On Syria

[ilanin]

enismirdal wibbled a bit about Syria and invited sensible comments, I had too much to say so this became a post. Due to the nature of it as a reply this may make more sense if you read what she said first.

Comments

[enismirdal]

This is interesting. I still feel equally conflicted, but it pretty much highlights several points I already suspected to be the case. I guess you're right that from a terrorism-reduction strategy, bombing the bajeesus out of Daesh in Raqqa would probably be fairly effective. (That said, reducing the speed limit on every UK road by 5mph would, presumably, save about 10 times as many lives over the next 10 years because we are all still way more likely to die in a road accident than from a suicide bomber

[sildil]

Very interesting and clearly put. It confirms much of what I think and has challenged (gently!) some of the other thoughts I had. I linked Matthew Paris' article to Enismerdal, as I thought that was very interesting as well; http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4626165.ece

[naath]

I guess we could just nuke Syria until it glows, and then the *Syrian* problem would be "solved" in as much as no-one really wants to occupy a radioactive wasteland...

But it doesn't seem likely to solve the larger problem of "there are some people who hate us and want to stage terror attacks on us", it's not even going to take away their ability to cook up a bomb in their shed or buy a gun on the black market.

We seem to keep getting *into* wars without a clear strategy for how to win, or even what counts as winning, and how we intend to get out once we have "won". We have a lot of very nice precision bombing capability, but we don't actually seem to have any "fixing fucked up countries" capability *at all*.