Badra Mamet/Reuters

What Going To War In Syria Would Really Mean For The U.S. -- Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic

A brutal dictator, a violent terrorist group, and the morally fraught tradeoff that interventionists face

Attacking Adolf Hitler's Germany benefited moral monster Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. That inescapable fact of World War II doesn't mean it wasn't worth fighting Nazis. Under the circumstances, allying with Stalin to beat Hitler was the right call. But the consequences of that fraught alliance were themselves horrific. To ignore its downsides would be to misunderstand the real choices America faced.

Today in Syria, the United States faces another set of harrowing tradeoffs. Syria's leader, Bashar al-Assad, is a murderous dictator. The various rebel groups trying to wrest the country from his control include ISIS, a radical Sunni militia. To strike Assad, as Obama threatened to do last summer, would help ISIS. To strike ISIS, as the Obama administration is threatening to do right now, would help Assad. Those are the unsavory choices confronting all who favor intervention. And while the prospect of aiding and abetting Assad or ISIS doesn't decisively prove that intervention is unwise, it is at least a factor that Americans ought to confront with open eyes, rather than pretending the tradeoff away.

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My Comment: There are now no good options when it comes to Syria. This is a conflict that must run it's course .... and it now looks like it is going to be a few years of warfare before there is even a prospect of an end to the conflict.

Update: Here is an interesting post on a Syrian rebels story of fighting a war that he has grown weary of .... A Weary Rebel Retreats to Fight Another Day (New York Times)