They care about them so much — until they don’t.
Although this article is not only about Syria, I will begin with Syria.
In his address to the Nation on Tuesday, September 10, concerning the August 21 chemical attack in Syria, President Obama singled out for special concern the hundreds of children who were killed, and invited his listeners to view the images. A few days later, on September 13, the Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott published an examination of this aspect of the President’s address in light of public opinion polls opposed to U.S. military action in Syria in a piece he entitled, “Why Syria’s Images of Sufferings Haven’t Moved Us.” Among other things, he wrote, “Images of children suffering form the ultimate emotional argument, compelling us to move from sentiment to action, from the particular to the universal, from passivity to engagement.” Undoubtedly, this is so. There are numerous examples, and not just examples from war zones. Recall the 18-month-old child who fell to the bottom of a 22-foot deep well: Jessica McClure in 1986, the subject of the 1989 TV movie,Everybody’s Baby.
In his address, the President belittled the prospects that a U.S. military attack would result in any extended air campaign or further intervention, or any retaliation by the Assad regime against the United States or Israel that the United States or Israel couldn’t handle. What he did not mention, and could not speculate on, was the degree of expected or unexpected “collateral damage.” We can assume there would be deaths of unarmed people, including children. Some of the children killed would be located near the targets. But there might well be more. It would be easy to envision that a regime that used chemical weapons would put children near targets to serve as human shields. Or use photos of dead children and allege that they were near the targets when killed or that they were killed when American weapons failed to hit their intended targets. What price, in the form of the blood of Syrian children, was President Obama willing to pay in order to deter the Syrian regime from engaging in, or to degrade the ability of the Syrian regime to engage in, chemical attacks that killed — Syrian children?
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