By Steve Sailer
09/04/2013
From The New Yorker:
OBAMA PROMISES SYRIA STRIKE WILL HAVE NO OBJECTIVE
POSTED BY ANDY BOROWITZ
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — Attempting to quell criticism of his proposal for a limited military mission in Syria, President Obama floated a more modest strategy today, saying that any U.S. action in Syria would have “no objective whatsoever.”
“Let me be clear,” he said in an interview on CNN. “Our goal will not be to effect régime change, or alter the balance of power in Syria, or bring the civil war there to an end. We will simply do something random there for one or two days and then leave.”
Actually, this parody proposal doesn’t strike me as a totally bad idea, so it’s worth thinking through why it would be bad. Assuming that there was use of poison gas in Syria and assuming the regime was behind it and that it’s important to deter future use of poison gas, why not punish the leaders with some cruise missiles blowing up the leadership’s prized possessions (does Assad have a G6?) and nicest offices, and then, point made, stop?
Well, one reason is because this kind of Olympian thunderbolt flinging is likely to lead onward. Things get personalized quickly. For example, Obama’s unexpected declaration of a no fly zone over Libya in 2011 inevitably meant that the U.S. was going to overthrow Colonel Q/K/G. Obama couldn’t go into the 2012 election as the President who started a war with G/Q/K and didn’t win.
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