A Guardian commentator critiques Tony Blair’s call to arms against Syria, arguing that it won’t make any difference.
“I am not saying that armed intervention is always mistaken. If it could help fix things, or even improve them, all well and good. And that is where a plan comes in. But if the logic is simply that Assad is a 24-carat wrong-un, that his use of chemical weapons against his own people is a moral outrage, therefore we need to act – then we are doing little more than satisfying our own sense of retributive morality, and one that has become blurred with a large dollop of action-hero crap.”
I’m actually a Blair Doctrine person myself, but I have various common-sense qualifiers the man himself never applies to situations. When applied to Syria, it’s very clear we shouldn’t intervene, in my opinion. And I think if you’re broadly pro-intervention along the lines of the Blair Doctrine, you have to also exercise restraint in some cases (picking your battles literally) or else you won’t be able to intervene in other situations where you can do some good. We can’t intervene everywhere so we shouldn’t try or we’ll be able to intervene nowhere.
