“It has taken this president too long to understand that evil must be dealt with.”

WaPo columnist Richard Cohen explaining the new Monroe Doctrine rather succinctly.

Or is that the ‘defense of Obama under ridiculous and jocular circumstances’ doctrine?

The R2P idea, (Responsibility to Protect) as a DOCTRINE is:

• Unattainable - humans are corrupt, greedy, self serving, and biased. This pertains to those who DEAL OUT protection as well as those gassing and chopping their own peoples. We will NEVER be able to deal out JUSTICE impartially, and those looking for us to do so now, had better consider what other nations may consider they have to protect HERE, now or in the future
• Unattainable - we cannot kill our way to preserving life by use of surgically near-perfect weapons. Does anyone remember the perfect strike on Iraqi Air Force communications in the evening (1st war -1991 - when it would be unoccupied) only to find in the AM that it was  a night time civilian air shelter and we had killed 400 civilians.
• Unattainable - we cannot be either omniscient or omnipotent. Just ask the farmers of the Ukraine in the 1930’s or the Tutsis while Bill Clinton was president.

No one on earth CAN protect innocents from being slaughtered by their own leaders, except in isolated, case by case consideration. In this case, interfering in a war among a free syrian army who MIGHT be like the Egyptian army (but if far more likely to either lose or be islamist), Assad a mafioso of untrammeled conscience, and the Salafi freaks of Ikwhan derivation (whose zealous and heartfelt murders are sincere and not really selfish) , there is no case.

If we invest in anything in this particular disaster, let’;s make it support of refugee camps in Jordan and Turkey.

Who happen to be, to some degree, ALLIES.