If the plan is to help the Syrian people from all this potential suffering then we ought to be going into N. Korea, if not many other places. We should have bombed China decades ago.
Yep.
That reason is a stupid reason.
I can't think of a better reason to send armed people in with a mandate to shoot than if we don't more people will end up dead, or worse.
It concerns us because of oil and our rich friends in the ME region - do you really think our world leaders give a toss about the people unless their suffering makes them look overtly bad?
I think on some level they might, but as professional politicians they think such concerns are beneath the more important task they have, and they think that politics is almost entirely about economics with enough deference to popular ethics to engender a little support from the 'unsophisticated' public.
I wasn't giving reasons why I thought our politicians should send troops in, though, I was giving the basis on which I would send in a military response.
As you say the money and help would just change direction to some other similar group, as we are not dealing with a purely centralised opposition - it has multiple heads. So anything we do will just force it underground for it to pop up somewhere else later on.
It's not a threat that can be responded to as a 'conventional' military threat. Just as the military of 1914 was still trying to fight the colonial conflicts of the late 1800's, so this generations politicians are still trying to fight the Cold War.
"...when there's no clear way to differentiate friend from foe." That was the problem Vietnam had...
One of them, yes. The other being that the majority of the people in the region weren't on one side or the other of the conflict, but were rather caught in the middle.
As for your last paragraph it is true that the motivations of those living in the West with resentment to the West have varying degrees of differing reasons for their hate for it than ISIS's motivations and so (not education) reasoning and a dialogue with them would help to negate their extreme wishes for violence. This is where the Mosques should come in to not only do this but to give their religion and God a good name; but can we trust them and are they sufficient in doing this. They have failed so far by sticking their heads in their backward, conservative, cultural ways.
There are a range of Muslim views, and in the west the vast majority are being ignored whilst they continually protest what is being done, as they see it, in Islam's name. The problem isn't the majority of Muslims, it's the fact that the influential Muslims - the Saudi royals, the Iranian elite and the like - are sitting on the fence. They don't want to aggravate their markets in the West, they don't want to aggravate potentially violent terrorist groups, so they pretend like it's not their issue whilst funneling cash into the region to support one ragtag bunch of nutjobs or another.
O.
