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It won't happen. It won't happen because the media has stopped reporting about this--not as a result of conspiracy or indifference, but because there's no money for foreign news. Journalism is in profound crisis; you know why. No one has found a solution.
Because Americans haven't been seeing the images, hearing the stories, learning what's happening, day in and day out, they don't understand the gravity of the crisis. Thanks to Russia's highly effective information war,
those with some understanding of it believe Assad and Putin are "killing terrorists," which is to be applauded.
There is zero enthusiasm among Americans for intervention in this region. It would be highly unpopular.
There is zero enthusiasm among Americans for intervention in this region. It would be highly unpopular.
The widespread assumption in the US--and it may be right--is that "stopping it" would require an Iraq-war level intervention (with all that entailed) at best, and direct nuclear superpower conflict at worst.
Trump won, in part, because he promised to keep the US out of this kind of conflict. He is exceptionally sensitive to what his base thinks, and knows very well that his base is on Assad/Russia's side (to the extent they understand it).
Simultaneously, Trump has no sensitivity at all to moral arguments, or the idea that we might owe something to people overseas. His base certainly doesn't think we do. He's also insensate to strategic arguments about the US national interest.
He can't conceive that it would be in the US national interest to prevent this slaughter from continuing *and* that it is the right thing to do. Asking him to think that way is pointless; he can't do it. His mind doesn't work that way.
Everyone affected by this must be very clear-minded about this: The US is not going to intervene so long as Trump is president, and probably not afterward. They must make the best choices they can in the knowledge of this.
We--Americans--will look back on this in shame, and we will pay the price for it for generations. But there's nothing you or I or even people close to him can do to sway him. And he was chosen by the American people in a free election,
So it seems Americans will have to learn for themselves, all over again, what happens when you withdraw from the world and let evil do what it may.
