Let Syria Bleed

“Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the graveyard.” ~ graffiti all over Eastern Syria

All the Very Serious People are at it again. Something must be done about Syria - meaning Assad. Because he's a dictator and we don't like dictators anymore. If that comes as a surprise to you, you're not alone.

Last week, Assad and his official Syrian army took Qusair. Not that Qusair is really all that important for our discussion today - but what is important is if and how many Hezbollah troops helped out. The Very Serious People, from Fox to HuffPo, are calling for The West - meaning America - to arm the brave rebels as they can't stand up to the combined might of Assad and Hezbollah.

This is stupid.

What none of the Very Serious People care to take seriously is how the Syrian Civil War is a bloody gang fight. There are no good guys here - not that there ever are - and any intervention will just be strengthening one faction of throat-slitters against all the others.

Like the precious rebels, for example. The Sunni majority with loud and proud ties to Al Qaeda, among others. When the Very Serious People hear that little fact, their binary processors short out and they either ignore it or double down - saying we can somehow pick and choose who gets the stinger missiles this time. Like how John McCaine could pick and choose who he was photographed with.

Which one is the scrappy freedom fighter and which one is the Jihad-happy mass-murderer?*

Though none of that matters because, like all "humanitarian" interventions, this is about the principle of the thing. We gotta do the Right Thing in helping the Little Guy - even if the Little Guy in this case is a terrorist-backed cannibal. Context doesn't factor into all this principle shit because it muddies the waters, demonstrates that the people we may be trying to help aren't really worth the trouble. The Albanians NATO came to help in the Kosovo War weren't exactly damsels in distress and the Iraqis were so happy to be free of Saddam Hussein that they murdered over four thousand American troops.

"Well then what should we do?" I hear you ask, because you stupid types are so very loud.

Simple - let them bleed.

Syria is the current hot spot in the cold war between Sunnis and Shi'ites that went red hot once the Bush Administration rolled into Baghdad. This conflict is religious like the Thirty Years War, two factions hashing it out over some point of doctrinal difference from hundreds of years ago. In Syria, you've got Assad the Shi'ite on one side - so he gets help from Hezbollah and Iran - and Sunni rebels on the other. And Sunni rebels get all their help from Al Qaeda, from post-invasion Iraq to Chechnya.

Now Jordan and Saudi Arabia and other despotic regimes in the region are rightly scared that the war in Syria will spill over into their little kingdoms. Fair enough - and to be expected the Syrian war arguably being a side effect of the Iraq War. Only instead of promoting democracy throughout the region like the neocon fantasy said, it's been inspiring separatist jihadis.

That's a problem itself, but it's not gonna be fixed by running around the Middle East pretending to be Superman with crates of Kalashnikovs.

*All of them.