How dare people who are being murdered by their own government fight back! The nerve of some people!
Before we armed and trained them, the "rebels" were in exactly the same position as dissenters in Saddam-Iraq, present-day Turkey, pre-civil war Syria or Libya, or present-day Iran. If they rise up, then yes, their government will murder them. Once we armed and trained them, the "rebels" were able to push the Syrian government into a full-fledged civil war. That's when government murder ceases to be a retail affair and transitions to wholesale murder and misery, and that's on us. If it's a moral imperative to give these people the right to self-determination, then morally the Bush method is much superior as it removes the old repressive regime at a much lighter price to the people we are supposedly concerned with empowering.
Personally though, I prefer the Obama-Clinton model. Self-determination in Middle Eastern or indeed, many other Islamic nations inevitably results in people voting in theocratic overlords who immediately remove the people's right to self-determination. Knowing that, I see no reason to spend the lives of our best people to give them something they then throw away. If they wish to wrest control away from one dictator only to hand it to another, maybe helping them is still the moral thing to do, but it's not worth American lives. However, not giving them the power to make their neighbors' lives a living hell also has much to recommend it morally.
I've heard it said that Liberals are so open-minded and amenable to different points of view that they become easily morally paralyzed. It's sad to see so much of that in this thread and nice to see that some Liberals here don't drown when faced with terrible alternatives. Its sad that the fear of doing something evil, the contemplation of terrible ramifications and unintended results, can lead to moral paralysis. No serious mind, facing the slaughter of children by terrorists believes that actions taken to stop them can't lead to other terrible things. No serious mind believes that there is any action is right. But surely one must pick up the cross and suffer the dirt one gets on ones hands. I do not accept a world where children are butchered because I can't have everything I want. On the contrary, one must be willing to give up everything one has it seems to me.
The bolded has to be the unintentionally funniest thing ever typed on the Internet.
It's a psychic agency (or combination of several derivatives depending on your view) that I hold important in American society, but does that make it a universal societal ideal?
Even so, we cannot satisfy all of our psychic needs so we must compromise. Personally I'm very apprehensive about such a statement. There is not one right way to be human, and the character of a person might work drastically differently in different societies.
I'm not saying we should not draw hard ethical lines to protect human rights globally. I'm merely saying we ought not be comfortable that we've done it right or that we have a solution to their violation.
You have a point, but outside of Communist and Islamicist dogma, surely self determination is as close to a universal societal ideal as one can get.
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