By Will Van Gelder ’16

The Obama administration has been tying itself in knots as it goes back and forth on whether to take military action against the Syrian government of President Bashar Al-Assad. While this rhetoric has toned down in the last few weeks, it reached a fever pitch following the use of sarin gas by the Syrian military on August 21. This attack killed 1,400 people, including 400 children, in the neighborhood of Barzeh in the suburbs of the Syrian capitol of Damascus. The United States immediately reacted with threats of a missile attack and after first denying that it had these weapons, Syria soon started negotiations with Russia to destroy its chemical weapons cache to meet conditions of a UN resolution.

As the world’s only super power the United States has increasingly believed that it has a special role. Every time there is a sectarian conflict somewhere in the world that escalates into civil war, the United States feels compelled to get involved. Such examples include Somalia in 1993, Bosnia in 1995 and Libya just two short years ago. Of course, there also were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the case of Iraq, the United States concluded that it was its responsibility to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), which subsequently were never found.

The Syrian conflict started in early 2011 when citizens started to peacefully protest in many major Syrian cities against the tyrannical government. Later in the spring, the government started to fiercely crack down on these protests. By late 2011 many of these protesters had taken arms against the government and by mid-2012 a civil war had begun. This war’s violence has increased steadily and in return the Syrian government’s response has gotten more brutal and may have broken some human rights laws. According to reports, as many as 100,000 Syrian civilians had been killed.

In 1997, 189 countries agreed to ban chemical weapons as the international community concluded that such weapons were immoral even in the context of modern warfare. While what Syria did was horrible and broke international law, the United States should not get militarily involved in this far-off country’s brutal civil war. Military intervention has unintended consequences, both large and small. Recent history has proven this to be a fact. The use of targeted missile strikes on Syria could kill hundreds of civilians, and wouldn’t it be cruelly ironic if while trying to defend civilians the United States ended up killing them?

There’s also no guarantee that the missile attacks will stop Assad’s brutal tactics, and the United States could well be compelled to get involved more deeply in the Syrian conflict. If the missile attacks didn’t have the desired outcome, would the Obama administration then turn to the use of ground troops? Getting involved in this Syrian conflict could be a slippery slope; as the world’s self-declared police, the United States then would be responsible to militarily react to other countries’ development and use of chemical or nuclear weapons. The world is full of countries with governments that do some awful things. While this a tragedy, it is unrealistic to think that the United States can put an end to such suffering and injustice simply by dropping some bombs on the bad guys.