Iraq turmoil sparks Syria debate in US
, by none other than President Obama, as people who do not understand that force is not the solution to every question, BBC said in news briefed by “Shafaq News”.
Now that the unrest in Syria has spread to neighbouring Iraq, she says, the Obama administration appears to be changing its tune.
"The sudden turn of events leaves people like me scratching our heads," the former director of policy planning at the State Department during Mr Obama's first term writes. "Why is the threat of ISIS in Iraq a sufficiently vital interest, but not the rise of ISIS in Syria - and a hideous civil war that has dismembered Syria itself and destabilised Lebanon, Jordan and now Iraq?"
The Obama administration sees the world in "two planes", she writes:
[There's] the humanitarian world of individual suffering, where no matter how heart-rending the pictures and how horrific the crimes, American vital interests are not engaged because it is just people; and the strategic world of government interests, where what matters is the chess game of one leader against another, and stopping both state and non-state actors who are able to harm the United States.
It refuses to acknowledge that the two "are inextricably linked", she says.
The US priority should be doing what it can to help the people in both Syria and Iraq because that is the only way the region will be stable, she asserts.
By allowing the Syrian government of Bashar Assad to continue to commit atrocities against its people, she says, it allows "violence, displacement and fanaticism" to flourish.
Mr Obama should seek the support of the United Nations for action - beforehand if possible, but after the fact if necessary.
"This is not merely a humanitarian calculation," she writes. "It is a strategic calculation. One that, if the president had been prepared to make it two years ago, could have stopped the carnage spreading today in Syria and in Iraq."
The Nation's Bob Dreyfuss is not convinced.
"So, like the hawks and neoconservatives of the Republican Party," he writes, "Slaughter is blaming Obama for the crisis, since if he acted with force 'two years ago' everything in Iraq and Syria would be dandy."
He says it's true that the Syria and Iraq uprisings have become a "single conflict", but it is "a regional one, pitting Saudi proxies and allies against Iranian ones, in a war that is both sectarian (Sunni v Shiite) and a geopolitical, state-v-state struggle for regional hegemony".
The American Conservative's Daniel Larison says Slaughter has been called a warmonger because she has never met a military intervention she didn't support.
She may not like the label, he says, but it fits - and it serves a purpose.
"If supporters of intervention are accurately called warmongers, that will tend to make it harder to get the US into new wars, and that is bound to be frustrating for them," he writes. "I'm just not sure why the rest of us should care."
