I don’t normally “re-blog,” preferring my own words. But Michael Gerson’s latest column about Syria says it better than I could (click here).
That photo of the dead child grabbed our hearts. As if we never knew of the tens of thousands of other child Syrian victims — some literally tortured to death by Assad’s regime.
Gerson’s eloquent indictment of American passivity is not mere hindsight. At every stage, the poor decisions seemed clear to many observers (me included, as my blog readers may remember). And this isn’t just about fuzzy humanitarianism (not to disparage that); less pusillanimous policies would have better served our hard-nosed geopolitical interests.
On top of it all, as Gerson notes, Germany has thrown open its doors to all Syrian refugees, taking in hundreds of thousands, while America has taken very few. Shame on us.
POSTSCRIPT: When I mentioned this to my daughter — working in Jordan for an NGO helping Syrian refugees — she replied, “The United States takes in more refugees than any other country.”
The Rational Optimist 
September 7, 2015 at 5:58 pm
A quote from President John F. Kennedy:
“Our most basis common link is that we all inhabit this planet.
We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future.
And we are all mortal.”