More traitor than hero. Much more.

It seems the more that comes out about NSA "whistleblower" Edward Snowden, the less he looks like a whistleblower and the more he looks like a straight-up traitor. In From the Cold gives more of his distasteful story:

As of this writing, the man who exposed the crown jewels of NSA's intelligence-gathering activities is still on the international concourse at the Moscow Airport, apparently awaiting a flight to Havana, the next stop on his way to Ecuador.
So far, Mr. Snowden has missed at least two flights to Cuba, but (apparently) he has little to worry about--at least on the Russia leg of his global adventure. Various Russian leaders, including Vladimir Putin, have stated they have no intention of turning Putin over to U.S. authorities. True, there is no formal treaty covering such matters between the United States and Russia, but we have extradited at least seven individuals back to Moscow in recent years. As in most aspects of the bi-lateral relationship, extradition is clearly a one-way street.
But the travels of Edward Snowden raise some rather interesting (and dangerous) possibilities. While much of the world hails him as a hero, there is the very real chance that Snowden is nothing more than a spy, masquerading as a whistle-blower. As Bloomberg reported yesterday:

U.S. intelligence agencies are investigating whether Edward Snowden’s leaks may be a Chinese intelligence operation or whether China might have used his concerns about U.S. surveillance practices to exploit him, according to four American officials.
The officials emphasized there’s no hard evidence yet that Snowden was a Chinese agent or that China helped plan his flights to Hong Kong and then to Moscow, directly or through a witting or unwitting intermediary. Rather, they are duty-bound to probe such a worst-case scenario for the U.S., said the officials, who are familiar with the case and asked not to be identified to discuss classified intelligence. 

Well, since the beginning of this affair that has been the big question, alongside "What is your name?", "What is your quest?", "What is your favorite color?" and "What is the capital of Assyria?" But right now, it is us being tossed into the Gorge of Eternal Peril. The release of Snowden's information coincided with the a visit by Chinese leadership to the US in the aftermath of revelations that the Chinese had been hacking US government networks. In From the Cold gives the caveat, but then gives the caveat a caveat:

To be fair, the potential "Beijing connection" may be little more than an effort by the intel community--and the Obama Administration--to cover their collective posteriors. Counter-intelligence officials were reportedly aware of Snowden's massive download of NSA collection documents in mid-May, about the time he left Hawaii and traveled to Hong Kong.
Yet, the collective resources of the FBI (on American soil) and the CIA (overseas) were unable to prevent Snowden from leaving the United States. Equally embarrassing, the same agencies have had difficulty keeping up with him as he circles the globe, and there has been no talk about possibly nabbing him. Might we suggest a little light reading about the Mossad operation that capture Adolf Eichmann in Argentina?

Another piece of this still-incomplete puzzle is that Snowden didn't actually just fall into this classified information. He sought it out:

Edward Snowden took a job with a firm that provides contractors to the National Security Agency solely to gather evidence about U.S. surveillance programs, the self-avowed leaker told the South China Morning Post Newspaper.
"My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked," the Post quoted him as saying in a story published Monday. "That is why I accepted that position about three months ago."
The documents Snowden has revealed so far -- he claims to have thousands more -- revealed classified details of U.S. programs to monitor domestic telephone traffic, as well as the activities of Internet users overseas.
He has also said the National Security Agency hacks into major Internet pipelines to intercept millions of communications flowing through them each day.

That sorta changes things, doesn't it? No one is claiming Snowden is the sharpest crayon in the box. He's a high school dropout, yet he not only ended up with a treasure trove of highly classified signals intelligence but he managed to elude the CIA and the FBI and escape the country. He claims he did it because, to paraphrase, he saw the US becoming more like China and Russia, so he flees to ... China and Russia. The first place he fled was to China. This does not make sense. He is obviously being played, but by whom is the question.

Did China put him up to this? In From the Cold:

[T]here are hints that Snowden may have shared that treasure trove of top secret documents with his Chinese hosts during that sojourn in Hong Kong. Call it the "price of admission." While the former British colony enjoys more autonomy (and freedom) than other parts of China, the harboring of an individual like Mr. Snowden doesn't happen by accident, or without the approval of senior leadership in Beijing.
And, given the fact the Chinese have been so accommodating to the former intelligence analyst, it's quite likely they got something in return; namely, detailed information on NSA collection efforts against the PRC's computer networks. With that sort of windfall, it's quite reasonable that Beijing would offer protection, clearance for a private jet flight on to Moscow, and other forms of compensation.
In other words, Snowden may be no different from Robert Hanssen, Rick Ames, John Walker and other turncoats who sold out their country for good, old-fashioned cash. After all, Snowden needs some way to pay the bills, beyond future income for book and movie deals. For the type of information he may have provided, Snowden could receive millions of dollars from spymasters in Beijing and Moscow. That could support a very comfortable lifestyle in Havana, Quito, or other locations beyond the reach of American extradition laws. 

Not beyond reasonable doubt, but the circumstantial evidence is piling up, and many do not like where it is leading. Patterico:

If you’re wedded to the narrative of Snowden-as-hero, then he Struck a Blow for Truth and Justice, and it hardly matters that he is furnishing unfriendly countries with information that has zero to do with exposing surveillance of U.S. citizens — but gives those countries a propaganda victory, or perhaps something even more valuable, like a technical roadmap of our surveillance network. To make a whistleblower omelet, you gotta crack open a few choice secrets for our enemies, to encourage them to facilitate your escape from the country you’re trying to save.
[...]
The more I learn about Snowden, the more I find his actions distasteful — and I haven’t seen anything he revealed that is obviously a violation of the Fourth Amendment. When media outlets broke the SWIFT story during Bush’s tenure, I was outraged. While I was torn about prosecuting the journalists, I wanted to explore whether the journalists should be prosecuted if they knowingly helped reveal classified information about an effective and legal program — and I leaned slightly towards the view that prosecution was wise. Tell me why I should not feel the same way about this. I know it’s very fashionable to say that it’s unthinkable to “prosecute journalists for journalism” — but if national security information is legitimately classified, helps us fight terrorism, and is knowingly revealed by a “journalist,” I don’t know that such actions are obviously beyond prosecution.
As I said in 2006, a lot of it comes down to whether the journalist is exposing wrongdoing or whether they are just telling our secrets. Often they think they are doing the former when they are just doing the latter.
Does a spy get to be a hero if he is revealing secrets to “We the People” as well as Russia and China to buy off their cooperation? 

(emphasis in original)

Allahpundit:

Snowden’s fans think he’s morally justified in doing basically anything he has to in order to stay out of the feds’ clutches, whether it be handing propaganda windfalls to Russia and China by seeking refuge there or threatening to spill a gigantic treasure trove of sensitive information. Maybe they’ll draw the line if/when we find out he paid off his protectors with intelligence — as Greenwald now admits Snowden did to a small degree in revealing the IP addresses of Chinese computers hacked by the NSA — but I doubt it. This is why it gets stupider by the day to say that the story of his escape is merely a distraction from the far more important story of U.S. surveillance capabilities. How is it “distracting” to know there’s a guy running around in China and Russia with huge stores of state secrets, essentially blackmailing the government to let him leak selectively with impunity or else he’ll leak indiscriminately? On what planet is that a non-story?
[...]
As for the point that all of this stuff has been carefully vetted, Snowden’s critics toss around the word “narcissistic” usually without explaining what they mean, but this is a fine example of it. He seems to believe he’s reached a degree of omniscience where he can pick and choose what to leak with confidence that it won’t put people at risk, won’t injure the American public’s interest in its own national security, and won’t give rogue regimes critical information on how to improve surveillance. Why he thinks this, I have no idea. Whatever he has and however long he’s sifted through it, he can’t see the entire chessboard, especially on the enemy’s side of the board. To take a minor example, the stuff he leaked about the NSA spying on Medvedev at the G20 a few years ago noted that the U.S. thought it had discovered a change in the way the Russians were transmitting their leadership signals. Did Russia realize that before the Guardian’s story was published a few weeks ago? Probably. Maybe not. Who knows? Does Snowden? And if that’s the sort of thing he’s willing to leak to a paper, what’s in the doomsday files that he doesn’t feel comfortable sharing with journalists (yet)? It’s amazing to me that he feels he can tell what’s truly damaging and what isn’t, and that he thinks he can keep this information secret at his whim from intelligence services all over the world. Frankly, knowing now about the doomsday files, don’t enemies like Russia and China have an extra incentive to disappear him? If anything happens to him, Snowden’s defenders will assume that it was U.S. intel that did it; presumably that’ll trigger the doomsday files, and that’ll give Russia, China, and everyone else access to whatever’s in Snowden’s secret stash. I’m not sure, in other words, that the doomsday stuff doesn’t jeopardize his safety more than it protects it.
It’s hard to recall now, but this clusterfark began ostensibly because Snowden’s conscience could no longer tolerate infringements on Americans’ civil liberties by the U.S. government. Are we to believe, then, that everything in the doomsday files is related to that narrow subject too? If it is, then why is he holding it back? Release it and help the civil libertarian cause before it’s too late. If it isn’t, then why did he take it in the first place and why is he threatening to release it now? We seem to be paying an increasingly steep price in blows to national security for what we’ve learned about data-mining.

"Comprehensive immigration reform"

is the subject of my latest column for Independent Voter Network.

Think this whole Senkaku Island dispute is nothing?

Via Information Dissemination, This is, apparently, an actual model of the aircraft carrier ... er, destroyer (yeah, that's it. A destroyer! That's it! That's the ticket!) Hyuga for sale in Japan:

Isn't that a Chinese aircraft carrier sinking in the background? 

As if the message was not clear enough, the model is the "Operation Senkaku" variant.

China really should not be trying to piss off Japan. Two words: Kido Butai.

Can it happen?

I have gotten sidetracked this week by the new video game The Last of Us, which was released last week. I had not planned to buy it, but with its glowing reviews (some have compared its potential effect on video games to what Citizen Kane did for movies) and the fact that much of it takes place in my ancestral home of Pittsburgh, I broke down and bought it. I’m not all the way through the game yet, but I have to agree with the glowing reviews.

Screen shot from magazine GameInformer of The Last of Us in one of the game's Pittsburgh chapters. Visible here are the US Steel Tower, BNY Mellon Center, One Oxford Centre, and the Fort Duquesne Bridge. Also making an appearance in the game is Fifth Avenue Place and the underpass of either the Liberty Avenue Bridge or the Boulevard of the Allies. While these features are not necessarily in their proper locations or proportions, the designers obviously did a lot of research into downtown Pittsburgh.

That said, The Last of Us is not for everyone. The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic United States. In that respect, it is similar to the popular Fallout series, in which you run around the mostly depopulated, anarchic, post-nuclear wasteland of the US, crawling inside ruins of famous monuments, avoiding mutants, bandits, and high-radiation areas, and generally just trying to survive. While I like the Fallout series and find it to be an interesting game, it is very depressing. And I do not understand why many fans of its publisher Bethesda were excited when Bethesda cut off further development of downloadable content for its hugely successful Skyrimtitle (with its story still unfinished) because they thought it was putting resources into the next Fallout game.

But The Last of Us makes the depressing Falloutlook like Disney World by comparison. While Fallout tempers its grim story with an acknowledgment that it could never happen, largely because before the nuclear war the United States as depicted in Fallout was some weird 1950’s-style creature with futuristic technology – in short, a country that never existed – The Last of Us goes out of its way to explain that what was destroyed was the United States as you know it now, as well as at least 60% of the world population.

The apocalypse that forms the basis of The Last of Us’ world is not a nuclear war, but an almost overnight biological pandemic. A mutated strain of the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis (“cordyceps”) infected much of the population, turning them into zombie-like creatures. In that respect The Last of Us is like the Resident Evil series and other survival horror games (though regrettably Resident Evil seems to have abandoned that genre as of late). The zombie apocalypse has always been a mainstay for horror. It can be far more frightening than nuclear attack inasmuch as while a nuclear attack is devastating to life and property, once it destroys, kills, poisons, and irradiates, that’s it. There are devastating after effects, but once it happens, it’s done and steps can be taken to start some sort of recovery. By contrast, the zombie apocalypse is ongoing. What it does not kill it turns into more zombies. Their presence puts anyone at risk of becoming a zombie and makes large areas uninhabitable. You can’t start recovery because you can’t stop the zombie outbreak.

Which is exactly what happens in The Last of Us. The cordyceps is initially spread through spores. You inhale the spores and the fungus starts growing inside your body and gradually taking over and destroying higher brain functions. Removal of the cordyceps without killing the host is impossible. In the case of the most hated enemies in the game, the “Clickers,” the fungus has taken over them entirely. The cordyceps has taken over their bodies entirely, warping them physically, growing over the top of their heads and through their eye sockets, destroying their eyesight. They can only see by “clicking” for echolocation. Their humanity destroyed, the Clickers only goal is to spread the cordyceps fungus, this time by biting.

The very limited backstory to The Last of Usindicates the cordyceps outbreak spread almost overnight. With removal of the fungus impossible and all attempt at vaccination ineffective, the US government tried to set up “quarantine zones” around major cities where the uninfected could live relatively safely behind walls and barricades. But as the uninfected population continued to fall and as many of the remaining uninfected were wracked by despair and privation, many of the quarantine zones were abandoned or fell to bandits, civil war, and the cordyceps itself. The government of the United States still exists in The Last of Us, but it controls only a few cities of the continental United States, under a state of emergency, its security forces hypervigilant and at times corrupt.

It’s a horrifying picture, a horrifying story, made much more uncomfortable by the fact that the Ophiocordyceps unilateralisfungus is an actual real-life infectious fungus.

So, can The Last of Us actually happen?

It probably helps and is very comforting to know that while the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus is an actual real-life infectious fungus, it only affects ants, grasshoppers, spiders, and other insects and arachnids. In fact, it’s considered a good thing to help control these populations. Given the differences in physiology and biochemistry between insects and humans, the possibility of cordyceps spreading to humans is minimal.

Even if it did spread, the possibility that the cordyceps would spread the way it does in The Last of Us and affect human behavior is almost zero. While the cordyceps has been known to wipe out entire colonies of ants, it is not known to turn infected ants into attacking mutants. What it does do is, as the fungus grows within and on the ant, it turns the ant into a zombie who climbs to an overhanging leaf and clamp down on a major vein with its mandibles. Then the ant dies and the fungus turns the corpse into a fruiting body to spread the spores. What it certainly does not do until the ant’s death is destroy physical abilities of the ant, such as its eyesight, which would seem to actually inhibit the spread of the fungus. Obviously and quite understandably, Naughty Dog, the developers of The Last of Us, took some liberties for purposes of putting together a gripping story.

The portrayal of the collapse of civilization in The Last of Us is chilling but history strongly suggests a major pandemic would play out much differently. If one examines what is believed to be the worst pandemic in human history, the Black Death, which killed an estimated 75 million – 200 million people across the Eastern Hemisphere in the 14^th century, one can find few similarities with The Last of Us. The Black Death (still not fully explained but often believed to be a form of bubonic, pneumonic, and septicimic plague spread by the rat-spread Yersinia pestisbacterium) wiped out an estimated 30-60% of Europe’s population, including entire towns. It caused major socio-economic upheaval across Europe (check out Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, for instance), but government (albeit government a lot more limited than it is today) never ceased functioning, never retreated into walled, barricaded cities, never abandoned large portions of the territory it ruled to the plague. And that was when the cause and spread of the Black Death was entirely unknown and government’s response to it almost totally ineffective.

The US government’s response to disasters is not always stellar (see, eg, Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy), but it is far, far better than is the norm across the globe, and it is far, far better than is portrayed in The Last of Us, in which the government response is actually worse than the response to the Black Death more than six centuries ago. Tools for fighting the cordyceps infection, such as gas masks, ingress screenings and bleach (to kill the fungus itself), are shown in The Last of Us and would in real life form the basis of a much more effective response than the one seen in the video game.

So, The Last of Us is a great game, a great story, and a great chance to ask “What if?” And it should be enjoyed (if one can “enjoy” such a depressing scenario) as such. But the actual possibility of The Last of Us happening is next to zero.

New column for Independent Voter Network

As regular readers of this blog and my old blog, as well as followers of my Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts know, my political beliefs are rooted in my own theory of government, with the result that my positions vary from the far right (generally defense, foreign policy, and crime, which I talk about most often) to the far left (gay rights, drug legalization, abortion). Some would consider me an independent, others a maverick. I consider myself a Jeffist.

A few months ago I was contacted by  the Independent Voter Network, a group based in my adopted home of San Diego that presents news and op-eds from the viewpoints of people like myself who are either not easy to pin down ideologically or whose positions are all over the political spectrum depending on the issue. IVN asked if I would be interested in writing for them. At the time, I was immersed in completing the manuscript for Rising Sun, Falling Skies and told them I'd be happy to write for them, but that I could not do so until the manuscript was completed, which would be at the end of May.

Well, IVN has waited patiently, and so today marks my first column for them. It is a discussion of Rob Portman's change of heart on gay marriage in particular and takes a different look at politicians changing their positions in general. This piece is called In Defense of Flip-Flopping. I hope it provides food for thought. 

In the meantime, check out some of the other fine work of the Independent Voter Network.

Sayonara San Onofre

Well, this sucks:

Southern California Edison announced plans on Friday to shut down the troubled San Onofre nuclear power plant.
SCE planned to permanently retire Units 2 and 3 at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), the utility said in a news release.
Unit 2 was taken out of service on January 9, 2012, for a planned routine outage.
Shortly thereafter, Unit 3 was taken offline on January 31, 2012, after a small leak was detected in a tube inside a steam generator.
Unexpected wear was found in the metal tubing that carries radioactive water in all four of the plant’s steam generators, two for each reactor.
SCE cited uncertainty surrounding a proposal to restart Unit 2, as well as costs, as the reasons for its decision.
It submitted a plan to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in October 2012 to restart Unit 2 at 70 percent capacity for an initial period of five months.
That plan has been under review ever since, and several public meetings have been held on the matter.
However, a recent ruling by an arm of the NRC created further uncertainty about when a decision would be made on the restart plan, SCE officials said.
Additional administrative processes and appeals could result in delay of more than a year, according to SCE.
During that time, the costs of maintaining San Onofre and the costs to replace the power it previously provided would continue.
The company decided that the continuing uncertainty was not good for customers or investors, Edison International Chairman and CEO Ted Carver said.

My very early years were spent in Toledo, so the very first nuclear power plant I ever saw was Davis-Besse. As we would drive by it within shouting distance of its cooling tower, I remember being mesmerized by that giant cooling tower and all the power lines, transformers and transmission towers going in to and our from the complex. I've always liked Davis-Besse for that reason. San Onofre, however, has a completely different design, one that has become famous for reasons unrelated to energy:

About to be busted: the San Onofre nuclear power plant. (KUSI.com)

The first time I drove down the 5 to San Diego from Los Angeles and saw these ... things between the freeway and the Pacific, I had no idea what they were. They looked extraterrestrial. Then I remembered they had been shown in the movie Naked Gun. 

Southern California will suffer from the loss of generating capacity from San Onofre. My beloved adopted home of San Diego and Los Angeles will likely face brownouts and skyrocketing electric rates. Of course, when you refuse to build power plants, you can expect that.

Syrian Chemistry

So, it seems the moment both the far left and the far right in the US have been dreading is here: confirmation that the Assad regime in Syria has used chemical weapons:

American and European intelligence analysts now believe that President Bashar al-Assad’s troops have used chemical weapons against rebel forces in the civil war in Syria, an assessment that will put added pressure on a deeply divided Obama administration to develop a response to a provocation that the president himself has declared a “red line.”
According to an internal memorandum circulating inside the government on Thursday, the “intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year.” President Obama said in April that the United States had physiological evidence that the nerve gas sarin had been used in Syria, but lacked proof of who used it and under what circumstances. He now believes that the proof is definitive, according to American officials.
But a flurry of high-level meetings in Washington this week only underscored the splits within the Obama administration about what actions to take to quell the fighting, which has claimed more than 90,000 people. The meetings were hastily arranged after Mr. Assad’s troops — joined by fighters from the militant group Hezbollah — claimed the strategic city of Qusayr and raised fears in Washington that large parts of the rebellion could be on the verge of collapse.
Senior State Department officials have been pushing for an aggressive military response, including airstrikes to hit the primary landing strips in Syria that the government uses to launch the chemical weapons attacks, ferry troops around the country, and receive shipments of matériel from Iran. But White House officials remain wary, and one American official said that a meeting on Wednesday of the president’s senior advisers yielded no firm decisions about how to proceed.
It is unclear precisely how the Obama administration made its final determination about the chemical weapons use in Syria. According to the internal memorandum, intelligence agencies have “high confidence” in their assessment, and estimate that between 100 and 150 people have died to date from chemical weapons attacks. The memorandum goes on to say that the conclusion is based on a variety of intelligence.
“Our intelligence community has high confidence in that assessment given multiple, independent streams of information,” the memorandum said.

More details on possible military options from the Wall Street Journal:

A U.S. military proposal for arming Syrian rebels also calls for a limited no-fly zone inside Syria that would be enforced from Jordanian territory to protect Syrian refugees and rebels who would train there, according to U.S. officials.
Asked by the White House to develop options for Syria, military planners have said that creating an area to train and equip rebel forces would require keeping Syrian aircraft well away from the Jordanian border.
To do that, the military envisages creating a no-fly zone stretching up to 25 miles into Syria which would be enforced using aircraft flown from Jordanian bases and flying inside the kingdom, according to U.S. officials.
The White House is currently considering proposals to arm the rebels in Jordan, according to U.S. officials. White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden declined to comment on the details of those deliberations.
The limited no-fly zone wouldn't require the destruction of Syrian antiaircraft batteries, U.S. officials said.
Officials said the White House could decide to authorize the U.S. to arm and train rebels in Jordan without authorizing the no-fly zone recommended by military planners. A White House announcement could come soon, officials said.

That would be my preferred course of action -- not ground troops and maybe not even a no-fly zone. Assuming we can even identify non-Islamist opposition groups (a big assumption). There is deep opposition within the American electorate for "military action" in Syria, which can limit our options. As Allahpundit pointed out:

I’ll repeat what I said in this post last month about polls showing deep opposition to U.S. action in Syria: The only way he can sell it is by emphasizing the WMD angle. If you look back at the polling data, only when chemical weapons are mentioned does public opinion against getting involved there begin to soften. Go figure that U.S. intelligence would suddenly conclude that sarin has been used at precisely the same time that Obama’s looking to intervene in Syria for strategic reasons unrelated to WMD — namely, that if the rebels aren’t reinforced soon somehow, Assad and Hezbollah might roll right over them and the big upcoming “peace” conference will be even more meaningless than it’s expected to be. One of the ironies of the U.S. putting such stock in the peace talks, notes Aaron David Miller, is that when they inevitably fail, military intervention of some form will be the only option left to Obama. He boxed himself in. Maybe he realized that and decided to get the ball rolling today. Another grand irony is that if you asked Americans what they’re most afraid of vis-a-vis Assad and WMD, most would probably say it’s the prospect of jihadi rebels overrunning his stockpiles and using those chemical weapons against western targets. Well, thanks to Assad’s recent victory streak, that seems less likely than ever right now. And yet here we are.

Maybe. I do not necessarily believe chemical weapons need be the "red line" that Obama portrayed it to be. The use of chemical weapons in, say, Outer Mongolia, would not necessarily warrant a US response.

The issue here is the that 1. the Syrian war is rapidly expanding, drawing in Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, and Jordan; and B. we have a chance to dump a real bad guy in Assad who is currently front man for an anti-American, anti-Western cabal in Syria-Iran-Hezbo'allah. As the always-readable Michael Totten explained it last year:

Syria’s tyrant Bashar al-Assad is in the middle of a life-or-death struggle. He might be overthrown. He should be.
The Arab Socialist Baath Party regime, beginning with its founder Hafez al-Assad and continuing through the rule of his son Bashar, is the deadliest state sponsor of terrorism in the Arab Middle East. It assisted the bloodthirsty insurgency in Iraq that killed American soldiers by the thousands and murdered Iraqi civilians by the tens of thousands. It has used both terrorism and conventional military power to place Lebanon under its boot since the mid-1970s. It made Syria into the logistics hub for Hezbollah, the best-equipped and most lethal non-state armed force in the world. It has waged a terrorist war against Israel and the peace process for decades, not only from Lebanon, but also from the West Bank and Gaza. And it is Iran’s sole Arab ally and its bridge to the Mediterranean.
Tehran is the head of the Iranian-Syrian-Hamas-Hezbollah resistance bloc, and Syria is the junior partner in the alliance, but both governments have American blood under their fingernails. Unlike Damascus, however, Tehran may acquire nuclear weapons capability within the next couple of years. If we could take only one member of that bloc off the board, we’d be wise to pick the Iranian government. The Syrian government, though, is the second-best option. And it’s lower-hanging fruit right now because Assad is facing an armed insurrection.
Short of regime change in Tehran, the overthrow of Assad is the worst thing that can happen to the Iranian government and to Hezbollah. Iran will lose its only ally in the Arab world, and Hezbollah will lose one of only two patrons and its entire overground logistics network. Scud missiles and other enormous weapons can’t exactly be mailed to Hezbollah from Iran through the Beirut international airport.
A fresh government in Damascus will almost certainly be less friendly toward Iran and Hezbollah and more friendly toward Lebanon. Beirut will be able to make more of its own decisions, which are naturally closer to what the US and Israel would like, even if they aren’t ideal. So many of Lebanon’s politicians are currently bribed and bullied by Assad into doing his bidding, inducing their support for Hezbollah and violent “resistance” against Israel. Even Hezbollah’s most powerful tactical “allies” only support the organization under duress.

And why is Assad and his allies such bad guys? The use of chemical weapons, for one thing. Then there is this bit:

WikiLeaks published a batch of revealing diplomatic cables from Lebanon last year. One describes how Nabih Berri, Lebanon’s speaker of Parliament and Hezbollah’s supposedly most stalwart ally, reacted during the Israeli bombardment of South Lebanon in 2006. “Berri condemned the ferocity of Israel’s military response,” the cable writer says, “but admitted that a successful Israeli campaign against Hezbollah would be an excellent way to destroy Hezbollah’s military aspirations and discredit their political ambitions. . . . We are certain that Berri hates Hezbollah as much, or even more, than the [Western-backed] March 14 politicians; after all, Hezbollah’s support . . . is drawn from the Shiites who might otherwise be with Berri.”
According to another cable, Lebanon’s current prime minister, Najib Mikati, described Hezbollah as “cancerous” and wishes to see its militarized state-within-a-state destroyed. Mikati is the man who replaced the previous prime minister, Saad Hariri, at Hezbollah’s insistence. If even Syria’s and Hezbollah’s hand-picked allies are waffling and possibly even plotting behind the scenes, the entire rigged system may come crashing down if there’s a regime change in Damascus.

But there is that opposition inside the US to military action in Syria. Totten:

Many on both the political left and the political right in the US think we ought to stay out of this. Partly that’s because the devil we know, so to speak, is sometimes preferable to the devil we don’t. And we have good reasons to believe a post-Assad government will almost certainly be unfriendly to Israel, as nearly all Arab governments are, but it might also be unfriendly to the United States. After the disastrous results of the Egyptian parliamentary election last year, where radical Islamists received twice as many votes as secular parties, we’d be fools to think a Syrian election—assuming an election is ever actually held—would bring to power parties that are politically liberal and friendly. Since Libya degenerated into a failed militia state after the fall of Muammar el-Qaddafi, we’d be naive at best to assume a stable order must necessarily follow Assad’s. And the Iraqi insurgency taught us that the Arab world’s reaction to our removal of even a genocidal tyrant can lead to serious blowback that grinds on for years.

It gets worse. From a Terry Glavin column titled "No one cares about Syria:"

The body count in Syria over the past two years easily exceeds the death toll from the first two years of the war in Iraq. As a humanitarian crisis, Syria is worse than the Kosovo War of the late 1990s and the Haiti earthquake of 2010 combined.
And still, a paltry $306,000 is all that a coalition of front line Canadian aid organizations had managed to raise for Syrian relief, three weeks into a major push for private donations that began May 15. In contrast, the coalition raised roughly 20 times that amount — nearly $6 million — during the first week of its 2010 Haitian earthquake relief campaign.
[...]
When it comes to “rapid onset” crises brought on by earthquakes or floods, Canadians are generous to a fault. But in “conflict-related” crises, generosity routinely gives way to suspicion and confusion, Marie-Jo Proulx, the Humanitarian Coalition’s communications manager, told me. So that’s partly the problem.
“It’s complicated. With Syria, people feel that they don’t understand the politics or the history of it,” Proulx said. “The different groups, the perpetrators, who’s in charge — these are questions, irrespective of the humanitarian needs.”
What’s straightforward enough is that out of a population of about 20 million, the UN reckons nearly seven million Syrians are in dire need of humanitarian assistance. Last month, UN General Assembly president Vuk Jeremic said at least 80,000 Syrians had been killed since Syria began to degenerate into massacres, jihadist violence and sectarian killings following Baathist dictator Bashar Assad’s brutal suppression of the country’s youthful and non-violent 2011 democracy uprising. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights puts the body count at 94,000, and possibly as high as 120,000. By comparison, the Iraq Body Count project put the 2003-2005 death toll in the Iraq war at 67,365 civilians.
Almost six million Syrians — nearly three times the number of Haitians made homeless in the 2010 earthquake — have nowhere to live, either because of being driven from their homes, or because their homes have been destroyed. About 1.6 million Syrians have found their way into refugee camps in neighbouring countries, mostly Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. The refugee camps are swelling by roughly 7,000 people every day.
The way the Syrian crisis has been reported in the news media, the political freight shunted around in debates about whether to “intervene” or not and the plain disgrace of NATO leaders mostly standing around with their hands in their pockets through it all — none of this has helped mobilize efforts to come to the aid of the Syrian people. “The only meaningful impact we can have now is to help these poor innocent civilians,” Proulx said. “There is a lot of work being done on the ground, but funds are just trickling in.”
It isn’t only Canadians who are confused. Oxfam America president Ray Offenheiser told Foreign Policy magazine earlier this month that the public response to Syrian relief appeals in the United States has been “just nil.” Last week, Oxfam America had raised only $140,000 of its goal of $53 million for Syrian relief. In contrast, in 2010 Oxfam America managed to raise nearly $30 million to help the 2.4 million Haitians made homeless by the earthquake that year.
Last Friday, the UN issued the most ambitious aid appeal in the UN’s history: a pitch for $5 billion. That’s the amount necessary just to provide food, water, shelter, medical assistance and the basics of life for the refugee population, and also to assist Lebanon and Jordan with stresses on infrastructure.

But what can you do for people in a war zone? The best humanitarian act we can commit is to get rid of Assad.

Unless you are an elementary school student or a Ron Paul supporter, you can easily see how the Syrian war has already engulfed its neighbors. Iran is sending in Pasdaran troops to prop up its ally. Hezbo'allah is trying to shore up its rear in Lebanon while moving in to support Assad. Israel has already attacked Syrian military assets. Jordan and Turkey are swamped with refugees. Turkey has also suffered border incursions from Syria. The Syrian war has also contributed to the protests against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan across Turkey (which is a good thing). Then remember this war is taking place around an area disputed between Turkey and Syria: the southern Turkish province of Hatay, home to the ancient cities of Antioch and Alexandretta.

Staying out of the war is not an option. We don't have to send in ground troops or even any troops. But we must recognize this is another front in a battle for civilization.