Syria Violence: Should someone step in?

[Mr Khan]

hatmoza said:

Mr Khan said:
Israel should take over Syria. Have to protect those interests in the Golan Heights, and any democratic Muslim regime is just going to end up supporting Hezbollah. They need a dictatorship, they just need the right kind of dictatorship, one which will keep the Arabs in line.

Believe it or not, there are a majority of innocent men, women and helpless kids who are killed on a daily basis in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Innocents who suffer because of a minority of extreme fundamentalists on one side, and a powerful military on the other.

So easy for you to generalize and pass judgement on a situation from the comfort of your computer seat. Do you even realize what you said? You want Syria to be conquered because they are going through a revolution?

Sickening Mr. Khan.

Mistakenly, it seems, i believed people were familiar enough with my reasonably anti-Israeli position to know that i was being facetious if i would advocate an Israeli takeover of Syria. I took the most egregious position i could think of for kicks.

Realistically, i don't know what should happen. For now the situation seems different from Libya, where the relative levels of violence are low (not saying it's low overall, but lower than how it was in Libya), and equally it does not seem as though Assad is willing to go into full-on massacre mode, so the immediate danger of this ballooning into an absolute human rights catastrophe seems to be low.

I recall in debates on this site that I advocated for exactly what ended up happening in Libya (military engagement to eliminate the Libyan Regime's heavy weapons capabilities to allow the rebels to win), but in Syria's case there doesn't seem to be the same kind of active rebellion, so it is harder to take a clear position on what should be done.

Ultimately a wait-and-see position seems to be the only realistic thing for anyone to do right now, with continued diplomatic pressure on the Assad regime to implement further political reforms (like acting on that new constitution they had a referendum on earlier). It does seem like there is an actual possibility that the Baathists could be negotiated with, so long as other powers did not take an extreme position (like "all Baathists must resign from government and military,") there is the possibility for peace, but i really don't know what Assad's endgame is here. Ultimately what needs to be seen is how far Assad is willing to concede, and what concessions the Syrian opposition is willing to accept. If either side has views that are too extreme, this problem could continue for a while