Bring Assad to Court
Posted on August 27, 2013
Why don’t we bring Bashir Assad to court rather than bomb Syria?
I ask that question because I just don’t understand what we get out of launching a few cruise missiles into Damascus.
We will kill some innocent people, maybe some not so innocent people.
We will inject ourselves into a fight that almost nothing to do with us.
We will pick a side between two equally antagonistic entities: The Baathists who are allied with the Iranians and Al Quaeda Islamists who are still at war with the United States.
And we will be picking the side that isn’t currently at war with us.
According to polls, the American people are hesitant about jumping into this thing.
They don’t like that Assad has used chemical weapons, and that marginally helps the President make the case that we should get involved.
But getting involved doesn’t have to mean that we bomb the shit of the Syrian Capitol.
It’s not like they would really notice anyway.
We should go to the Hague, and file real charges against Assad for crimes against humanity.
We should take all of evidence that we have to the court and then get them to make the proper judgment.
And when the case is over and when the proper sentence is passed down, at the proper moment, Assad will be seized and thrown in jail, and then possibly executed.
We need to show the world, especially in the Middle East, that dictators can’t get away with bombing their own citizens with chemical weapons.
But we should do it in a methodical and thoughtful way.
Sending cruise missiles into Syria is not the answer.
I know some Clintonistas believed that because it worked in Bosnia, it will work in Syria, but I think those are different circumstances.
In Bosnia, the Serbs were crushing the Croats in an ethnic genocide. Bombing Sarajevo turned out to be only way to get Milosevic to stop his murderous campaign.
I doubt seriously that Obama will launch such a campaign, because he is somewhat ambivalent about the end result.
He should be. There are no democrats in Syria today, nor is there likely to be any time soon.
In the meantime, we should start legal proceedings against Assad now, and leave the missile response on the shelf .
We don’t need to inject ourselves directly in this bruising fight. We've got too many other things going on in this country.