Jag tänkte samla mig till ett inlägg om Syrien. Men så läste jag Tom Nichols och har för tillfället inget mer att tillägga. Läs hans text i sin helhet, men för den som har bråttom kommer här några citat:

”I am particularly tired of the retired generals out there hitting the airwaves, each of them gravely intoning the List of Horrible Consequences while offering almost nothing in the way of actual solutions. Over the past few days, I have watched Colin Powell do his usual equivocating, Robert Scales rumble about doom, and James “Spider” Marks affirm the need to do “something” while shooting holes in all the “somethings.” The generals, it seems, are busily hedging their comments so that nothing will come back to bite them no matter what happens.”

(Detta kan tillämpas för en och annan i den svenska debatten också, kan tilläggas.)

”Nothing, in my view, has become more tiresome than people making lists of things not to do while offering no alternatives other than generalities like “working with partners to help the Assad regime.” Yes, we’ll get right on that — as soon as we’ve dealt with this WMD use. The Syrian regime is going to pay some price for using WMD; if you’re not interested in figuring out what that price should be, you can probably stop telling the rest of us how gosh-darned complicated Syria is. We knew that part already, thanks.”

(Hänvisar i detta sammanhang till Vänsterpartiets pressmeddelande i frågan. Ett tips för den som vill förkovra sig i partipolitiska skillnader är att läsa Miljöpartiets parallellt.)

Och på temat tredje världskrig:

”The Russians not only will not go to war over Assad, they can’t. I don’t know where people get these ideas (first guess: Google University), but the Russian Navy isn’t even remotely capable of getting in NATO’s way in the Med. Unless Vladimir Putin wants to threaten a nuclear war for Bashar Assad, this is not an issue. The Russians, as my colleague Nick Gvosdev points out, will get their pound of flesh for this in some way later, but not in a war.”

Nichols avslutar med följande rader, som tål att begrunda i ”symbolpolitikdebatten”:

”There are options that lie between invasion and doing nothing.They do not have the perfect exit strategies and democratic Syrians or meet any of the other impossible conditions anti-interventionists insist on as surrogates for the fact that they simply do not want to intervene. But (as Jeffrey Lewis argued yesterday) they can acheive the immediate goals of establishing consequences for WMD use, and maybe even save some lives.”