Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a great danger with convincing Americans that “they are bad and we are good” is justification enough to invade, kill, or otherwise bring destruction on another nation. Such simplistic reasoning allows those in power to do whatever they wish to other nations provided they can paint that nation as the bad guy. I do not in any way support Assad. I also don’t fully understand what is going on there and what the…
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/ 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…
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"