John2290 said:
How about nothing. Let Assad have the country at least it'll be some semblance of peace, let the people there decide if they want to continue fighting or accept Assad. America should tell Israel to fight their own damn battles for once without bringing the rest of the world into it, cut ties with that country and let the middle east get on in the way they want to get on instead of dragging out suffering for more centuries to come. Let America withdraw from the middle east like Trump promised he would. Make trade deals and not war. Where was America or the west when Russia took Crimea? Nowhere because there's no oil in Crimeas general area and it poses no threat to Israel. |
The people did decide they want to fight around the time of the "Arab Spring", and they're still resisting despite being massacred and starved against air superiority with which they cannot compete. The issue is that the vast, vast majority of interference in Syria has been the support for Assad's regime given by Russia and Iran. If no outsiders had involved themselves Assad would have fallen almost immediately, but Iran and especially Russia have completely saved his ass with the kind of resources and air support he needed to push back and gradually take rebel strongholds.
There's no chance that the Middle East would cease to be meddled with if the US left; if anything, that would just create an even larger vacuum and embolden regional powers. It should be noted, after all, that the US had to ask France to wait for them with this latest strike, as they were immediately prepared and anxious to respond to this latest use of chemical weapons. Were the US not here, a bombing still would have taken place.
Like I said, there's no real option that feels proper and doesn't screw over enormous swaths of the population there in some way or another. In the end, all the US did was bomb a few targets where chemical weapons were produced or stored and no deaths were reported... I imagine Russia will put extreme pressure on them to make sure no chemical weapons are used in the future, and pretty much nothing else has changed.