Pro written by Tesla Bethel
The United States has had the same debate for centuries: Will the United States get directly involved in foreign conflicts or stand silently on the sidelines?
The old tale is between isolationists and interventionists. There is a place in between. The United States does not need to get involved in every country’s business, but sometimes when it gets dire, intervention is warranted when millions of people’s lives stand on the precipice of death.
The United States has been known to get involved in other country’s affairs, and it ended poorly, but there were instances where intervention wasn’t exactly warranted. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was over whether Cuba should have the right of freedom. In this instance, we fought for Cuba’s democracy, but not for countries like the Philippines who just became a U.S. territory as the war concluded. So Cuba deserves democracy, but the Philippines does not? The Philippines did not become an independent nation until after World War II.
However, according to the Washington Post, the United States did not step in when warranted in 1975 in Cambodia during the Pol Pot’s genocide. This is the second largest genocide in world history, second only to World War II. Historyplace.com stated that approximately 50 percent of 425,000 people of the Chinese population perished in 1975, and the United States did nothing.
We will get involved in a fight for democracy and control in Cuba or the Philippines, but heaven forbid we step in during a genocide. Come on America, get your priorities straight.
After seeing the horrors going on in Syria after the Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad released nerve gas on civilians did President Donald Trump step in. On Thursday, April 6, a military strike was ordered, which sent Tomahawk missiles to destroy the base the gas was distributed from. This received some negative backlash from Russia, but Assad has gone too far. Innocents die in the streets as hospitals are burned to the ground while we fight against “radical Islam” or ISIS.
In Syria in 2015, according to the Washington Post between the months of January and July radical Islam’s had killed approximately 1,131 people. Meanwhile, Assad and his regime have killed more than triple that with a total of 7,894 people. That is just in six months of a single year. The conflicts in Syria have been a problem since 2011. Now just doing the math for over six years of fighting, one could say that Assad has accumulated a murder count of 94,728 people. That’s just math, but the real number is much larger and more concerning.
According to Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), since the civil war began, approximately 470,000 deaths have occurred. Only 400,000 of those were a result of violence. Other 70,000 deaths were from the collapse of their healthcare system, which lead to a lack of medication and proper treatment. Another 1.88 million are wounded, not all of these deaths are contributed to Assad. There have been casualties on both sides, but the vast majority are because of Assad and his chemical warfare on his own people.
There is a time and a place for everything. If there was ever a time for the United States to intervene, it’s now. This is about more than just a fight about democracy, but humanity as a whole. Let’s not continue to let this barbarism haunt the world as the death toll increases. It’s time to do something.
Con written by Dominic Brown
On Thursday, April 6, President Donald Trump ordered a targeted military strike against Syria’s de facto leader Bashar Al-Assad. The point of these attacks was to punish Al-Assad for use of chemical weapons a few days prior that killed over 60 adults and 20 children. The strike was carried out by 59 sea to land Tomahawk class missiles that destroyed the airbase the chemical strikes were launched from. The lasting effect of the air strike is to keep Syria from launching any more chemical weapons. However, this offers up an unsettling conflict of which there is no foreseeable end.
Since the United States decided to directly invest itself in the Syrian Civil War, it now must see it through. Previously, the United States only backed Syrian rebels who were fighting against Al-Assad in early 2013, but no real progress was achieved and the United States backed down until late 2013. During 2014, the terrorist group Al-Qaida splintered and a new group based in Iraq called ISIS emerged and began carving out territory from the surrounding Arabic countries. Now the United States backed out of the Syrian Civil war and only funds rebels who are fighting ISIS.
Up until the strike on the Syrian airfield, this was the US policy in the Middle East. By maintaining indirect involvement in the conflict, the United States was not held to direct sides. Any conflict would have to be settled by the Syrian rebels and their allies. Now that the United States has taken direct action against Al-Assad, it is expected that President Trump maintains a “babysitting” policy preventing future chemical attacks. This is simply another task that the United States must look over. Another issue is the fact that Russia had troops placed at the airbase that was destroyed. This arises to the possibility that Russia will see this as an act of war and demand United States withdraw from the region.
There should have never been direct strike carried out, at least not in haste like it was. President Trump should have waited for the United States to determine the best course of action to avoid legal trouble. With this airstrike, the fall of Aleppo and the resilience of the rebels, the only thing that has come about this issue was fueling the fire of the civil war.