This directly addresses Louis' critique of the Noam Chomsky presentation at Harvard (at the end of the hour long video -- which is VERY WORTH watching, by the way) about Syria.
Sorry, Louis, I do not see Chomsky as going "to the deep end" on this one. He argues that the militarization of the Syrian Civil War has marginalized any and all of the "good people" and the battle is now between the murderous Assad regime (he clearly is not an apologist for that regime) and the proxies of Saudi Arabia and Turkey represented by the retrograde jihadi groups -- ISIL and Al-Nusra. I suppose the argument could be that IF the US had gotten involved in 2013 right away and "taken out" Assad as we "took out" Saddam Hussein, then the Syrian Civil War might have been aborted and a new enlightened democractic government might have been installed. Chomsky is skeptical that in fact that would have happened -- witness what actually occurred in Iraq -- or Lybia for that matter ... Chomsky does leave room for "some" humanitarian interventions to actually exist but (as you may know from his analysis of the Pacific War during WW II) he has always argued that almost all interventions are CLAIMED to be "humanitarian" and that IN FACT they rarely are --- they are usually very much in the interest of the intervenor with very little benefit for those being "rescued" (viz Lybia again. I missed his comment on Guantanamo -- maybe he wrote that somewhere else. So, I guess, Louis, I don't see what your complaint is about what he had to say in answer to the question about Syria. (and I understand for the rest of the PENNERS who haven't seen the video this might be quite off topic) Cheers, Mik
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