Correction: He said he would not put a single soldier on Syrian soil unless they retaliated. But, as he said, this most likely will not even have to happen should Russia remove the chemical weapons from Syria.
There's ... reasons I cannot share with you for why I doubt this. Boots are most certainly going to be on the ground. How many, exactly, and what their mission will be... I do not know... but there are boots with orders to be on the ground.
Obama is right. Just because we as Americans are tired of war doesn't mean we can turn the other cheek while innocent people's human rights are violated. So many people are criticizing Obama for his plan but if diplomacy does not work we need to strike! Not in a way that will topple his government but basically sending a message. If this happened in America and it was the cause of the government wouldn't you want a foreign military to aid you?? Just think a about how wrong it was for him to use chemical gas
No, we don't need to strike. Syria has been gassing itself for the past two years. At least 12 other strikes have happened (one of the first being the rebels mixing chlorine and bleach together, basically).
The other fact of the matter is that the rebels are, currently, composed mostly of Hezbollah funded groups that also have ties with Al Qaeda. Most of the people with any common sense have already fled to Lebanon and surrounding areas.
Further - the idea that we are going to change the culture of this society with a 'few limited strikes' is asinine. Elections do not a free country make. "The people" there have grown up in a culture where the modus operandi is oppression.
The closest parallel I can think of is the most extreme forms of racism expressed in America. We see those groups as 'the same people.' They see each other the way the KKK and Black Panthers view each other. A society with those two groups 'running the show' will never really be a free society - regardless of their governmental structure. Democracy is just as oppressive as any other form.
Spare for totalitarian rule of a secular leader who doesn't give a shit about either side and who kills them for getting out of line.
Yes, he is planning a strike. However, he already said that he will try diplomatic choices before this. That is why he said he asked Congress to wait on their decision, to see if Russia will come through for them or not.
Why didn't he try diplomacy from the beginning?
Obama has been trying to sell a strike for the past month.
This is the man who won a Nobel Peace Prize because people -THOUGHT- he -WOULD DO- peaceful things.
And what does Vladimir Putin - an Ex KGB Officer who has been criticized as a rather brutal person to deal with? .... He offers diplomacy to Syria.
Honest to goodness - I don't trust Putin farther than I can throw him... but at least the man has some semblance of intelligence.
But here's the difference, it's ok for the US to use chemical weapons on others but it's not ok for other countries to use them. Look at what extent we used chemical weapons during Vietnam and nothing was ever done to the US for using them. Heck it took forever just for US vets that were exposed to the chemicals to get treatment because we denied that we used them for so long. And there are plenty of other cases of countries using chemical weapons and no one making a big stink about it.
You're confused. We didn't use chemical weapons.
What we used were defoliants - used to kill vegetation that the VC were using to hide and conceal themselves in. The problems arose because they distributed this stuff by the truck load to soldiers who were not trained in the handling of chemicals, wore little/no PPE (and were sweating like crazy - their skin was a waiting vector for exposure), and the chemicals were hardly packaged reliably.
You could handle OxyClean the same way - and end up with it causing just as many (if not more) problems as things like Agent Orange.
Also anyone that thinks the US isn't currently developing bigger and badder chemical/biological weapons needs to wake up.
The U.S. ceased bio-weapon research long ago. Any research being done is under private contracts (likely from companies spawned off of the Soviet bio-weapon research).
The main reason why is that 'experts' at the time were convinced that it would never be effective and bio-weapons were a waste of time and money (classified tests conducted, however, illustrated otherwise). Congress was convinced and the diplomatic argument was that if we made a display of shutting down our bio-weapons research - so would Russia (it had the opposite effect, actually - they figured we were trying to get them to give up their program so we'd have an advantage).
Chemical weapon research has continued - but they are exceptionally limited in their capacity. Like bio-weapons, they are not as useful during the day because high atmospheric turbulence limits spread and UV light from the sun tends to destabilize the compounds. Heavier-than-air compounds resolve this, but are considerably limited in effectiveness because trench warfare is largely a thing of the past.
They are effective in enclosed spaces. That's about it. So we don't waste too much time or money on developing them, as they are not the "weapons of mass destruction" that we keep hearing about.
The real reason so much attention is paid to them is because of how 'inhumane' they appear. While there are some that are quite horrible to die from - the main thing is the eeriness of the aftermath of chemical weapon attacks. Bodies are left in relatively undisturbed surroundings - you can clearly see what people were doing at the time of their death and identify with it in your daily life. The media loves them - because they create nice photographs.
People in the west don't identify with the results of standard warfare. They object to pictures of people holding their guts in while continuing to fire at their opposition - or pictures of people wandering around, looking for their arm in a state of shock. They can't identify with piles of rubble that used to be homes, offices, or markets. They just look at it and go "man... that's horrible."
But they don't really feel anything. Not like they do from the pictures of a chemical weapon attack. They're useful for propaganda and that's about it.
