Syria and Interventionism

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Has Syria crossed the chemical weapon “red line”? - Salon.com

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Chemical Red Lines on Syria - By Paul R. Williams, J. Trevor Ulbrick, and Jonathan Worboys | The Middle East Channel

This blog explains better what I've been getting at;

by drawing an explicit red line around the use of CBW, the United States has implicitly signaled that it would not intervene otherwise, potentially emboldening the Assad regime. Indeed, since these red lines were established in August, the Assad regime has shown little restraint, attacking civilian areas with indiscriminate weapons such as cluster bombs, artillery, and helicopter gunships.

Like I said, why wait? Obama's worried he'll be compared to Bush? Not buying that, in some ways he's already been to places Bush never did.

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By all accounts it's a geographical, political and economic nightmare and NATO countries aren't exactly free-spending at the moment.

I'm definitely not convinced they should anyway. Humanitarian intervention is morally dubious, creates extremely uncertain outcomes and, as humanitarian action goes, is absurdly cost-inefficient. If it's very much in NATO's interests to go in then fine, but they definitely shouldn't go in on a 'it's the right thing to do' ticket. There's a lot of less ambiguously 'right things to do' that those resources could go on.

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Sure but they're arming the rebels so they can't wash their hands of it totally if things go to **** either.

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War rape: The forgotten pandemic sweeping Syria - Comment - Voices - The Independent

Fun stuff.