As I post this, John McCain announced on the Senate floor that this administration has decided to assist the Syrian rebels through various means. Because of this I thought I should post excerpts from an interview between the Times of Israel and Michael Walzer of the Institute for Advanced Study on the subject:
"Now you have jihadi fighters on the one hand and Hezbollah on the other, and it really doesn't look like there's much to choose between," Walzer said. "It's almost impossible to describe a desirable outcome in this civil war, and if you don't have a desirable outcome — you can't intervene."...From the early days of the Syrian uprising, Walzer argued that three conditions must be met for the US to intervene militarily, conditions that were sorely disregarded when it engaged the Qaddafi regime in Libya in 2011. Firstly, the US must "pick a winner" and make sure he is capable of governing Syria; secondly, the US must secure Assad's weapons arsenal and prevent it from leaking into neighboring countries; and finally the new (presumably) Sunni government must guarantee the physical safety of the country's minorities: Alawites, Druze, Christians and Kurds.
"The only way to achieve these goals is with troops on the ground," Walzer argued, adding that no one in the American political system is willing to pay that price.
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