Time for U.S. Military Action in Syria

It seems like nothing has changed in Syria, and indeed, there were reports of new atrocities out on Wednesday.

See  Jerusalem Post, "At least 78 killed in Syria's Hama province." And at Telegraph UK, "Government forces accused of fresh Syrian massacre":

Reports of a bloody mass killing of in the Syrian province of Hama emerged on Wednesday, with dozens dead, including several women and children.

Pro-government militiamen attacked collections of buildings in the farming district of Mazraat al-Qabeer and killed civilians in their homes, activists said.

The killings came less than two weeks after a massacre in the town of Houla, in which security forces and pro-Assad militia men known as “Shabiha” killed 108 people, nearly half of them children.

Meanwhile, President Bashar al-Assad faced mounting pressure at home and abroad as rebels attacked his chief strongholds and Washington threatened his regime with UN sanctions.

Both massacres have happened in the presence of United Nations observers, a 300-strong force sent into Syria to observe a ceasefire deal brokered by international envoy Kofi Annan. The truce was hardly observed by the government or the rebels, who last week said they would no longer honour the ceasefire because of recent killings.

“Today the regime troops started to shell the village. Under this cover the shabiha [government militia] entered the village while people were hiding in their homes. They killed everyone they found in the houses or streets by knives,” said Mohammed Abu Bilal, who claimed to have spoken to a survivor.

This has gone on long enough. The U.S. should act, unilaterally if necessary, and Max Boot makes the case. See, "Toppling Syria's Assad":

After the Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda, the world said: Never again. And there have been interventions to stop the killing — in Bosnia, Kosovo and Libya. But these have been the exception, not the norm. Even now, as horrifying violence unfolds in Syria, the U.S. and its allies find reasons to limit their response to economic sanctions accompanied by strongly worded, but ineffectual, statements of condemnation.

This, despite the fact that the stakes in Syria are higher, from a strategic standpoint, than in Libya. By the time NATO acted against Moammar Kadafi, he was an isolated despot who had given up sponsoring terrorism and building weapons of mass destruction. Not so with Bashar Assad: His regime sponsors Hezbollah and Hamas. It has a large stockpile of chemical weapons and would be on its way to developing nuclear weapons had not Israel bombed its nuclear reactor in 2007. And it has close links to the Iranian regime, which is the No. 1 enemy of the U.S. and its allies in the region.

Moreover, the longer Assad stays in power without being able to stop the uprising against his government — which is now more than a year old — the greater the odds that regional powers will be drawn into the fray and that extremist groups such as Al Qaeda, already responsible for several grisly bombings in Syria, will be able to establish safe havens on Syrian soil.

There are risks in a post-Assad Syria, to be sure, but toppling him as swiftly as possible — something sanctions have shown no sign of achieving — holds out the promise of meeting significant strategic as well as humanitarian objectives.

Those in favor of a go-slow approach will admit much of this but then argue that there are no good options for intervention. It is true that action to topple a regime always carries risks. It is never an operation to be undertaken lightly, as we learned in Afghanistan and Iraq. But no one is proposing sending U.S. ground troops into Syria; the riskiest option of all isn't on the table, nor should it be.

Even less risky options, such as airstrikes, would be harder in Syria than in Libya because the Syrian opposition is less unified than in Libya, and it does not control any cities or discrete territory. Thus it would be harder to strike regime assets without injuring civilians.

But is this an argument for simply sitting by and letting the killing continue? That isn't a "good option" either...

Read it all at the link.

Boot has a plan.