, and the chance of consequences on Western interveners exceeds the value of the lives of a half-million Syrian Arabs. Replace "Syrian Arabs" with "half a million Danes" or "half a million French civilians"," does that make you feel any different about the situation? What if I replaced "Hamza Al Khatib" with "12 year old Johnny McCormick?" All human life is equally precious, so that really shouldn't change anything. To avoid "consequence entropy," I'll jump right to this: the expected negative value of the hundreds of potential consequences of action is far smaller than the very real, 100% actualized present-day situation extrapolated to the future. Moreover, consider this. Assad has been continually creating the consequence entropy that people fear. That's what makes the "but what about ISIS?" type of question so ridiculous. He brought ISIS into Syria. He helped fund the precursor to ISIS (AQ in Iraq) to destabilize Iraq. He assassinated the beloved prime minister of Lebanon (Rafik Hariri). This behavior will continue as long as he presides over Syria. Remember, that's all besides the genocide that he is undertaking. Also remember that ISIS isn't Syrian, it's mainly composed of North Africans and Iraqi nationals that invaded Syria. The primary victims of ISIS are the same people that Assad is genociding. These are Muslim Syrian Arabs that lived happily alongside Christians, Druze, Alawites (note: Assad is Alawite), Kurds, and Armenians prior to the revolution. They are the majority of the population and they have no ill will towards other races or creeds. These are the people that were asking for freedom before they got massacred. So the choice isn't "Assad vs. unknown mix of potentially bad consequences" it's "Assad, guaranteed continuation of genocide, guaranteed debasement of human life, guaranteed obliteration of the cradle of civilization, cultural trama, orchestrated demographic replacement, terrorism, anarchy, international assassinations, and unknown mix of potentially bad consequences vs. unknown mix of potentially bad consequences"
- 7y ago

sykick 7y ago

What makes it complicated? Unintended consequences. Exit conditions. Will it inflame passions in neighboring areas and cause greater harm? Suppose we overthrow Assad and Syrian Kurds breakaway from a weakened Syria and establish a nation. Are we prepared to thwart the inevitable Turkish invasion? Suppose a worse tyrant ends up in power after Assad. Suppose enmity against the United States greatly increases as a result of our intervention and this unleashes attacks we aren't really prepared to deal with. At a higher level how do we distinguish as a people from the mass killings we disapprove of versus the ones we approve of or perpetrate ourselves? How do we know that the intervention will be done with good intentions or that there is not an ulterior motive at play? How bad does a person have to be to warrant American military intervention? What about the cases where we actively support the genocidal maniac? For example in Cambodia. How do we know our intervention won't lead to a worse outcome? Is our leadership competent enough to justify a belief that our intervention will be good? Are we prepared to properly care for our soldiers who get wounded there? Do we have the money and will to properly care for them? Does it matter? Is the military capable of winning the conflict? Is there a winnable strategy that we are willing to engage in? Is our leadership sufficiently knowledgable and well informed to make good decisions? We famously intervened in Lebanon in the 1980s. After one terrorist attack on Marine barracks we left. Do we have the political will to see the intervention to the end? Do the American people have the attention span/desire to see the thing through to its end? Do the American people care enough?

keenmaster 7y ago

The world (not the U.S. alone) should engage in a large peacekeeping mission in Syria. Why? Because Syrians aren't subhumans. I'm actually being completely serious when I say that. 500k+ Syrians Arabs have been slaughtered. Tens of thousands are being tortured and raped in ways that would make Satan blush. We're talking about a government that removed the genitals of the 12 year old kid (Hamza Al Khatib) that started the revolution and mailed them to his parents with a warning letter, followed by his bruised and cigarette burn-laden corpse. (see the Syria thread further below for links) If that isn't the worst-case scenario, then the implication is really grim: that Syrians are subhumans, and the chance of consequences on Western interveners exceeds the value of the lives of a half-million Syrian Arabs. Replace "Syrian Arabs" with "half a million Danes" or "half a million French civilians"," does that make you feel any different about the situation? What if I replaced "Hamza Al Khatib" with "12 year old Johnny McCormick?" All human life is equally precious, so that really shouldn't change anything. To avoid "consequence entropy," I'll jump right to this: the expected negative value of the hundreds of potential consequences of action is far smaller than the very real, 100% actualized present-day situation extrapolated to the future. Moreover, consider this. Assad has been continually creating the consequence entropy that people fear. That's what makes the "but what about ISIS?" type of question so ridiculous. He brought ISIS into Syria. He helped fund the precursor to ISIS (AQ in Iraq) to destabilize Iraq. He assassinated the beloved prime minister of Lebanon (Rafik Hariri). This behavior will continue as long as he presides over Syria. Remember, that's all besides the genocide that he is undertaking. Also remember that ISIS isn't Syrian, it's mainly composed of North Africans and Iraqi nationals that invaded Syria. The primary victims of ISIS are the same people that Assad is genociding. These are Muslim Syrian Arabs that lived happily alongside Christians, Druze, Alawites (note: Assad is Alawite), Kurds, and Armenians prior to the revolution. They are the majority of the population and they have no ill will towards other races or creeds. These are the people that were asking for freedom before they got massacred. So the choice isn't "Assad vs. unknown mix of potentially bad consequences" it's "Assad, guaranteed continuation of genocide, guaranteed debasement of human life, guaranteed obliteration of the cradle of civilization, cultural trama, orchestrated demographic replacement, terrorism, anarchy, international assassinations, and unknown mix of potentially bad consequences vs. unknown mix of potentially bad consequences"

7y ago