5 Reasons Why There Won’t Be War in Syria

Moisés Naím, writing for the Carnegie Endowment, discusses why the United States and Europe are attacking Libya with bombs and Syria with words. He first dismisses arguments that the justification for war in Libya is oil, arguing that it would be easier for U.S. oil companies to have security under Gadhafi rather than under the chaos that has ensued.  He states that there are five reasons why the same response has not happened in Syria: 1) Syria’s military is far stronger than Libya’s and it would be a difficult fight; 2) Libya exhausted “the little appetite left in the United States to engage in wars”; 3) Syria borders with one of the world’s most volatile mixture of countries: Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Jordan, and Turkey; 4) Syria has close allies in the region unlike Libya; 5) There is a lack of knowledge of who in the opposition the U.S. could support or who would potentially fill a power vacuum.