David Cole: Clogging the War Machine

What if President Obama had not gone to Congress, and instead acted the tough cowboy that some of his critics evidently think he should be? The bombs would by now have been launched. Countless more civilians might well be dead. Russia would not have had time to make its diplomatic offer and, responding to unilateral US action, might have dug in its support for Assad further, making peace negotiations all the more unlikely. Assad might well have felt a need to use the weapons again just to show he was not cowed by the United States. It’s possible, of course, that the missiles would have inflicted severe damage on the Syrian regime and its ability to launch further attacks. But that seems unlikely, in view of both the president’s own assertion that such attacks would be limited and not aimed at decisively changing the conflict, and the virtual certainty that we do not actually know where all the weapons are.

Mein Blog befasst sich in einem umfassenden Sinn mit dem Verhältnis von Wissen, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Ein besonderes Augenmerk richte ich dabei auf die Aktivitäten des Medien- und Dienstleistungskonzern Bertelsmann und der Bertelsmann Stiftung.