After a British soldier was run down and beheaded on the streets of London, UK Parliamentarian George Galloway tweeted, 'This sickening atrocity in London is exactly what we are paying the same kind of people to do in Syria.'
Galloway was understandably shouted down. British policy toward Syria is not exactly analogous to killing an off-duty soldier with a meat cleaver. However in light of the Obama administration's move to arm Syrian rebels, a notoriously fragmented and diverse group of partisans, his comments shouldn't be totally discarded.
Syria is a weeping sore in the international community. The UN recently estimated that Syrians are being killed at an average rate of 5000 per month, bringing the total deaths to around 93,000. Continuing one of the great demographic trends of the 20th century, civilians make up an overwhelming proportion of these figures.
Interventionists argue that something must be done. After all, didn't a UN inquiry find that 2500 adequately trained military personnel with a coherent mandate could have prevented the Rwandan genocide, thereby sparing 800,000 people from the machetes?
One wonders if this weighed on Bill Clinton's mind when he recently warned Obama not to look like a 'wuss' on Syria. Not that he mentioned Rwanda, focusing instead on Kosovo, where he did lead a military style intervention.
Indeed interventionists argue, as a chastened Kofi Annan would later, that 'The state is now widely understood to be the servant of the people, and not vice versa.' History appears to be on their side.
And yet when I heard Obama's decision to start providing arms, I couldn't help but picture the character of Pyle, sauntering through the pages of Graham Greene's The Quiet American and out onto the streets of Damascus, dog-eared copy of York Harding in one hand and plastic explosives in the other.
Let's be clear. Adding arms to a pressure-cooker environment is an enormous risk.
Last year The New York Times suggested that the CIA was managing this risk by operating in Turkey, 'vetting' the rebel groups, distinguishing those with al Qaeda or anti-Western affiliations on one side from those more suitable to Western interests on the other. However, former CIA-field officer Milton Bearden, no stranger to arming rebel groups, remains skeptical about separating the 'sheep' from the 'goats'.
Bearden was one of the point men who oversaw the $US3 billion covert program to arm the Afghan mujahideen and bleed the Soviets out of Afghanistan. When questioned over arming Islamic