Ugh, Syria

God damn it.

I think I agree with Trump in the same way that I wind up agreeing with Alex. He’s come to the right conclusion in the wrongest possible way. We shouldn’t be in Syria. Most everything I’ve read about Syria suggests that I’m wrong, and I probably am, but I have a nagging suspicion that the reasons we are there are based on flawed, cold-war logic.

We are in Syria for a bunch of fake reasons, a few real reasons, and then a bunch of reasons that are real but only if you believe the lies.

To start, the Syrian civil war is probably our first look at what devastation climate change will cause long before the sea level rise starts tearing down cities (ask me if anyone’s learning lessons from it!). There are many individual factors that are unique to this particular rebellion, but the broad strokes are the same as every rebellion; the poor became poorer; the rich became richer; unemployment among young men aged 14 to 25 (ya know, the ones with all the testosterone they can’t control) rose to an untenable extent giving the people with the most unchecked aggression nothing to do; mismanagement, corruption, and greed by the ruling class became impossible to ignore. But the impetus for all of this chaos to occur was a long, long drought.

Rural Syria was filled with agricultural families supporting themselves, spread out and independent. The drought changed all of that. This was an uncharacteristically long drought, lasting years, forcing more and more people to concentrate in urban areas. The infrastructure couldn’t be built fast enough to support the people coming, more and more seemingly every day. The lesser food production also meant less food in the cities and, of course, the rich sure as fuck aren’t going to be taking less food. Now we have an influx of poor, hungry, angry, and suddenly organized people, like every rebellion.

Pet peeve: the Syrian war has metastasized into a global proxy slaughter, filled with war crimes perpetrated by the leadership of all parties (except for the ones that can’t afford to commit war crimes, ask me who they are!). But before that, it was called a civil war. This is false and misleading. This was not a civil war. This was a rebellion. The rebels were fighting against fucking evil Emperor fucking Palpatine, Bashar Al-Assad, who should be prosecuted and executed for using chemical weapons against the Syrian people -

Separate pet peeve: the phrase people use is Bashar Al-Assad used chemical weapons “against his own people”. They are not his people. He does not have people, he is not a person, he is a war criminal who deserves to be executed. So if you are going to talk about him in the future, use the sentence “War criminal Bashar Al-Assad committed a war crime because he’s a fucking monster who should be executed.” Thanks.

- There’s a big difference in connotation between “Civil War” and “Rebellion”. America roots for the poor and downtrodden (in other countries, not ours, ha) and public opinion would absolutely sway harder in the direction of the rebels in a rebellion, perhaps meaning when we inevitably intervened (cause we can’t resist ourselves) we wouldn’t have turned the narrative into a fight between ISIS and the war criminal who should be executed, leading us into a “terrorist” war, instead of the fight against a government literally gassing people like the Nazis.

This is the type of war, the type of massacre, climate change will be the cause of, and there will be many more as climate change's effects worsen. For fucks sakes, the most populated parts of the southwest, including California, are fucking deserts. A small drought fucks that region up, imagine one that lasts for years.

Back to why I agree with Trump, even though he has the wrong reasons because he’s a fucking idiot.

Ostensibly, we are fighting ISIS in Syria. What we are really doing is fighting Russian influence in Syria, because proxy wars have always worked! In no way are we helping. We aren’t making the situation in Syria better. We’re only creating more problems that will fuck us over in the future.

The other reason we are in Syria can be summed up with the phrase “just in case.” We’re in Syria because what if there is a diplomatic solution and we’re not there? Then we won’t be able to take any credit for the successful transition of power! Why, the Syrian people might think we’re not the good guys, we could never let that happen. That would be a world we don’t want to live in, a world where America isn’t the driving moral force for good *insert longest eye roll in the history of eye rolls*.

Or, if you want to entertain the idea that we are fighting ISIS, then we are fighting an eternal war, which is so out of character for America. I say this because, though American propaganda would have you believe otherwise, we are not defeating ISIS. We are taking territory away from ISIS leadership’s control. These are two very different things. ISIS is a collection of displaced men with no recourse other than violence after we fucked up Iraq. I doubt a single one of the ISIS fighters hasn’t lost multiple family members due to American intervention, either directly killed by Americans or as a result of the power vacuum we left. ISIS is our child, but it isn’t our only one. Defeat ISIS as an organization and you still have tens of thousands of men with no recourse other than violence.

Jesus, hasn’t our military seen Disney’s Hercules? It shouldn’t take this long to realize that the more Hydra heads you cut off, the more Hydra heads you make (also, it took Hercules way too long to realize that, maybe strong men are fucking stupid).

So let’s go down the list of reasons to be there:

Fighting Russian influence: Why? I’m confused as to why are fighting Russian influence in the Middle East...again. It didn’t work before, and, in fact, leaving Russia alone to try to conquer regions in the Middle East fucking bankrupted them last time. Fighting them in the Middle East gave us 9/11. Stupid.

Just in case: No one will give us credit for anything in the Middle East ever except for millions upon millions of civilian deaths. Don’t pretend otherwise. We should formally apologize to the countries we’ve destroyed and pull out.

Fighting ISIS: We are the reason ISIS exists, we are the reason ISIS still recruits, we should do something unheard of. We should forgive them. We should apologize to them and we should help rebuild their lives. Us fighting them only creates more terrorists. Fuck you Republican Christian Nation fuckfaces, want to believe your nation is Christian? Act like it you fucking assholes (you never will).

Trump is right (*sigh*), we should leave Syria.