The Real Soution for the Sticky Syria Issue

Looks like we're going to war in Syria.

The Very Serious People will tell us in solemn tones how we have to send a message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and how since there will be no American boots on the grounds it would not really be a war anyway.

But footwear aside, it would be a war, and we'd just be following through on our death threats, with no good outcome really expected other than saving face.

Before I get to my solution, better read this.  It's from The Onion, a satirical web site, but it tells you better than the conventional media everything you need to know about the state of current affairs with respect to the whole Syrian issue.  Go ahead and click over, I'll wait.

Done?  Well, President Obama seems caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place, with no good options on the table.

But there is one option, in fact a very good one, so here's my advice to President Obama, in the form of the short address he should use to the world when he announces his course of action:

Pressident Bashar al-Assad is batshit crazy.  So crazy, in fact, that sending him any sort of military message would probably be futile.  It might make some of us feel better--you know, that whole eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth Old Testament stuff--but in point of fact any leader who would use weapons of mass destruction on his own people is already around the bend and immune to ordinary lesson-teaching.

Plus, no matter how well we'd target our weapons there would be more dead civilians.

So, we are not going to make a military response.  The hawks here in this country and around the world will get their panties all in a bunch, but what I've decided the United States will do instead is this. 

Our military strategists have figured out their recommended "proper response."  That is, just enough blown-up stuff to try to teach a lesson to al-Assad and for us to save face with the world, but not enough blown-up stuff to upset the balance in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

But rather than launch those munitions, we will instead take the $_____ billion that would have been expended on bombs and missiles and use it for humanitarian aid for the millions of Syrian civilians displaced or affected by this war.  We will fund doctors, nurses, medical supplies, food, safe drinking water, schools, and rebuild homes, villages, and infrastructure.  We invite our allies and others to join us in that effort.

That will send the correct message to al-Assad and the rest of the world, better than any missile could: that of beating our swords into plowshares, and our spears into pruning hooks.