It’s hard for me to know where to begin in evaluating the possibility of a foreign military intervention in Syria (read: US, maybe with some meaningful help from NATO or Middle Eastern allies), except to say, “Oh, no, here we go again.” I find the international reaction to the situation in Syria so absurd and naive that I have trouble articulating a response to it that isn’t inchoate and sputtering. The recent talk about Bashar al-Assad crossing a “red line” strikes me as a bit ridiculous and reinforces my gut feeling that diplomats aren’t generally honorable or trustworthy. This language has the same tone as the inane imagery of the “reset button” that Hillary Clinton and Sergei Lavrov indulged in a few years ago, but the stakes are much higher and more immediate in this instance, so I can’t help but worry that there is something fundamentally deficient, to put it very charitably, about the international response to Assad’s escalation.

Intemperate and uncouth though this may sound, I’d be more comfortable if the language used in the diplomatic press conferences were crude and concrete, e.g., “If Bashar doesn’t go into exile by Friday next, the US Air Force will level the presidential palace and the general staff headquarters.” That’s more or less what’s at stake, to use a conservative prediction. Any “international response” to Bashar al-Assad crossing the “red line” will be nothing short of an air war on Syria, in other words, raining down hellfire that will kill or maim anyone in its path. Regardless of whether or not this is an appropriate response, it is not one whose reality should be sanitized. If it happens, it will be gruesome, and its gruesomeness should not be censored in that fashion.

When I describe an air war as a conservative outcome, I have in mind the likelihood of a foreign ground war in Syria. Just because the Western experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq have proven this to be a disastrous course of action for the occupying armies doesn’t mean that it won’t be tried a third time in Syria. US leaders have enough hubris to think that their military, unlike the Soviet military and Alexander the Great’s, will ultimately be able to control Afghanistan. They think this despite presumably having some understanding of what the proto-Taliban “freedom fighters,” US proxies at the time, did to the Soviets (with American weaponry). They assume that they, unlike the Soviets, will be able to control the Pashtunwallah and channel it to their own benefit, instead of seeing it used however the Pashtun warriors possessing it, the ones fighting on home terrain, see most fit.

And now they’re considering a military attack on Syria, a country where an autocrat in the mold of Saddam Hussein and Josip Broz Tito is futilely trying to keep the lid on a sectarian powder keg. They insist that Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people is unconscionable, and they’re right, but what of the alternatives? There is no civil society waiting in the wings to take over upon Assad’s resignation or death; that vacuum will almost certainly be filled by sectarians, likely Sunnis hellbent on revenge for decades of repression and marginalization at the hands of the Assads. The interventionists do not have a credible plan for a post-Assad Syria. Despite their experiences with Iraq and Afghanistan, they can’t think months ahead.

The shorter version is that Syria is an intractable bloodbath that foreign powers are hopeless to resolve militarily, and the Western powers that seem most eager to intervene are exactly the ones least suited to the job. They should limit themselves to humanitarian and peace-brokering efforts; anything else would be foolhardy at best and suicidal at worst.

On a final note, it occurs to me that US officials have had a very muted response to the Bahraini government’s violent repression of its own protesting citizens and its politically motivated imprisonment of medical personnel who treated them, that the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet is based in Bahrain, and that Bashar al-Assad has historically had cordial relationships with Russian and Chinese leaders. These circumstances make the response to Syria look less like straightforward humanitarian concern than a sick combination of craven realpolitik and harebrained retribution against a strongman who annoyed his US counterparts by becoming too cozy with the United States’ quasi-enemies.